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PAINTED BY-SUTTON-
PALMER DESCRIBED-BY
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BONNIE SCOTLAND
That I for poor auld Scotland's sake, Some uscfu' plan, or beuk could make.
BURNS.
BENEATH THE CRAGS OF BEN VENUE, PERTHSHIRE
BONNIE SCOTLAND PAINTED BY SUTTON PALMER • DESCRIBED BY A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF PUBLISHED BY A. ^ C. BLACK' LONDON' MCMXII
683021
I9«4 Refr'mtid 1905, 1911
Note
THE author does not attempt elaborate word -pictures, that would seem pale beside the artist's colouring. His design has been, as accompaniment to these beautiful landscapes, an outline of Scotland's salient features, with glimpses at its history, national character, and customs, and at the literature that illustrates this country for the English-speaking world. While taking the reader on a fireside tour through the varying " airts " of his native land, he has tried to show how its life, silken or home- spun, is a tartan of more intricate pattern than appears in certain crude impressions struck off by strangers. And into his own web have been woven reminiscences, anecdotes, and borrowed brocade such as may make entertaining stripes and checks upon a groundwork of information. The mainland only is dealt with in this volume, which it is intended to follow up with another on the Highlands and Islands.
Contents
CHAPTER I
THE BORDERS
PAGE I
CHAPTER II
AULD REEKIE
CHAPTER III
THE TROSSACHS ROUND
45
CHAPTER IV
THE KINGDOM OF FIFE .
69
CHAPTER V
THE FAIR CITY
90
CHAPTER VI
THE HIGHLAND LINE
ill
CHAPTER VII
" ABERDEEN AWA' ! "
vn
136
Contents
CHAPTER VIII
PAGE
To JOHN o' GROAT'S HOUSE . . . • • *57
CHAPTER IX THE GREAT GLEN • • >77
CHAPTER X
GLASGOW AND THE CLYDE . . • • 197
CHAPTER XI
THE WHIG COUNTRY . . • • • .215
CHAPTER XII
GALLOWAY . . • • • • 244
via
List of Illustrations
1. Beneath the Crags of Ben Venue, Perthshire . Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
2. Tantallon Castle, on Coast of Haddingtonshire . . 2
3. The Bass Rock, Firth of Forth, off Coast of Haddingtonshire 4
4. Neidpath Castle, Peeblesshire . , . " . . 8
5. Abbotsford, Roxburghshire . . . . .12
6. Melrose, Roxburghshire . . . . .16
7. Scott's favourite View from Bemerside Hill, Roxburghshire . 20
8. Edinburgh from " Rest and be Thankful " . . . 24
9. Edinburgh from Salisbury Crags — Evening . . .28
10. Craigmillar Castle, near Edinburgh . . 32
11. Linlithgow Palace . . . . . .36
12. The Bass Rock — A Tranquil Evening . . ..38
13. Loch Achray, the Trossachs, Perthshire . . .42
14. Stirling Castle from the King's Knot . . .46
15. The Outflow of Loch Katrine, Perthshire . . . 48
16. In the Heart of the Trossachs, Perthshire . . 50
17. Brig o' Turk and Ben Venue, Perthshire . . 52
1 8. Birches by Loch Achray, Perthshire . . -54
19. Head of Loch Lomond, looking up Glen Falloch, Perthshire 56
20. Golden Autumn, the Trossachs, Perthshire. . 58
21. The River Teith, with Lochs Achray and Vennachar,
Perthshire ," . . . . .60
ix
List of Illustrations
FACING PAGE
22. Veiled Sunshine, the Trossachs, Perthshire . . .62
23. Near Ardlui, Loch Lomond, Dumbartonshire . . 64
24. The Silver Strand, Loch Katrine, Perthshire . . 66
25. Loch Achray and Ben Venue, Perthshire . . .68
26. The Castle of St. Andrews, Fifeshire . . -7°
27. Loch Lubnaig, Perthshire . . . . 76
28. In Glenfmlas, Perthshire . . . . .80
29. On the Dochart, Killin, Perthshire . ... .84
30. Perth from the Slopes of Kinnoul Hill . . .90
31. Ben A'an, corner of Loch Katrine, Perthshire . . 94
32. Loch Vennachar, Perthshire . . . . 98
33. A Croft near Dalmally, Argyllshire . . .102
34. Wet Harvest Time near Dalmally, Argyllshire . .106
35. The Grampians from Boat of Garten, Inverness-shire . 112
36. Killin, Perthshire . . . . . .114
37. A Moor near Killin, Perthshire . . . .116
38. In Glenfinlas, Perthshire . . . . .118
39. Looking up Glen Lochay near Killin, Perthshire . .120
40. Beneath the Slopes of Ben Ledi, near Callander, Perthshire 122
41. A Wild Spot, Killin, Perthshire . . . .124
42. The Falls of Tummel, Perthshire . . . .126
43. Dunkeld and Birnam from Craigiebarns, Perthshire ^ . 128
44. A Wooded Gorge, Killin, Perthshire . . '.130
45. Looking up the Pass of Killiecrankie, Perthshire . .132
46. Killin, Head of Loch Tay, Perthshire . . . 134
47. Dunnottar Castle, Kincardineshire . . . 136
48. Old Mar Bridge and Lochnagar, Aberdeenshire . .140
49. Balmoral, Aberdeenshire . . . . .144
50. Strath Glass, Inverness-shire . . . .148
51. A Peep of the Grampians, Inverness-shire . . .152
52. The River Glass near Beauly, Inverness-shire . .158
53. Moor of Rannoch, Perthshire and Argyllshire . .162
x
List of Illustrations
FACINO PACE
54. The Isles of Loch Maree, Ross-shire . . .166
55. Moor and Mountain, Ross-shire . . . .170
56. Crags near Poolewe, Ross-shire . . . .174
57. Inverness from near the Islands . . . .178
58. Tomdoun, Glen Garry, Inverness-shire . . .182
59. A Shepherd's Cot in Glen Nevis, Inverness-shire . .186
60. River Awe flowing to Loch Etive, Argyllshire . .190
6 1. A Croft near Taynuilt, Loch Etive, Argyllshire . .194
62. Glencoe, Argyllshire . . . . .198
63. Garelochhead, Dumbartonshire .... 202
64. Glen Sannox, Isle of Arran .... 206
65. Loch Triochatan, Entrance to Glencoe, Argyllshire . 210
66. Glen Rosa, Isle of Arran . . . . .214
67. The Falls of the Clyde, Lanarkshire . .- \ 216
68. A Highland View . . . . . . .220
69. Kilchurn Castle, Loch Awe, Argyllshire . . . 226
70. River Coe, Glencoe, Argyllshire . . . .230
71. Ben Cruachan from Inverlochy, Argyllshire . . . 234
72. The Morven Hills from Appin, Argyllshire . .238
73. A Croft near Loch Etive, Argyllshire • .. , . . 242
74. A Birch-Wood in Springtime, by Loch Maree, Ross-shire . 246
75. On the River Ayr, Ayrshire . . . .250
XI
BONNIE SCOTLAND
CHAPTER I
THE BORDERS
THE dawn broadens, the mists roll away to show a north- ward-bound traveller how his train is speeding between slopes of moorland, green and grey, here patched by bracken or bog, there dotted by wind-blown trees, every- where cut by water-courses gathering into gentle rivers that can be furious enough in spate, when they hurl a drowned sheep or a broken hurdle through those valleys opening a glimpse of mansions and villages among sheltered woods. Are we still in England, or in what at least as far back as Crom well's time called itself " Bonnie Scotland " ? It is as hard to be sure as to make out whether that cloudy knoll on the horizon is crowned by a peat-stack or by the stump of a Border peel.
Either bank of Tweed and Liddel has much the same aspects. An expert might perhaps read the look or the size of the fields. Could one get speech with that brawny corduroyed lad tramping along the furrows to his early job, whistling maybe, as if it would never grow old, an air from the London music-halls, the Southron might be none the wiser as to his nationality, though a fine local ear
Bonnie Scotland
would not fail to catch some difference of burr and broad vowels, marked off rather by separating ridges than by any legal frontier, as the lilting twang of Liddesdale from the Teviot drawl. Healthily barefooted children, m ore's the pity, are not so often seen nowadays on this side of the Border, nor on the other, unless at Brightens and Margates. The Scotch " bonnet," substantial headgear as it was, has vanished ; the Scotch plaid, once as familiar on the Coquet as on the Tweed, is more displayed in shop windows than in moorland glens, now that over the United Kingdom reigns a dull monotony and uniformity of garb. Could we take the spectrum of those first wreaths of smoke curling from cottage chimneys, we might find traces of peat and porridge, yet also of coal and bacon. Yon red-locked lassie turning her open eyes up to the train from the roadside might settle the question, were we able to test her knowledge whether of the Shorter Catechism or of her "Duty towards her Neighbour." It is only when the name of the first Scottish way-station whisks by, that we know ourselves fairly over the edge of "Caledonia stern and wild"; and our first thought may well be that this Borderland appears less stern than the grey crags of Yorkshire, and less wild than some bleak uplands of Northumberland.
What makes a nation ? Not for long such walls as the Romans drew across this neck of our island, one day to point a moral of fallen might, and to adorn a tale of the northern romancer who by its ruins wooed his alien bride. Not such rivers as here could be easily forded by those mugwump moss-troopers that sat on the fence of Border law, and —
2
TANTALLON CASTLE, ON COAST OF HADDINGTONSHIRE
The Borders
Sought the beeves to make them broth In England and in Scotland both.
Is it race? Alas for the ethnologic historian, on its dim groundwork of Picts and Celts — or what ? — Scotland shows a still more confusing pattern of mingled strains than does the sister kingdom ! To both sides of the Border such names for natural features as Cheviot, Tweed, and Tyne, tell the same tale of one stock displaced by another that built and christened its Saxon Hawicks, Berwicks, Bamboroughs, and Longtowns upon the Pens and Esks of British tribes. — Is it a common speech ? But from the Humber to the Moray Firth, along the east side of Britain, throughout the period of fiercest clash of arms, prevailed the same tongue, split by degrees into dialects, but differing on the Forth and the Tyne less than the Tyne folks' tongue differed from that of the Thames, or the speech of the Forth from that of the Clyde mouth. So insists Dr. J. A. H. Murray, who of all British scholars was found worthy to edit the Oxford English Dictionary, that has now three editors, two of them born north of the Tweed, the third also in the northern half of England. • Scottish " wut " chuckles to hear how, when the shade of Boswell pertly reported to the great doctor that his post as Lexicographer-General had been filled by one who was at once a Scotsman and a dis- senter, all Hades shook with the rebuke, " Sir, in striving to be facetious, do not attempt obscenity and profanity ! " — or ghostly vocables to such effect.
Is it loyalty to a line of princes that crystallises patriot- ism ? That is a current easily induced, as witness how the sentiments once stirred by a Mary or a Prince Charlie
3
Bonnie Scotland
could precipitate themselves round the stout person of George IV. — Is it religion? Kirk and Covenant have doubtless had their share in casting a mould of national character ; but the Border feuds were hottest among generations who seldom cared to question "for gospel, what the Church believed." — Is it name ? Northerners and Southerners were at strife long before they knew themselves as English and Scots.
By a process of elimination one comes to see how esprit de corps seems most surely generated by the wont of standing shoulder to shoulder against a common foe. Even the shifty baron, "Lucanus an Apulus anceps," whose feudal allegiance dovetailed into both kingdoms, that professional warrior who " signed on," now with the northern, now with the southern team, might well grow keen on a side for which he had won a goal, and bitter against the ex-comrades who by fair or foul play had come best out of a hot scrimmage. Heartier would be the animosity of bonnet-lairds and yeomen, between whom lifting of cattle and harrying of homes were points in the game. Then even grooms and gillies, with nothing to lose, dutifully fell into the way of fighting for their salt, when fighting with somebody came almost as natural to men and boys as to collie dogs. So the generations beat one another into neighbourly hatred and national pride ; till the Border clans half forgot their feuds in a larger senti- ment of patriotism ; and what was once an adventurous exercise, rose to be a fierce struggle for independence. The Borderers were the " forwards " of this international sport, on whose fields and strongholds became most hotly forged the differences in which they played the part of
4
THE BASS ROCK, FIRTH OF FORTH, OFF THE COAST OF H ADDINGTONSHIRE
The Borders
hammer and of anvil by turns. Here, it is said, between neighbours of the same blood, survive least faintly the national resentments that may still flash up between drunken hinds at a fair. Hardly a nook here has not been blackened and bloodstained, hardly a stream but has often run red in centuries of waxing and waning strife whose fiery gleams are long faded into pensive memories, and its ballad chronicles, that once " stirred the heart like a trumpet," can now be sung or said to general applause of the most refined audiences, whether in London or Edinburgh.
The most famous ground of those historic encounters lies about the East Coast Railway route, where England pushes an aggressive corner across the Cheviots, and the Tweed, that most Scottish of rivers, forms the frontier of the kingdoms now provoking each other to good works like its Royal Border Bridge. Beyond it, indeed, stands Berwick-upon-Tweed, long the football of either party, then put out of play as a neutral town, and at last recognised as a quasi-outpost of England, whose parsons wear the surplice, and whose chief magistrate is a mayor, while the townsfolk are said to pride themselves on a parish patriotism that has gone the length of calling Sandy and John Bull foreigners alike. This of course is not, as London journalists sometimes conceive, the truly North Berwick where a prime minister might be seen " driving " and " putting " away the cares of state. That seaside resort is a mushroom beside Berwick of the Merse, stand- ing on its dignity of many sieges. The Northumberland Artillery Militia now man the batteries on its much- battered wall, turned to a picturesque walk ; and the
5
Bonnie Scotland
North British and North Eastern Railways meet peacefully on the site of its castle, where at one time Edward I. caged the Countess of Buchan like a wild beast, for having dared to set the crown upon Bruce's head. At another, it was in the hands of Baliol to surrender to an Edward as pledge of his subservience ; and again, its precincts made the scene of a friendly spearing match between English and Scottish knights, much courtesy and fair-play being shown on both sides, even if over their cups a perfervid Grahame bid his challenger " rise early in the morning, and make your peace with God, for you shall sup in Paradise ! " who indeed supped no more on earth.
The North British Railway will carry us on near a stern coast-line to Dunbar, whose castle Black Agnes, Countess of March, defended so doughtily against Lord Salisbury, and here were delivered so signally into Crom- well's hands a later generation of Scots "left to them- selves " and to their fanatical chaplains ; then over a land now swept by volleys of golf balls, to Pinkie, the last great battlefield between the kingdoms, where also, almost for the last time, the onrush of Highland valour routed redcoat soldiery at Prestonpans. But tourists should do what they do too seldom, tarry at Berwick to visit the tragic scenes close at hand. In sight of the town is the slope of Halidon Hill, on which the English took their revanche for Bannockburn. Higher up the Tweed, by the first Suspension Bridge in the kingdom, by "Norham's castled steep," watch-tower of the passage, and by Ford Castle where the siren Lady Ford is said to have ensnared James IV., that unlucky "champion of the dames," a half- day's walk brings one to Flodden, English ground
6
The Borders
indeed, but the grave of many a Scot. Never was slaughter so much mourned and sung as that of the " Flowers of the Forest," cut down on these heights above the Tweed. The land watered with " that red rain " is now ploughed and fenced ; but still can be traced the out- lines of the scene about the arch of Twizel Bridge on which the English crossed the Till, as every schoolboy knew in Macaulay's day, if our schoolboys seem to be better up in cricket averages than in the great deeds of the past, unless prescribed for examinations.
Battles, like books, have their fates of fame. Flodden long made a sore point in Scottish memory ; yet, after all, it was a stunning rather than a maiming defeat. A far more momentous battlefield on the Tweed, not far off, was Carham, whose name hardly appears in school histories, though it was the beginning of the Scotland of seven centuries to come. It dates just before Macbeth, when Malcolm, king of a confused Scotia or Pictia, sallied forth from behind the Forth, and with his ally, Prince of Cumbria on the Clyde, decisively defeated the Northum- brians in 1018, adding to his dominions the Saxon land between Forth and Tweed, a leaven that would leaven the whole lump, as Mr. Lang aptly puts it. Thus Malcolm's kingdom came into touch with what was soon to become feudal England, along the frontier that set to a hard and fast line, so long and so doughtily defended after mediaeval Scotland had welded on the western Cumbria, as its cousin Cambria fell into the destinies of a stronger realm. Had northern Northumberland gone to England, there would have been no Royal Scotland, only a Grampian Wales echoing bardic boasts of its Rob Roys and Roderick Dhus,
7
Bonnie Scotland
whose claymores might have splintered against Norman mail long before they came to be beaten down by bayonets and police batons.
But we shall never get away from the Border if we stop to moralise on all its scenes of strife — most of them well forgotten. Border righting was commonly on a small scale, with plunder rather than conquest or glory for its aim ; like the Arabs of to-day, those fierce but canny neighbours were seldom in a spirit for needless slaughter, that would entail fresh blood-feuds on their own kin. The Border fortresses were many, but chiefly small, designed for sudden defence against an enemy who might be trusted not to keep the field long. On the northern side large castles were rare ; and those that did rise, opposite the English donjon keeps, were let fall by the Scots them- selves, after their early feudal kings had drawn back to Edinburgh. In the long struggle with a richer nation, they soon learned to take the "earth-born castles'* of their hills as cheaper and not less serviceable strongholds.
The station for Flodden, a few miles off", is Coldstream, at that " dangerous ford and deep " over which Marmion led the way for his train, before and after his day passed by so many an army marching north or south. The Bridge of Coldstream has tenderer memories, pointed out by Mr. W. S. Crockett in his Scott Country. This carried one of the main roads from England, and the inn on the Scottish side made a temple of hasty Hymen, where for many a runaway couple were forged bonds like those more notoriously associated with the blacksmith of Gretna Green. Their marriage jaunts into the neighbour country were put a stop to only half a century ago, when the
8
NEIDPATH CASTLE, PEEBLESSHIRE
The Borders
benefits of Scots law, such as they were, became restricted to its own inhabitants. English novelists and jesters have made wild work with the law, by which, as they mis- apprehend, a man can be wedded without meaning it ; one American story-teller is so little up-to-date as to marry his eloping hero and heroine at Gretna in our time. The gist of the matter is that while England favoured the masculine deceiver, fixing the ceremony before noon, it is said, to make sure of the bridegroom's sobriety, the more chivalrous Scots law provided that any ceremony should be held valid by which a man persuaded a woman that he was taking her to wife. No ceremony indeed was needed, if the parties lived by habit and repute as man and wife. The plot of Colonel Lockhart's Mine is Thine, one of the most amusing novels of our time, turns on a noted case in which an entry in a family Bible was taken as a sufficient proof of marriage. It is only gay Lotharios who might find this easy coupling a fetter ; though in the next generation, especially if it be careless to treasure family Bibles, there may arise work for lawyers, a work of charity when the average income of the Scottish Bar is perhaps five pounds Scots per annum.
Gretna Green, of course, lies on the western high-road from England, beside which the Caledonian Railway route from Carlisle enters Scotland, soon turning off into a part of it comparatively sheltered from invasion by the Solway Firth, whose rapid ebb and flow make a type of many a Gretna love story. This side too, has often rung with the passage of armed men. At Burgh-on-Sands, in sight of the Scottish Border, died Edward I., bidding his bones be wrapped in a bull's hide and carried as bugbear standard
9 *
Bonnie Scotland
against those obstinate rebels. The rout of Solway Moss made James V. turn his face to the wall, his heart break- ing with the cry, " It came with a lass and it will go with a lass ! " And the Esk of the Solway was seldom " swollen sae red and sae deep " as to daunt hardy lads from the north who once and again
Swam ower to fell English ground,
And danced themselves dry to the pibroch's sound.
These immigrants, unless they found six feet of English ground for a grave, seldom failed to go " back again," perhaps with an English host at their heels. Prince Charlie's army passed this way on its retreat from Derby. But this side of the Borderland is less well illustrated by stricken fields and sturdy sieges. It has, indeed, no lack of misty romance of its own, such as an American writer dares to bring into the light of common day by adding a sequel to Lady Heron's ballad, in which the fair Ellen is made to nurse a secret grudge at last confessed : she could not get over, even on any plea of poetic license, that rash assertion :
There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far Who would gladly be bride to the young Lochinvar !
"Fosters, Fen wicks, and Musgraves," how they rode and they ran on those hills and leas in days unkind to " a laggard in love and a dastard in war"! These names belong to the English side, as does Grahame in part. Elliot and Armstrong, Pringle and Rutherford, Ker and Home, Douglas, Murray, and Scott, are Scottish Border clans, who kept much together as in the Highlands. " Is there nae kind Christian wull gie me a night's lodging ? "
10
The Borders
begged a tramp on the Borders, and had for rough answer, " Nae Christians here ; we're a' Hopes and Johnstones ! " a jest transmuted farther north into the terms of a black Mackintosh and red Macgregors.
The first name of fame passed on the Caledonian line is Ecclefechan, birthplace of Thomas Carlyle, now a prophet even in his own country, but it is recorded how a devout American pilgrim of earlier days found no re- sponsive warmth in the minds of old neighbours. " Tarn Carlyle — ay, there was Tarn ! " admitted an interrogated native. " He went tae London ; they tell me he writes books. But there's his brither Jeems — he was the mahn o' that family. He drove mair pigs into Ecclefechan market than ony ither farmer in the parish ! " Tom had carried his pigs to a better than any Dumfriesshire market. If we turned west by the Glasgow and South- western Railway, we should soon come among the shrines of Burns and the monuments of Wallace. But let us rather take the central route, on which flourishes a greener memory.
The " Waverley " route from Carlisle, a central one between those East and West Coast lines, so distinguishes itself as passing through the cream of the country associated with Sir Walter Scott, its first stage being the wilds of Liddesdale, where he spent seven holiday seasons collecting the Border Minstrelsy. This district, where "every field has its battle and every rivulet its song," can boast of many singers. From the days of Thomas the Rhymer comes down its long succession of ballad- makers who "saved others' names but left their own unsung." At Ednam was born James Thomson, bard
ii
Bonnie Scotland
of The Seasons and of "Rule, Britannia," who surely deserves a less prosaic monument than here recalls him. From Ednam, too, came Henry Lyte, a name not so familiar, but how many millions know his hymn " Abide with me " ! Some of Horatius Bonar's hymns were written during his ministry at Kelso. About Denholm were the " Scenes of Infancy " of John Leyden, poet and scholar, cut off untimely. Near his humble home, now turned into a public library, is the lordly house of Minto, one of whose daughters wrote the " Flowers of the Forest." Thomas Pringle, the South African poet, was born at Blakelaw, near Yetholm, the Border seat of gipsy kings. Home, the author of Douglas, is said to have come from Ancrum, which can more certainly claim Dr. William Buchan of Domestic Medicine renown. Riddell, author of " Scotland Yet," began life as a Teviot shepherd. If we may touch on living names, was not Mr. Andrew Lang born among the " Soutars of Selkirk," who has gone so far ultra crepidam ? But indeed a whole page might be filled with a bare catalogue of the bards of Tweed and Teviot.
The genius loci, greatest of all, while born in Edin- burgh, sprang from a Border family of "Scotland's gentler blood." The cradle of his race was in Upper Teviotdale, near Hawick, that thriving " Glasgow of the Borders," among whose busy mills the old Douglas Tower still stands as an hotel, and rites older than Christian Scotland are cherished at its time-honoured Common Riding. Not far off are Harden, home of Wat Scott the reiver, and Branxholme, that after being repeatedly burned by the English, bears an inscription of its rebuilding by a Sir
12
ABBOTSFORD, ROXBURGHSHIRE
The Borders
Walter Scott of Reformation times, whose namesake and descendant would make its name known so widely. At Sandyknfcwe farm, between the Eden and the Leader Water, he lived as a sickly child in his grandparents' charge, and under the massive ruin of Smailholm Tower, drank in with reviving health the inspiration of Border lore and romance —
Ever, by the winter hearth,
Old tales I heard of woe or mirth,
Of lover's sleights, of ladies' charms,
Of witches' spells, of warriors' arms ;
Of patriot battles, won of old
By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold ;
Of later fields of feud and fight,
When, pouring from their Highland height,
The Scottish clans, in headlong sway,
Had swept the scarlet ranks away.
While stretch'd at length upon the floor,
Again I fought each combat o'er,
Pebbles and shells, in order laid,
The mimic ranks of war display'd ;
And onward still the Scottish Lion bore,
And still the scatter'd Southron fled before.
Later on, the old folks being dead, his sanatorium quarters were shifted to his aunt's home at Kelso, where also an uncle bought a house, inherited by the lucky poet. For a time he attended the Grammar School, whose pupils had for playground the adjacent ruins of the Abbey, so roughly handled in Border wars and by iconoclastic zealots. This boy had other resources than play, who could forget his dinner in the charms of Percy's Reliques ; and his lameness did not hinder him from roaming over the beautiful country in which Tweed
'3
Bonnie Scotland
and Teviot meet. Their confluence encloses the ruins of Roxburgh Castle, once a favourite royal residence and strong Border fortress, before whose walls James II., try- ing to wrest it back from the English, was killed by the bursting of one of those new-fangled " engines " that were to break down moated castles, replaced by such sumptuous mansions as Floors, the modern cMteau of the Duke of Roxburghe. Roxburgh town has disappeared more completely than its castle, its name surviving in that of the picturesque Border shire where, off and on, Scott spent much of his youth, photographing on a sensitive mind the scenes he has made famous, and getting to know the flesh-and-blood models of Meg Merrilies, Edie Ochiltree, Old Mortality, Dandie Dinmont, Josiah Cargill, and other "characters" that but for him might now be forgotten.
Kelso stands almost on the site of Roxburgh, but its place as county town is taken by Jedburgh, guard of the " Middle March," farther to the south, yet not so near the crooked border line. It stands upon a tributary of the Teviot, among "Eden scenes of crystal Jed," flow- ing down from the Cheviots. Tourists do not know what they miss by grudging time to divagate on the branches connecting the two main lines of the North British Railway. Jedburgh, birthplace of scientific cele- brities, Sir David Brewster and Mrs. Somerville, has another grand Abbey, that suffered much from early English tourists ; and its jail occupies the site of a vanished royal castle. In this old seat of "Jeddart justice," Scott began his career at the Bar, by the defence of such a poacher and sheep-stealer as his own forebears
The Borders
had been on a bolder scale. Here a few years later, he met Wordsworth in the house recently marked by a memorial tablet ; and other dwellings are pointed out as having housed Queen Mary and Prince Charlie, while Burns has left a warm record of his visit, so many of Scotland's idols has Jedburgh known, and may well reproach the hasty travellers who pass it by.
The young advocate did not waste much of his genius on defending sheep-stealers and the like ; but in those halcyon days of patronage, through the influence of his chief, the Duke of Buccleuch, he soon got the snug berth of Sheriff of Selkirk. This brought him to live at Ashes tiel on the Tweed, where he spent his happiest days, writing his best poems, and beginning Waverley, to be laid by and forgotten for years. Selkirk, too, has the misfortune of lying off the main line ; but strangers would do well to turn aside here for the wild pastoral scenes of St. Mary's Loch and the "Dowie Dens of Yarrow." Too many, like Wordsworth, put off this trip to rheumatic years ; yet it may be easily done by the coach routes from Selkirk and from Moffat on the Caledonian line, that meet at Tibbie Shiels' Inn, whose visitors' book enshrines such a collection of autographs ; and its homely fame scorns the pretensions of the new " hotel." This is the heart of Ettrick Forest, where stands a monument of its shepherd, James Hogg, unfairly caricatured as the genial buffoon of the Noctes, but second only to Burns as a popular poet, and best known over the English-speaking world by his " Bird of the wilderness, blithesome and cumberless." All the schooling he had was a few months in early childhood ; he taught himself to write on slate
15
Bonnie Scotland
stones of the hillside where he herded cows, and this art he had to relearn when he first tried to sing of green
Ettrick —
In many a rustic lay, Her heroes, hills, and verdant groves ; Her wilds and valleys fresh and gay, Her shepherds' and her maidens' loves.
The North British junction for Selkirk is at Galashiels, another thriving woollen town, whose mills may not have improved the physique of the " braw lads of Gala Water.'* Before reaching this, the main line, holding up the Tweed where it is looked down upon by a colossal statue of Wallace, passes two more of David I.'s quartet of Abbeys, so that the tourist has no excuse for not visiting Dryburgh and Melrose. Melrose, indeed, is a tourist shrine, that owns a somewhat sheltered climate, with natural charms enough to fill its adjacent Hydropathic and the hotels about the Abbey and the Cross, nucleus of a group of Tweedside hamlets, to which warm red stone, sometimes filched from the ruins, gives a snug and cheerful aspect ; then the nakedness of the slopes, held by Scott a beauty, though he laboured to clothe it with plantations, hides nooks like that Rhymer's Glen, where True Thomas was spirited away by the Fairy Queen, and that Fairy Dean in which the White Lady of Avenel appeared to Halbert Glendinning. Above rise the triple Eildon Hills, in whose caverns Arthur and his knights lie sleeping, and from the top, as our Last Minstrel boasted, can be seen more than forty spots famed in history or song.
Of Melrose Abbey, the finest remains of Scottish ecclesiastical architecture in its golden age, and of its
16
MELROSE, ROXBURGHSHIRE
The Borders
illustrious tombs, let the guide-books speak, and the romance that deals with this neighbourhood of " Kenna- quhair," an alias plagiarised by Carlyle in his Weissnichtwo. Visiting it " by pale moonlight " or otherwise, few will not turn three miles up the river to that other show- place, Abbotsford, the Delilah of his imagination that bound Scott in withs of care and set him to toiling for Philistines. The baronial mansion, now overlooked by outlying villas of Galashiels, was all his own creation, and most of the trees were planted by himself, in the absorbing process that began with buying a hundred ill- famed acres, and ended with such unfortunate success in making, as he said, "a silk purse out of a sow's ear." When one thinks what it cost him, this exhibition of artificial feudalism has its painful side ; yet another Sir Walter, a romancer of our own generation, declares that it "would make an oyster enthusiastic." But more moving is the pilgrimage from Melrose down the Tweed to where, in St. Mary's Aisle of Dryburgh Abbey, the most beautiful fragment of a noble fane, among the tombs of his kin lies at rest Scotland's most illustrious son, he who best displayed the warp and woof that makes the chequered pattern of his country's nature.
When will Cockney revilers learn that Scotland is not all thrift, caution, and kailyard prose, but a nation showing two main strains, which Mr. John Morley suggests as the explanation of Gladstone's complex character ? One component may be hard, practical, frugal, in politics tend- ing to democracy, in religion to logic ; but this has been crossed by a spirit, better bred in the romantic Highlands, that is generous, proud, quick-tempered, reckless, reverent
J7 3
Bonnie Scotland
towards the past, rather than eager for progress. The painter of Scottish life must recognise how Fitz- James and Roderick Dhu are countrymen with Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice, how Flora Maclvor is not less a Scotswoman than Mause Headrigg or Jenny Dennison, and how the Jacobite and the Presbyterian enthusiasm smacked of the same soil. If one shut one's eye to half the case, it would be easy to make out that rash im- petuosity flourished beyond the Tweed rather than the thistly prudence taken for a more congenial crop.
Scott comprehended both of these elements. By birth and training he belonged to the Saxon, by sympathy to the Celt. If his father was a douce Edinburgh " writer," one of his forebears had been that " Bear die " who bound himself never to shave till the Stuarts came back to their own. Brought up under the dry light of the Revolution Settlement, in his reminiscences of childhood he transforms a worthy parish minister into a " Venerable Priest," and in later life he came to be himself little better than an Episcopalian. It may be owned he had no more religion than became a Cavalier ; even the romance of supersti- tion did not take much hold on him, and that rhyming " White Lady " has not even a ghostly life on his page. His favourite heroes are the like of Montrose and Claver- house, yet he can do justice to the stern virtues of the Covenanters. In the sober historian mood he duly warns his grandchild how life was galled and fettered in the good old days, which he was too willing to see couleur de rose when their picturesque incidents offered themselves to the romancer. He turns a blind eye, perhaps, too much on the faults of knights and princes, yet he knows the
18
The Borders
worth of ploughmen and fisherfolk, and into Halbert Glendinning's and Henry Morton's mouths he puts senti- ments to which John Bright or Cobden might say amen. He is happiest, indeed, in the past, when " the wrath of our ancestors was coloured gules" whereas we have learned, like Mr. Trulliber's wife, to be Christians and take the law of our enemies. His appetite for imaginary blood- shed is a sore offence to writers like Mark Twain, who appear less scandalised that a pork-baron, a corn-lord, or a cotton- king should plot to be rich by starving children on the other side of the world. But Scott's very failings reflect the character of his countrymen, who, Highland and Lowland, have been mighty fighters before the Lord on a much wider field than from Berwick to John o' Groat's House. The pity is that this imaginative writer, who knew all characters better than his own, should have fancied himself a shrewd man of business, a part for which he was too generous and trustful. Of his personal merits, the most marked is that in a class of sedentary craftsmen notoriously apt to be irritable, bilious, jealous, and vainglorious, Walter Scott stands out by hearty, wholesome, human qualities which present him as the type of a Scottish gentleman.
Whatever record leap to light, He never shall be shamed !
To have done with the "Scott Country," we should hold on westward up the Tweed to where its sources almost mingle with those of the Clyde, below the bold mass of Tinto and other hills that might claim a less modest title. This route would bring us by the renowned
'9
Bonnie Scotland
inn of Clovenfords, "howff" of Christopher North and many another choice spirit, by Ashestiel, then by Inner- leithen, set up as a spa through its claim to represent St. Ronan's ; and so to Peebles, a haunt of pleasure since the days when James I. wrote of " Peeblis to the play." For some reason or other, Peebles and Paisley have become butts of Gotham banter, their very names attract- ing the sly jests by which Scotsmen love to make fun of themselves. But neither of them is a town to be sneezed at. Peebles, for its part, after falling into a rather sleepy state, has been wakened up in our time through the Tontine "hottle," that so much excited Meg Dods' scorn ; the huge Hydropathic that has introduced German bath practice into Scotland ; and the Institution bestowed on the town by William Chambers, who hence set out to turn the proverbial half-crown into a goodly fortune. Was it not at this Institution that the local Mutual Improvement Society gravely debated the question, " Shall the material Universe be destroyed ? " and decided, by a majority of one, in the negative ! When Sir Cresswell Cresswell, from his peculiar bench, laid down the dictum that marriages between May and December often turned out ill, it must have been a Paisley statistician who wrote to him for the data on which he founded his assertion that " marriages contracted in the latter part of the year, etc." But Paisley has its manufacturing prosperity to fling in the teeth of calumny ; and Peebles has romantic as well as comic associations, notably its Neidpath Castle and its Manor Water Glen, haunted by memories of the Black Dwarf.
The leisurely tourist might gain Edinburgh by a
20
SCOTT'S FAVOURITE VIEW FROM BEMERSIDE HILL, ROXBURGHSHIRE
The Borders
branch line through Peebles, and this route can be re- commended to the hippogriffs of cycles and motors. Beyond the Catrail, ancient barrier of the Picts or the Britons of Strathclyde, our main railroad, as its way is, keeps on straight up the course of the Gala, leaving to its right the dreary Lammermoors ; then between the Castles of Borthwick and Crichton, it enters on the more prosaic Lothian country. To the left is seen the Pentland ridge, and straight ahead springs up the cone of Arthur's Seat beaconing us to Edinburgh, goal of the race for which a Caledonian express will be speeding along the farther side of the Pentlands.
And not a kilt have we seen yet, since leaving London ! Of this more anon ; kilts are not at home on the Borders, though I have seen one on the Welsh Marches, worn in conjunction with a pith helmet by a retired Liverpool tradesman. Since "gloves of steel" and " helmets barred " went out of fashion on Tweedside, the local colour has been that modest shepherd's plaid displayed in Lord Brougham's trousers to the ribaldry of Punch, and even that goes out of homely wear. You may buy Scott and Douglas tartans in the shops, but they seem vain things, fondly invented, as indeed are some of the patterns now seen in the Highlands. But there will be a good show of kilts in Edinburgh Castle, where once they were like to be bestowed in the dungeon : —
Wae worth the loons that made the laws
To hang a man for gear — To reave o' life for sic a cause
As lifting horse or mare !
And here our North British express, panting through
21
Bonnie Scotland
the fat Lothians, comes to slacken under the castellated walls of that gaol which tourists are apt to take for the Castle — no true kilts to be looked for there nowadays, yet perhaps at the Police Court under the head of drunk and disorderly ! So let us leave the Borderland behind with a quotation from an American writer (Penelope in Scotland) who knows what's what, and who at first sight fairly loses her heart to Edinburgh, haars, east winds, and all, that are its thorns in the flesh. " I hope," she very sensibly says, " that those in authority will never attempt to convene a Peace Congress in Edinburgh, lest the influence of the Castle be too strong for the delegates. They could not resist it nor turn their backs upon it, since, unlike other ancient fortresses, it is but a stone's-throw from the front windows of all the hotels. They might mean never so well, but they would end by buying dirk hat-pins and claymore brooches for their wives ; their daughters would all run after the kilted regiment and marry as many of the pipers as asked them, and before night they would all be shouting with the noble Fitz-Eustace,
Where's the coward that would not dare To fight for such a land ? "
22
CHAPTER II
AULD REEKIE
"AuLD REEKIE," as it is fondly called, still raises its smokiest chimneys and most weathered walls along the " hoary ridge of ancient town " that culminates in the Castle Rock, looking across a long central line of gardens to the farther swell of land on which stands the New Town of Scott's day. But New Town now seems a misnomer, since the cramped site of the old city, itself much sweetened and aerated by innovations, is surrounded by newer towns expanding in other directions. South- wards, of late years, Edinburgh has grown more rapidly up to the foot of the hills that here edge the suburbs of Newington, Grange, and Morningside. Westwards she spreads out towards Corstorphine Hill and Craiglockhart. On the east her progress is barred by the mass of Arthur's Seat, but round the base of this creep rows of tall houses that will soon connect her with Portobello, that minor Margate of the capital, now comprised within her municipal boundaries. Northwards, she goes on " flinging her white arms to the sea," which she almost touches at Granton and Trinity ; and a long unlovely street leads to the Piraeus of this modern Athens, Leith, still stiffly standing
Bonnie Scotland
aloof in civic independence. Including Leith, which refuses to be included, the Scottish metropolis began the century with a population not far short of 400,000.
On high in the midst of these modern settings, the charms of Old Edinburgh are thrown into becoming relief, as the medley smartness of Princes Street is enhanced by its facing the grim backs of the High Street "lands." Ruskin and other critics have said hard things of the New Town's architects ; but their strictures do not go without question. What, at all events, must strike strangers is an imposing solidity of the modern buildings, whether tall "stairs" — Anglict flats — or roomy private houses, nearly all built of a grey stone that seems in keeping with the atmosphere ; and this not only in the central streets and squares, but in outer suburbs, innocent of brick and stucco. If a too classical regularity has been aimed at, this is tempered by the unevenness of the ground, breaking up the " draughty parallelograms," giving vistas into the open country, and at night such long panoramas of glittering lights displayed on slopes and crests. The place, says R. L. Stevenson, who has so well caught the picturesque points of his native city, " is full of theatre tricks in the way of scenery. . . . You turn a corner, and there is the sun going down into the Highland hills. You look down an alley, and see ships tacking for the Baltic." And if the city fathers have been ill advised in the past, its municipality may claim the credit of being first in the kingdom to take powers for disinfecting it against the plague of mendacious and hideous advertisements that are too much allowed to pock our highways and byways.
24
EDINBURGH FROM " REST AND BE THANKFUL '
Auld Reekie
A peculiar feature of the city is its " Bridges," by which certain streets span others at different levels, physically and socially. From the unique Dean Bridge, in the heart of the West End, one overlooks what might be taken for a Highland glen but for the lines of mansions that edge it above. When I came to Edinburgh as a homesick little schoolboy, appalled by the " boundless continuity " of street, I devoted my first Saturday freedom to an attempt at discovering the open country. This was happily before the days of schoolboys being driven and drilled to play. Striking the Water of Leith at Stockbridge, I turned along the path leading into this glen that might well satisfy desires for a green solitude. But on reaching the village of Dean, embedded below the bridge, I climbed up to find myself beside the dome of St. George's Church, lost deeper than ever in that bewildering city. Still, a little trimmed and tamed, an oasis of wooded bank shuts in the rushing stream, now purified and stocked with trout, where we were content to catch loaches and sticklebacks.
What a loss to this city was the classically-minded Gothicism or carelessness through which came to be rooted up so many noble trees that once dotted the parks of Drumsheugh and Bellevue ! But Edinburgh has been well endowed afresh with open spaces and shrubberies, those that separate the blocks of the New Town mainly private joint-stock paradises, yet serving for public amenity. The Old Town is enclosed between the noble stretch of the Princes Street Gardens on the north, and on the south the open Meadows, with its " Philosopher's Walk " of Dugald Stewart's and Playfair's days, rising into the Bruntsfield Links. Then the city is almost ringed about
Bonnie Scotland
by parks, more than one of them including grand features of natural scenery. Philadelphia is the only city I know which has such wild scenes at her very doors, in her case collected together in the Fairmount Park, where miles of hill and river landscape have been left almost untouched among the streets and suburbs, yet boasting no points so noble as the head of Arthur's Seat, with its girdle of crags, screes, and lakes.
This miniature Ben, imposing as it looks, is under 1000 feet high, and easily climbed. Those almost past their climbing days may seek Blackford Hill on the south side, where Scott tells us that he bird's-nested as a truant boy, and speaks of it as at a later day brought under cultivation ; but it has relapsed again to its native wildness, laid out as a rough park and as site for the squat domes of the new Observatory. From this eminence one gets Marmion's view of the city, now grown up to its foot, shut in between Arthur's Seat and the wooded ridge of Corstorphine, and bounded to the north across the Firth by the heights of Fife, above which, in clear weather, stand up the blue bastions of the Highlands. Behind Blackford, one may keep up the wooded hollow of the Hermitage, by a public path following the stream, and thus gain the Braid Hills, overlooking the city a little farther back. Keep- ing along their edge, at some risk from flying golf balls, one can hold on to the hotel built between the old and the new south roads. Here, at the terminus of suburban trams, looking to the Pentlands up the valley of the Braid Burn, by which runs a field path towards Swanston, the country home of R. L. Stevenson, one might hardly guess oneself so near a great city, but for the lordly
26
Auld Reekie
poorhouse and fever -hospital buildings to the back of Craiglockhart Hill.
In the very heart of the city are view-points fine enough to content hasty travellers, from the battlements of the Castle, from the spire of Scott's Monument, from the slopes of the Calton Hill, with its array of ready-made ruins and monuments with which Edinburgh has sought to live up to her classical pretensions. This rises beyond the east end of Princes Street, opposite the battlemented gaol, and a little way past that Charing Cross of Auld Reekie, where its main ways meet between the Post Office, the Register House and the tower of a new North British Hotel look- ing down upon the glass roofs of the sunken Waverley Station. At the other end of Princes Street, an opening before the Caledonian Station may be called Edinburgh's Piccadilly Circus, radiating into its Mayfair quarter. This end is dominated by the Castle, suggesting to Algerian travellers a duodecimo edition of that wonderful rock-set city Constantine. It shows little of the modern fortress, rather a pile of ugly barracks which a Japanese cruiser could knock to pieces from the Firth ; but one understands how in old days its site made it a Gibraltar citadel, that often could hold out when the town was overrun by foemen taking care to keep themselves beyond range of the Castle guns. Taylor, the Water Poet, who had seen something of war in his youth, judged it "so strongly grounded, bounded, and founded, that by force of man it can never be confounded." The King himself did not gain admit- tance on his recent visit without a ceremony of summons by the Lord Lyon King of Arms ; but all and sundry, at reasonable hours, may stroll across its drawbridge to lounge
27
Bonnie Scotland
on the ramparts, to be conducted over historic relics by veteran ciceroni, or to wait for the stunning report of the gun, which, fired from Greenwich at one o'clock, brings every watch within hearing to the test.
From this " Maiden Castle," safe refuge for princesses of the good old times, a conscientious tourist makes for Holyrood by the long line of High Street and Canongate, bringing him past most of the historic sites and monu- ments— the " Heart of Midlothian," the Parliament House, the swept and garnished Cathedral of St. Giles, beside which John Knox now lies literally buried in a highway, as was Dr. Johnson's pious wish for him ; the restored Market Cross, the Tron Church, Knox's House, which counts rather among Edinburgh's Apocrypha, and many another ancient mansion, once alive with Scotland's proudest names, now degraded to an Alsatia of huge dingy tene- ments, swarming forth vice and misery at nightfall. The way narrows through an unsavoury slum as it approaches the deserted home of kings, beyond which opens a park such as no king has at his back door.
Holyrood was originally an abbey, founded by David I. " in gratitude," says the legend, " for his miraculous de- liverance from a stag on Holy Rood Day, and prompted thereto by a dream." Similar stories are told of many another prince less disposed to ecclesiastical benefactions than David, that " sair saint to the crown " ; even John of England founded one abbey, at Beaulieu, as an act of grace prompted by nightmare visions. Beside David's Abbey of the Holy Cross sprang up a palace that, as well the sacred precincts, suffered much in the troubles of the Stuart reigns, being frequently burned or spoiled by
28
EDINBURGH FROM SALISBURY CRAGS EVENING
Auld Reekie
English tourists of their period, on the last occasion " personally conducted " by one Oliver Cromwell, who had small respect either for palaces or abbeys. In Charles II.'s time it was rebuilt somewhat after the style of Hampton Court, while the Abbey, devastated by a Presbyterian mob, came to be refitted with a too heavy roof that crushed it into utter ruin. The present building is thus modern, but for the ruins behind, and the restored portion incorporating Queen Mary's apartments. The name of the Sanctuary opposite was no vain one up till about half a century ago, when impecunious debtors used to take asylum within its bounds, privileged to issue free on Sundays, else venturing forth to feast or sport only at the risk of thrilling adventures with bailiffs.
Everyone who has been to Edinburgh knows the sights of this show place : the portraits of Scottish kings, more or less mythical, "awful examples" as works of art, the whole gallery, it is said, done by a Dutch painter of the seventeenth century for a lump sum of £250 ; the tapes- tried rooms of Darnley ; the Queen's bedchamber ; and the dark stain on the flooring where Rizzio is believed to have gasped out his life, after being dragged from the side of his mistress. Every reader must know Scott's story of the traveller in some patent fluid for removing stains, who pressed the use of his nostrum on the horrified custodian. What every stranger does not know is how this " virtuous palace where no monarch dwells " is still used for functions of state. Annually, in May, the Lord High Commissioner takes up his quarters here as representative of the Crown in the General Assembly of the Church, when green peas
ought to come into season to make their first appearance
29
Bonnie Scotland
on the quasi-royal table. Ireland, that makes such loud boast of her grievances, basks in the smiles of a Lord- Lieutenant all the year, while poor patient Scotland has a blink of reflected royalty for one scrimp fortnight, during which the old palace wakes to the life of levhs, drawing- rooms, and dinners, where black gowns and coats are more in evidence than in most courtly circles. The Commissioner's procession from the palace to open the Assembly lights up the old Canongate with a martial dis- play ; and more or less festivity is held within the walls according to the wealth or liberality of the Commissioner, who, like the Lord Mayor of London, should be a rich man to fill his office with due Mat. But when King Edward VII. recently visited Edinburgh, to the regret of the citizens, he did not take up his quarters in the palace, pronounced unsuitable by the prosaic reason of its drains being somewhat too Georgian, a matter that has now been amended.
A more occasional function fitly transacted here is the election of representative peers for Scotland in a new parliament. As every schoolboy ought to know, our Constitution admits only sixteen Scottish peers to sit in Parliament, most of them indeed having place there in virtue of British peerages — the Duke of Atholl as Lord Strange, for instance, the Duke of Montrose as Lord Graham, and so forth. Of those left out in the cold, sixteen are " elected " by a somewhat cut-and-dried process very free from the heat and excitement of popular voting. As I have seen it, the ceremony seemed to lack impressive- ness. Some dozen gentlemen in pot hats and shooting jackets assembled in the Picture Gallery before an audience
30
Auld Reekie
chiefly consisting of ladies, more than one of these legis- lators in mien and appearance suggesting what Fielding says about Joseph Andrews, that he might have been taken for a nobleman by one who had not seen many noblemen. Each of the privileged order, in turn, wrote and read out a list of the peers for whom he voted, usually ending " and myself." Certain practically-minded peers sent in their votes by post. The most moving incident was the ex- pected one of an advocate in wig and gown rising to put in for a client some unrecognised claim to a title or protest as to precedency, duly listened to and noted down. The whole ceremony struck one as rather a waste of time ; but perhaps the same might be said of most ceremonies. One thing has to be remembered about these unimposing lords, that they are a highly select body in point of blue blood, all representing old families, as the fount of their honour was dried up at the Union, and the king can make an honest man as soon as a Scottish peer.
The tourist who comes in for any of such functions will realise the truth of what R. L. Stevenson says for his native city : —
"There is a spark among the embers j from time to time the old volcano smokes. Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence ; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other ; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble. There are armed men and cannon in the citadel overhead j you may see the troops marshalled on the high parade ; and at night after the early winter evenfall, and in the morning before the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the sound of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit bewigged in what
31
Bonnie Scotland
was once the scene of imperial deliberations. Close by in the High Street perhaps the trumpets may sound about the stroke of noon ; and you see a troop of citizens in tawdry masquerade ; tabard above, heather-mixture trowser below, and the men them- selves trudging in the mud among unsympathetic bystanders. The grooms of a well-appointed circus tread the streets with a better presence. And yet these are the Heralds and Pursuivants of Scot- land, who are about to proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom before two-score boys, and thieves, and hackney-coachmen."
Tourists are too much in the way of seeing no more of Edinburgh than its historic lions and rich museums, as indicated in the guide-books. I would invite them to pay more attention to the suburbs straggling on three sides into such fine hill scenery as is the environment of this city. Open cabs are easily to be had in the chief thorough- fares ; and Edinburgh cabmen have the name of being rarely decent and civil, as if the Shorter Catechism made an antidote to the human demoralisation spread from that honest friend of man, the horse. Give a London Jehu something over his fare, and his first thought seems to be that you are a person to be imposed upon ; but I, for one, never had the same experience here. I know of a stranger who took a cheaper mode of finding his way through Edinburgh ; he had himself booked as an express parcel and put in charge of a telegraph messenger, who would not leave him without a receipt duly signed at his destination. But the wandering pedestrian is at great advantage where he seldom has out of sight such land- marks as the Castle and Arthur's Seat. There is no better way of seeing the city than from the top of the tramcars that run in all directions, the main line being a circular
CRAIGMILLAR CASTLE, NEAR EDINBURGH
Auld Reekie
route from the Waverley Station round the west side of the Castle, then through the south suburbs, and back beneath Arthur's Seat to the Post Office. Public motor cars also ply their terror along the chief thoroughfares. The trams are on the cable system, invented for the steep ascents of San Francisco, but out of favour in most cities. The excuse for its adoption here was that bunches of over- head wires would spoil such amenities as are the city's stock in tourist trade. It has the objectionable habit of keeping up along the line a rattle disquieting to nervous people, while the car itself steals upon one like a thief in the night ; but it appears that accidents to life and limb are not so common as hitches in the working.
The trams now run on Sunday, an innovation that shocks many good folk, brought up in days when the streets of a Scottish city were as stricken by the plague, unless at the hours when all the population came stream- ing on foot to and from their different places of worship. A few years ago, I felt it my duty to correct the late Max O'Rell, who had gathered some wonderful stories supposed to illustrate the manners of Scotland. As he related how, getting into an Edinburgh tramcar on Sunday, his companion insisted on their riding inside not to be seen of men, one was able to inform him that since the days of Moses no public vehicle had disturbed Edinburgh's Sabbath quiet. It is not so now ; and all the old stories about " whustlin' on the Sabbath " and so forth will soon be legends, so fast is the peculiar observance of Scottish piety melting away.
R. L. Stevenson humorously called himself " a country- man of the Sabbath," but this institution is not so clearly
33 s
Bonnie Scotland
a native of Scotland as has been taken for granted. John Knox played bowls on Sunday ; and the rigidity that came in later was due as much to English Puritanism as to the thrawnness of Scottish revolt against Catholic practices. Whatever its origin, Sabbatarianism once weighed heavily on human nature north of the Tweed. " Is this a day to be talking of days ! " was the rebuke of the Highlander to a tourist who ventured to remark that it was a fine Sunday. Not so many years ago, I have known a Highland farmer refuse the loan of a girdle to bake scones for a breadless family, " not on the Sabbath " ; yet this orthodox worthy and his sons, living as far from a church as from a baker's shop, seemed to spend most of the day of rest lying by the roadside smoking their pipes and reading the newspaper. An exiled Scot, in far distant lands, has told me how the shadow of the coming Sabbath began to fall on his youth as early as Wednesday night. The holy day was a term of imprisonment for juvenile spirits, its treadmill two long services, chiefly sermon, sometimes run into one, or separated by only a few minutes' interval, to economise short winter light in which worshippers might have to trudge miles to church. It is in the Highlands and other out-of-the-way parts, of course, that such austerities linger, while the urban populations more readily adopt English compromises on this head.
In Edinburgh one generation has seen a great thawing of the Sabbath spirit. I can remember the excitement caused all over Scotland by a sermon in which Dr. Norman Macleod proclaimed that there was no harm in taking a walk on Sunday. The Scotsman, a paper that
34
Auld Reekie
has never much flattered its readers' prejudices, came out with a sly humorous article headed " Murder of Moses' Law by Dr. Norman Macleod," and it is said that some good people read this in the sense that the " broad " divine had actually committed homicide. Even earlier, Edinburgh people had tacitly sanctioned a walk to a cemetery, as echoing the teachings of the pulpit. The story went that the present King, when at Edinburgh University, was sternly denied admission to the Botanic Gardens on Sunday ; but he might unblamed have taken a stroll through the adjacent tombs of Warriston. From the Dean Cemetery, the West End ventured on extending its Sunday ramble as far as " Rest and be Thankful " on Corstorphine Hill ; then it was a fresh scandal when a very Lord of Session came to show himself on this road in tweeds, instead of the full phylacteries that might attest previous church-going. Of another judge living at Corstorphine it is told that he once sought to mend the morals of a cobbler helplessly drunk at his gate on Sunday afternoon, but was met by the hiccoughed repartee, " Wha's you, without your Sabbath blacks ? "
In my youth the police would put a stop to skating or such like diversions on Sabbath ; but now Sunday bicycles flit over the country ; the iniquity of a Sunday band is tolerated in the parks ; while a society is suffered to promote Sunday concerts and lectures indoors. Another sign of the times is that Christmas in Edinburgh begins to be almost as much observed as the national festival of New Year's Day, whereas orthodox Presbyterianism once made a point of ignoring fasts and feasts sanctioned by prelacy or popery. As for its own fasts, they have long
35
Bonnie Scotland
been transmuted into junketings ; and the sacramental " preachings " of large towns are now frankly abolished in favour of public holidays answering to the English saturnalia of St. Lubbock, observed only by banks across the Tweed. The Communion, in old days administered but once or twice a year, and regarded in some parts with such awe that few ventured to put themselves for- ward as participants, is now a frequent rite in Presbyterian Churches, whose congregations are throwing off their horror of ornament and ceremony, as may be seen in St. Giles. Old-fashioned English rectors of the Simeon school have been known to shake their heads at the services now read in the ears of descendants of that Jenny Geddes who so forcibly testified against a prayer-book declared by ribald jesters hateful to Scotland through its too frequent mention of " Collect/'
The honest stranger, then, has nothing to fear from the austerity of Scottish morals, not even the supposed risk of being married by mistake. It will be his own fault if he fail to find a welcome across the Tweed. Effusive manners are not the Scot's strong point, and he may be accused of a certain suspicion of offence, kept sharp by the careless and not ill-natured insolence of southrons who are so free with their jovial jests about " bawbees " and such like, well-worn and rusty pleasantries coined in the days of Bute's unpopularity and Johnson's bearish dogmatism. Among the baser sorts of Scots are still current inverse sarcasms against English " pock-puddings," conceived as fat and greedy ; but they would have to be fished up from a low social stratum by the travelling gent who cannot understand that, however little disposed
36
I
LINLITHGOW PALACE
Auld Reekie
Sandy may have been to hang his head for honest poverty, he ill relishes its being flung in his face. u A sooth bourd is nae bourd," says the old proverb ; but now, what with tourists, and trade, and Scotsmen who come back again, bringing the spoils of the world with them, the reproach of poverty ceases to be so sore a one.
Though in the eyes of busy Glasgow Edinburgh may pass as a retired capital, living on its means of attraction, it has in fact several industries from which to earn a livelihood. Along with the lodging and amusing of strangers, it must do a good business in the tartans, pebbles, silver-work, and other showy wares displayed in Princes Street shop windows. "Edinbury Rock," done up in tartan wrappers, is much pressed upon the notice of tourists ; the same indeed being sold in other towns under their own name. As for shortbread, scones, biscuits, and other manufactures of the " Land of Cakes," these have invaded London, where every baker not a German is like to be a Scot. It will be noted by Cockney revilers as a proof of Scotch thriftiness, which might bear another interpretation, that what costs a penny in a London baker's shop is here sold for a halfpenny. Well known to strangers are the Princes Street con- fectioners' shops, several of them extensive restaurants like that one which, crowning its storeys of accommoda- tion, has a roof garden looking upon the Castle opposite.
The staple trades of Edinburgh have come to be printing and publishing, and, as the nettle grows near the dock, brewing and distilling. The great Scottish publishing firms have of late years shown a tendency to gravitate towards London ; but more than one still keeps
37
Bonnie Scotland
its headquarters here, beside some of the largest and best printing establishments in the kingdom. It must be confessed that what is spoken of as "the trade," is whisky, too much consumed about the premises, as visitors are apt to note. The worst shame a Scotsman need take for Scotland is on account of what Englishmen specially distinguish as " Scotch." I never heard sadder jest than the laughing comment of a group of Dundee lasses, as they passed a braw lad wallowing in the gutter at mid-day — " He's having his holidays ! " Yet as to this reproach, something might be said in plea for mitigation of judgment. Something to the purpose was said by that experienced toper who explained how " whusky makes ye drunk before ye are fu', but yill makes ye fu' before ye are drunk." The whisky drunk by the lower classes here is a demon that takes no disguise. It seems that, while there is more brutal intoxication in Scotland, there may be less toping sottishness than in England. Men seen so helplessly overcome at the ninth hour of a holiday are perhaps of ordinarily sober habits, all the more readily affected by occasional indulgence in fiery spirit. A woman frequenting public-houses implies a lower depth of degradation. In the north, a larger proportion of the population are abstainers ; young people and the class of domestic servants for instance, drink water where in English families they would expect beer. In all classes, there are still too many Scotsmen religious in the worship of their native Bacchus, vulgar and violent deity as he is ; but every year adds to the number of Protestants against this perverted fanaticism. By the Forbes Mackenzie Act, all public-houses are
38
THE BASS ROCK A TRANQUIL EVENING
If]
i" '.I- :l
Auld Reekie
closed on Sunday, when, however, if all stories be true, a good deal of shebeening or illicit drinking goes on in the cities. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the austerity of Scottish Sabbatarianism has driven many into vicious indulgence ; and much is to be hoped from the churches taking an interest in honest amusement as a help and not a hindrance to religion. But a sneer often thrown out by strangers against the supposed hypocrisy of Scotsmen, only shows ignorance of a country where those most concerned about Sabbath observance have long been the deadliest enemies of drinking habits.
Whisky, as well as golf, has now so masterfully invaded England, that this can no longer be called " Scottish Drink," as it was not by Burns. In his day, home-brewed beer was the Lowland beverage, of which a Cromwellian soldier complained as more like brose for its thickness. Up to our day " Edinburgh Ale " made the capital's chief contribution to the heady gaiety of nations. Whisky came in from the Highlands, its name a contraction of uisgebeatha^ " water of life," which Burns and Scott write usquebaugh^ the Celtic word for water being the same that appears in so many river names Esk, Usk, Exe, Axcy and so forth. Even in the Highlands, this mountain dew would seem to have supplanted beer within historic times ; and old writers admire the temperance as much as the honesty and courage of Highlanders. Both Highland and Lowland gentlemen preferred brandy, in the days when, as Lord Cockburn tells us, claret was hawked about the Edinburgh streets in a cart, a jug of any reasonable size being filled for sixpence.
39
Bonnie Scotland
Firm and erect the Caledonian stood, Old was his mutton, and his claret good. Let him drink port ! a beef-fed statesman cried. He drank the poison and his spirit died.
The preference for French wine and spirits before the days of Hanoverian fiscalities, relates to the old alliance with France, which has left its mark also on Scottish speech. That warning cry " Gardy-loo " (gardez Teau), which gave such scandal to early English tourists, was of course a survival of a far-spread practice in cities before the days of drainage or even of ash-backets (baquets). Many French household words are used in Scotland at this day, as "caraff" (carafe), "ashet" (assiette\ a "jiggot" of mutton (gigot\ a "haggis" (hachis) ; and Burns's " silver tassie " was of course a tasse. A " cummer " (commere) " canna be fashed " (sefdcher) to step out to the "merchant's," who may be "douce" or "dour" and an "honest" man (honn$te\ though sharp in his bargains. " Ma certie (certes\ that's a braw (brave} vest ! " quoth a lass to her lad, a word here used like the French garfon or gars, while gosse will be distinguished as a "laddie," who grows to be a "young lad" in spite of orgies on sour "grozers" or "grozets" and "gheans," which in France are groseilles and guignes, but in England gooseberries and wild cherries. French names too have taken root in Scotland, Janet (Jeannette) being very common with one sex, as Louis or Ludovic is not unknown in the other. For the matter of that, one might string together instances of how the well of Old English flows undefiled by time in the north.
40
Auld Reekie
Then brought to him that maiden meek Hose and shoon and sark and breek.
These words are used to this day in every Scottish cottage, as once in the stately style of an early southron minstrel. Shakespeare and the Bible show many picked phrases which are now wild flowers in the north ; and high example might be found for the shalls and wills that here run loose from the enclosures of modern grammarians. But as Mr. David MacRitchie suggests in an interesting pamphlet, " to doubt that one is colded and can't go to the church," seem rather specimens of French idioms trans- planted during the three centuries or so that Capets and Stuarts stood together against the Plantagenets.
Protestantism availed to draw Scotland from the arms of France into those of England; then Prelacy and Presbytery set the near neighbours again at odds. For some generations, the young Scotsmen who had once sought the Catholic schools of the Continent, were more in the way of finishing their education at Dutch or German Universities. Scotland had also an old connec- tion, chiefly in the way of trade, with Scandinavia and Poland, in both of which countries Scottish family names are naturalised, as Swedish Dicksons and Polish Gordons. Scots students of our day still look to Germany, under whose professors they are apt to forget the Shorter Catechism for the categories of Kant and the secret of Hegel. The Union was not fully consummated till Macs began to make themselves at home in Oxford and Cambridge, while for a time the renown of Scottish philosophy drew some of the promising English youth to Edinburgh, whose medical school kept up the attrao
41 6
Bonnie Scotland
tion. In the last generation or two, Scotsmen have been only too ready to go south for education, seeking a stamp of Anglified gentility as well as better qualities which were perhaps not to be had from those rude old dominies under whom the young laird and the barefoot loon once sat together in friendly hatred of " carritch " and rudiments.
Such foreign communications cannot but help young Scotsmen to put their native prejudices in due proportion, and to doubt if the sun of truth has always shown most clearly in the sky of one small people much beset by mists and east winds. Yet Scottish parents seem much " left to themselves " in sending their sons and daughters beyond Edinburgh for schooling. One of the most im- portant industries of this city has come to be education. It abounds in teaching of all kinds, from its venerable University to spick and span board schools. Those who believe the fable of Scotch niggardliness should consider that no place in the United Kingdom, unless it be Bedford, is so rich in educational endowments, and palatial charity schools, which have long ceased to be charities. Edinburgh, indeed, suffered from such an embarrassment of benefactions of this kind, that in our time, several of them have been turned into day-schools, giving a complete education to thousands of boys and girls of the better class. The latest large endowment, that of Sir William Fettes for the children of necessitous families, was applied to building a sumptuous pile, handed over per saltum to the upper class as a seminary on the model of English public schools, which only in the course of generations came so far from the intention
42
LOCH ACHRAY, THE TROSSACHS, PERTHSHIRE
Auld Reekie
of their pious founders. This competition has but set on their mettle the once " New " Academy, for the best part of a century the chief school in Scotland, and the old High School that nursed so many generations of distinguished Scotsmen.
So, as at Bedford, where marriageable damsels complain of the him s as being either too ancient or too modern, the population of the Scottish capital is increased by a selection of retired family-fathers, and a swarm of youngsters who appear to thrive on the easterly winds and haars. This hint about the weather is let slip unhappily, since I am about to put forward a bold pretension for " mine own romantic town," in a character not obviously associated with it. In case of seeming too presumptuous on its behalf, I will quote from Black's Guide to Edinburgh, which ought to be well informed on such matters : —
" In the holiday season, when Edinburgh is deserted by the upper class of its inhabitants, why should it not be sought as a pleasant change by the inhabitants of more grimy cities or less inspiring scenes ? It may seem strange to mention the capital of Scotland as a health resort ; yet, when one comes to think of it, c Auld Reekie ' has more claim to this extra title than many less famous places which flourish in full reputation for gay and picturesque salubrity. The fact is, that had Edinburgh not been a great city, it might well be a Clifton or a Scarborough, and its ancient dignity need not be allowed to overshadow its other merits. To begin with, the climate is airy and bracing, notoriously rather too much so at most seasons, but the sea- breezes cool the heat of summer, and the moderate rainfall is soon carried off on the sloping streets. Practically it stands on the sea, the shore being hardly farther from the centre of
43
Bonnie Scotland
Edinburgh than from some parts of Brighton. By train or tram one can run down at any hour to Portobello, where are sands, donkeys, crowds, bathing-machines, pleasure-boats, and ornamental pier to satisfy the most fastidious Margateer. At Craiglockhart, a mile or so from the outskirts of the town, there is a first-class hydropathic establishment, nestling under the wild scenery of the Pcntland Hills. Nor is mineral water wanting, if that be desired. In the valley of the Water of Leith, below the stately mansions of Moray Place, a sulphurous spring may be found dispensed in a little classical temple that elsewhere would pass for a creditable pump-room, though many citizens of Edinburgh, perhaps, know nothing about it. Bands play almost daily in one or other of the parks ; and even nigger minstrels, no doubt, might be found, if that feature seemed indispensable to the character of a holiday resort. There is no want of theatrical and other performances. Then, as we have shown, few cities are so well off for coach, steamboat, and railway excursions which would bring one back in a day from a round through half of Scotland."
44
CHAPTER III
THE TROSSACHS ROUND
BEYOND Edinburgh, perhaps the best known town in Scotland is Stirling, which hordes of pilgrims pass in the round trip of a single day through the famous Trossachs District, displaying such a finely mixed assortment of Scottish scenery, lochs, woods, and mountains
that like giants stand To sentinel enchanted land.
Stirling, on the edge of the Highlands, played a central part, even long after the Scottish kings had been drawn down to the rich fields of Lothian and the Merse. From the rock on which the Castle stands, only less boldly than that of Edinburgh, one looks over the Links of Forth, making such sinuous meanderings upon its Carse, and across to the Ochil Hills that border Fife ; then from another point of view appear the rugged Bens among which Roderick Dhu had his strongholds. Not fair prospects alone are tourists* attraction to Stirling. The palace of James V., the houses of great nobles like Argyll and Mar, the execution place of the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Scotland, the memorials of Pro- testant martyrs, the proud monuments of Bruce and
45
Bonnie Scotland
Wallace, the ruins of Cambuskenneth Abbey, with its royal sepulchre, all show this region the heart of mediaeval Scottish history. While Edinburgh grew to be recognised as the capital, Stirling Castle was the birthplace and the favourite residence of several among the James Stuarts that came to such an uneasy crown in boyhood ; some- times it was their prison or their school of sanguinary politics, when possession of the royal person counted as ace in the game played by truculently treacherous nobles. It has the distinction of being the last British castle to stand a siege, raised in 1746 by the Duke of Cumberland, when, as his panegyrical historian says, " in the Space of one single Week, his Royal Highness quitted the Court of the King his Father, put himself at the head of his Troops in Scotland, and saw the Enemy flying with Pre- cipitation before him, so that it may be said that his progress was like Lightning, the rebels fled at the flash, fearing the Thunder that was to follow." Its ramparts look down on Scotland's dearest battlefields, that where Wallace ensnared the invader at the Old Bridge, and that of Bannockburn, when Bruce turned the flower of English chivalry to dust and to gold, for, as the latest historian says, " it rained ransoms " in Scotland after this profitable victory.
One may speculate what might have been the fate of the United Kingdom had Bannockburn ended otherwise. Would the barons of the north have found a master in Edward III. ? Would the Plantagenets, with Scotland to back them, have made good their conquest of France ? Would the stern reformers across the Tweed have suffered the Tudors to shape and re -shape the Church as they
46
STIRLING CASTLE FROM THE KING S KNOT
The Trossachs Round
did ? Would the Scottish adventurers who once kept their swords sharp as soldiers of fortune all over Europe, have sooner found a career in forcing themselves to the front of British society ? This much seems clear, that there has been a woeful waste of ill-blood before a union that came about after all, in the way of peace. Yet are we so made that the most philosophic Scot, even fresh from a course of John Stuart Mill or Herbert Spencer, cannot look down upon these battle-grounds without a throb in his heart. It was Bannockburn that made us a nation, poor but free to be ourselves. Then, since we did not always come off so well in our battles with England, naturally we make much of the points won in a doubtful game. When I was at school there came among us perfervid young Scots an English boy, before whom, we agreed, it would be courteous and kind not to mention Bannockburn. Yet in the end some itching tongue let slip this moving name, but without ruffling our new comrade's pride. It turned out that he complacently took Bannockburn to have been an English victory ; at all events, one more or less made no great matter to his thinking. Englishmen take their own national trophies so much for granted, that they are apt to forget the susceptibilities of other peoples. Such a one was rebuked by a coachman driving him over the field of Bannockburn. " You Scotch are always boasting of your country, but when you come south you are in no hurry to get back again." With thumb pointed to the ground, the Scot made stern answer : " There was thirty thousand o' you cam north, and no mahny o' them went back again ! " There are other battlefields about Stirling, of which
47
Bonnie Scotland
Scotland has no such title to be proud, as that of Falkirk, where Wallace brought his renown to a falling market and Prince Charles Edward had but half a victory ; that of Sauchieburn, where James III. was foully slain ; and that of Sheriffmuir, the Culloden of 1715.
Let us hang a little longer upon the Castle ramparts to take a bird's-eye view of the stirring story that often came to centre round this rock. Over Highland mountain and Lowland strath the clouds lift away, giving here and there a doubtful glimpse of Scots from Ireland, Celts from who knows how far, Britons of Strathclyde, and dim Picts of the east, each such a wild race as " slew the slayer and shall himself be slain," among whom intrude Roman legions and Norse pirates, the former falling back from their thistly conquest, the latter settling themselves firmly on the coasts. Out of this welter, as out of the Heptarchy in the south, emerges a more or less dominant kingdom seated on the Tay. While the power of the Scots seems to have gone under, their name floats at the top, so as to christen the new nation, that on the south side, from the wide bounds of Northumbria, takes in a stable element destined to be the cement of the whole.
The next act shows the struggle of a partly Saxonised people against the Anglo-Norman kings and their claims to feudal superiority. The curtain rises on a sensational melodrama of confused alarms and excursions, where the ill-drilled Celtic supernumeraries at the back of the stage often fall to fighting like wild cats among themselves, while the mail-clad barons prance now on one side and now on the other, as the scenes shift about a border-line almost rubbed out by the crossing and recrossing of
48
THE OUTFLOW OF LOCH KATRINE, PERTHSHIRE
The Trossachs Round
armies. The heroes of the most thrilling tableaux are Wallace and Bruce ; and the loudest applause hails the culminating blaze of lime-light on Bannockburn.
The wars of Independence are not yet at an end, but the Scots people have learned more or less firmly to stand together, and their chiefs, when not led astray by feud and treachery, begin to enter into the spirit of the piece, in which France now takes a leading part. But Banquo's ill-fortune dogs the line not yet fully consecrated by misfortune. Over the stage passes that woeful procession of boy kings, most of them cut off before they had learned to rule, each leaving his son to be in turn kid- napped and tutored by fierce nobles to whom John Knox might well have preached on the text ct Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child ! " more profitably than he denounced that " monstrous regiment of women." This act culminates in the Reformation, when for a generation Scotland is not clear whether to cry " Unhand me, villain ! " to France, or to England, the two powers that at her side play Codlin and Short in a tragic mask.
When James VI. had posted off to his richer inheritance, we might expect an idyllic transformation scene of peace out of pain. But the Scot has no turn for peace. Is it the mists and east winds that set such a keen edge on his temper ? When not at loyal war, he is robbing and raiding his neighbours, as if to keep his hand in ; and if no strife be stirring at home, he hires himself out as a professional fighter or football player over foreign countries and counties, for pelf indeed, but also for the zest of the game. And now that Scotland has no longer its wonted national exercise of defending itself against
49 7
Bonnie Scotland
England, it developed at home that notable taste for spiritual combat ; so the next act has for its main interest a controversy as to what things were Cassar's, throughout which the hard-headed and hot-hearted theologians of the north made fitful efforts to be loyal to Caesar, who, on his part, gave them little cause for loyalty.
With the Revolution Settlement and the Act of Union the stage appears cleared for a happy denouement, which, indeed, but for episodes of rebellion and vulgar grudges on both sides, comes on at length as the two rivals learn how after all they are not hero and villain, but long-lost brothers, the one rich and proud but generous, the other poor and honest. Already, before the world's footlights, we see them fallen into each other's arms, blessed by nature and fortune, to the music of " Rule, Britannia," amid the cheers of a crowd of colonies, though foreign spectators may shrug their shoulders and twirl their moustaches when invited to applaud.
But may there not be an epilogue to the sensational acts of Scottish history? As Saxondom overcame the plaided and kilted clans, is not Scotland in turn destined to overlie the rest of the island ? Here we approach a delicate subject of consideration. In this enlightened age when, as a great Scotsman says, "the Torch of Science has now been brandished and borne about with more or less effect for five thousand years and upwards," the truly philosophic mind should be capable of rising above the pettiness of national prejudice. Only foolish and uninstructed persons can cling to the belief that their peculiar community, large or small, is necessarily identified with the highest excellences of creation. Wise
50
IN THE HEART OF THE TROSSACHS, PERTHSHIRE
The Trossachs Round
men agree to recognise that as a poor vanity which winks fondly at the halo consecrating its own faults, while blind to the plainest merits of its neighbours. Excesses, defects, and compensations must be everywhere recognised and allowed for, then at last we can take a calm and exact account of human nature in its different manifestations regarded by the light of impartial candour. And when in such a judicious spirit we come to survey mankind from China to Peru, there can surely be little doubt as to the due place of Scots in the broken clan of Me Adam.
The above edifying principles were earnestly enforced upon me by a French savant with whom I once travelled in the Desert of Sahara, who yet almost foamed at the mouth if one pointed the moral with a Prussian helmet- spike. Hitherto, alas ! international characterisations have been coarse work, usually touched with a spice of malice. Every parish flatters itself by locating Gotham just over its boundary, as any county may have some unkind reproach against its neighbours, Wiltshire moon-rakers, Hampshire hogs, or what not ; and nations, too, bandy satirical epithets, like those of a certain poet —
France is the land of sober common-sense, And Spain of intellectual eminence. In Russia there are no such things as chains ; Supreme at Rome enlightened reason reigns. Unbounded liberty is Austria's boast, And iron Prussia is as free — almost. America, that stationary clime, Boasts of tradition and the olden time. England, the versatile and gay, Rejoices in theatrical display.
51
Bonnie Scotland
The sons of Scotia are impulsive, rash, Infirm of purpose, prodigal of cash. But Paddy
But, indeed, the rest is too scandalous for publication.
The most marked feature of the Scottish national character is perhaps an engaging modesty that forbids me to dwell on the achievements of a small country's thin population, who have written so many names so widely over the world. But it must be admitted how the King of Great Britain sits on his throne in virtue of the Scottish blood that exalted a " wee bit German lairdie." Our men of light and leading are naturally Scotsmen, the leaders of both parties in the House of Commons, for instance. Since Disraeli — himself sprung from the Chosen People of the old Dispensation — Lord Salisbury was our only Premier not a Scotsman. Both the present Archbishops of the Anglican Church come from Presbyterian Scotland. The heads of other professions in England usually are or ought to be Scotsmen. The United States Constitution seems to require an amendment permitting the President to be a born Scot ; but such names as Adams, Polk, Scott, Grant, McClellan, and McKinley have their significance in the history of that country, while in Canada, of course, Mac has come to mean much what Pharaoh did in Egypt. It is believed that no Scotsman has as yet been Pope ; but there appears a sad falling away in the Catholic Church since its earliest Fathers were well known as sound Presbyterians. The first man mentioned in the Bible was certainly a Scot, though English jealousy seeks to disguise him as James I. Your "beggarly Scot" has the Apostles as accomplices in what Englishmen look on as his worst sin, a vice of
52
BRIG O TURK AND BEN VENUE, PERTHSHIRE
The Trossachs Round
poverty which, in the fulness of time, he begins to live down. Both Major and Minor Prophets deal with their Ahabs and Jezebels much in the tone of John Knox. A legend, not lightly to be despised, makes our ancestress Scota, Pharaoh's daughter ; but I do not insist on a possible descent from the lost Tribes of Israel. Noah is recorded as the first Covenanter. Cain and Abel appear to have started the feud of Highlander and Lowlander. Father Adam is certainly understood to have worn the kilt. The Royal Scots claim to have furnished the guard over the Garden of Eden, in which case unpleasing questions are suggested as to the duties of the Black Watch at that epoch. The name of Eden was at one time held to fix the site of Paradise in the East Neuk of Fife ; but the higher criticism inclines to Glasgow Green. In the south of Lanark, indeed, are four streams that have yielded gold ; but they compass a country more abounding in lead, and the climate seems not congenial to fruit trees. " I confess, my brethren," said the controversial divine, "that there is a difficulty here ; but let us look it boldly in the face, and pass on."
The antiquities of Stirling contrast with the modern trimness of its neighbour, the Bridge of Allan, lying at the foot of the Ochils two or three miles off, a Leaming- ton to the Scottish Warwick, the tramway between them passing the hill on which, to humble southron tourists, Professor Blackie and other ardent patriots reared that tall Wallace Monument whose interior makes a Walhalla of memorials to eminent Scotsmen like Carlyle and Gladstone. Bridge of Allan is a place of mills and bleach works, and of resort for its Spa of saline water, recommended, too, by its repute for a mild spring climate, rare in the north.
53
Bonnie Scotland
The " Bridge," which we have so often in Scottish place- names, points to a time when bridges were not matters of course ; as in the Highlands we shall find " Boats " recording a more backward stage of ferries. This bridge spans the wooded "banks of Allan Water," up which a pleasant path leads one to Dunblane, with the Ochil moorlands for its background.
Dunblane is notable for one of the few Gothic cathedrals still used in Scotland as a parish church. Sympathetically restored, it has even become the scene of forms of worship which scandalised true-blue Presbyterians, while on the other hand I once came across an Anglican lady much shocked to find how "actually there was a Presbyterian service going on 1 " Carved screen, stalls, and communion table make ornaments seldom seen in the bareness of a northern kirk, this one admirable in its pro- portions and mouldings, if without the elaborate decora- tion of Melrose. It has a valuable legacy in the library of a divine well known in both countries, the tolerant Archbishop Leighton.
Among Scotsmen, Dunblane enjoys a modest repute as a place of villeggiatura ; to tourists it is perhaps best known as junction of the Caledonian line to Oban, which brings them to Callander, a few miles from the Trossachs. This line at first follows the course of the Teith, " daughter of three mighty lakes," past Doune Castle, not Burns's " Bonnie Doon," but an imposing monument of feudal struggles and crimes, that has housed many a royal guest, if not, as one of its parish ministers gravely declares for unquestionable, Fitz-James himself on the night before his adventurous chase. So late as 1745,
54
BIRCHES BY LOCH ACHRAY, PERTHSHIRE
The Trossachs Round
Home, the author of Douglas •, had an adventure here, confined as prisoner of war in a Jacobite dungeon, from which he escaped, with five fellow-captives, in quite romantic style ; and this, we know, was one of the stages of Captain Edward Waverley's journey. Farther up the river, another place of note is Cambusmore, where Scott spent the youthful holidays that made him familiar with the Trossachs country. Callander he does not mention, its name not fitting into his metre, whereas its neighbour Dunblane's amenity to rhyme brought to be planted there a flower of song at the hands of a writer who perhaps knew it only by name. But Callander has grown into a snug little town of hotels and lodging-houses below most lovely scenery, little spoiled by the chain of lakes above being harnessed as water-works for thirsty Glasgow, whose Bailie Nicol Jarvies now lord it over the country of Rob Roy and Roderick Dhu.
Another way to the Trossachs is by "the varied realms of fair Menteith," through which a railway joins the banks of the Forth and the Clyde. The name of Menteith has an ugly association to Scottish ears through Sir John Menteith, a son of its earl, who betrayed Wallace to the English ; the signal for these Philistines* onrush was given by his turning a loaf upside down, and so to handle bread was long an insult to any man of the execrated name. Sir John afterwards fought under Bruce ; but however Scottish nobles might change sides in the game of feudal allegiance, the Commons were always true to patriotic resentment ; and no services of that house have quite wiped out the memory of a traitor remembered as Gan among the peers of Charlemagne or Simon Girty
55
Bonnie Scotland
on the backwoods frontier of America. And fortune seems to have concurred in the popular verdict, for till even the shadow of it died out in a wandering beggar, little luck went with the title of Menteith, least of all in a claim to legitimate heirship of the Crown ; then this earldom seemed doubly cursed when transferred to the Grahams, one of whom was ringleader in the murder of James I.
Menteith, one of the chief provinces of old Scotland, has shrunk to the name of a district described in a witty booklet by a son of the soil, far travelled in other lands.1 "A kind of sea of moss and heath, a bristly country (Trossachs is said to mean the bristled land) shut in by hills on every side," in which " nearly every hill and strath has had its battles between the Grahams and the Macgregors " ; but now " over the Fingalian path, where once the red-shank trotted on his Highland garron, the bicyclist, the incarnation of the age, looks to a sign-post and sees This hill is dangerous" Its stony fields and lochans lying between hummocks are horizoned by grand mountains, among which Ben Lomond, to the west, is the dominating feature, " in winter, a vast white sugar-loaf ; in summer, a prismatic cone of yellow and amethyst and opal lights ; in spring, a grey, gloomy, stony pile of rocks ; in autumn, a weather indicator ; for when the mist curls down its sides, and hangs in heavy wreaths
from its double summit * it has to rain/ as the Spaniards
t» say.
Menteith became a resort before Callander, when, early in the eighteenth century, we find Clerk of Penicuik taking
1 Notes on the District of Menteith, by R. B. Cunninghame Graham.
56
HEAD OF LOCH LOMOND, LOOKING UP GLEN FALLOCH, PERTHSHIRE
The Trossachs Round
his family there on a u goat's whey campaign," for which remedy the Highland borders were often visited in his day. At an earlier day, canny Lowlanders would be shy of trusting themselves, on business or pleasure, beyond the Forth ; and, even later, we know how Bailie Nicol Jarvie thought twice before venturing into the haunts of that "honest" kinsman of his. As Ben Lomond dominates this landscape, so looms out the memory of Rob Roy Macgregor, that doughty outlaw who, like Robin Hood, has taken such hold on popular imagination. Graham as he is, one suspects the above-quoted representative of the old earls to have his heart with an ancestral enemy who practised a kind of wild socialism —
To spoil the spoiler as he may, And from the robber rend the prey.
It appears that Scott had Rob Roy in his eye as a model for Roderick Dhu, and it is the Macgregor country which he has given to his fictitious Vich Alpines. Mr. Cunninghame Graham points out how the Highland borders were always more troubled than the interior clandom, and how here especially the vicinity of a rich lowland offered constant temptation for followers of the " good old rule, the simple plan " recorded by Words- worth. The Forth made a boundary against these predatory excursions, yet sometimes a Roderick Dhu would harry fields and farms as far as the home of " poor Blanche of Devon," beyond Stirling. The "red soldiers" in turn came to pass the Highland line. On Ellen's Isle women and children took refuge from Cromweirs men ; Monk marched by Aberfoyle, noting for destruction its woods
57 8
Bonnie Scotland
that harboured rebels ; and not to speak of Captain Thornton's unlucky expedition, no less authentic a hero than Wolfe once commanded the fortress which the Georges placed at Inversnaid, near Rob Roy's home, to bridle that broken clan of Ishmaelites.
The railway, from Glasgow or from Stirling, passes to the south of the Loch of Menteith, with its islands, to which a short divagation might be made. Here, on the " Isle of Rest," shaded by giant chestnuts which tradition brings from Rome, are the ruins of a cloister whither the child Queen Mary was carried for refuge after the battle of Pinkie, before setting out for France with her playmate maids of honour.
Last night the Queen had four Marys,
To-night she'll have but three ; There was Mary Beaton and Mary Seaton
And Mary Carmichael and me.
Mary Livingston was the authentic fourth of the quartette in those days, and Mary Fleming held the place of Mary Carmichael. The luckless heroine of this touch- ing ballad was a Mary Hamilton supposed by Scott to have been one of the Queen's attendants later on, but her identity is somewhat dubious ; and one writer shows reason to believe that the story of her crime and punish- ment has been strangely shifted from the Russian Court of Peter the Great, where she might well exclaim —
Ah ! little did my minnie think,
The night she cradled me The lands that I should travel in,
The death that I should dee !
Beyond this lake a railway branch brings us to
58
GOLDEN AUTUMN, THE TROSSACHS, PERTHSHIRE
The Trossachs Round
Aberfoyle, on the banks of the " infant Forth," its nursery name the Avon Dhu, " Blackwater," haunted like a child's dreams by fairies of whom prudent Bailie Nicol Jarvie spoke under his breath, though he professed to hold them as " deceits of Satan." Here the change-house of Lucky M'Alpine has been replaced by an hotel offering all the comforts of the Saltmarket, along with golf links and fishing at Loch Ard. As Ipswich shows the very room in the White Hart occupied by Mr. Pickwick and the green gate at which Sam Weller met Job Trotter, so among the lions here are the ploughshare valiantly handled by Bailie Nicol Jarvie, nay, even the identical bough from which he swung suspended by his coat tails. Such relics let one guess why that worthy citizen would not give " the finest sight in the Hielands for the first keek o' the Gorbals of Glasgow ! " But he might have taken another view had he seen the great slate quarries that now scar the braes of Aberfoyle, or that pleasure-house on Loch Katrine set apart for Glasgow magistrates to disport themselves at the source of their city's water supply.
From Aberfoyle or from Callander, the rest of the journey is by road to the Trossachs Hotel, which seems to represent Fitz-James's imagination of " lordly tower " or "cloister grey"; then on through the mile of bristling pass to the foot of Loch Katrine. How many a peaceful stranger has passed this way since the Knight of Snowdoun's steed here " stretched his stiff limbs to rise no more " ! What " cost thy life, my gallant grey " would be the fact that even in the poet's day, the path to Ellen's Isle was more like a ladder than a road. Now the danger most to be feared is from Sassenach cycling, which caused a coach
59
Bonnie Scotland
accident in the vicinity a few years ago. Umbrellas had replaced claymores so far back as Wordsworth's time ; and waterproofs are the armour most displayed, where once
Refluent through the pass of fear
The battle's tide was pour'd ; Vanish'd the Saxon's struggling spear,
Vanish'd the mountain-sword. As Bracklinn's chasm, so black and steep,
Receives her roaring linn, As the dark caverns of the deep
Suck the wild whirlpool in, So did the deep and darksome pass Devour the battle's mingled mass : None linger now upon the plain, Save those who ne'er shall fight again.
Macaulay, in his slap -dash style, has explained the want of taste for the picturesque in a bailie or such like of more romantic times. " He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the abruptness of a precipice from which he is in imminent danger of falling two thousand feet perpendicular ; by the boiling waves of a torrent which suddenly whirls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life ; by the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just stripped and mangled ; or by the screams of those eagles whose next meal may probably be on his own eyes." But Dr. Hume Brown (Early Travellers in Scotland) shows how there were bold and not unappreciative tourists in the Highlands before the era of return tickets. Whatever the guide- books say, it is certainly not the case that the Trossachs were discovered by Scott. In Dr. T. Garnett's Tour through the Highlands, published 1800, he relates a visit
60
THE RIVER TEITH, WITH LOCHS ACHRAY AND VENNACHAR, PERTHSHIRE
The Trossachs Round
to the "Drosacks," and speaks of the place as sought out by foreigners. Several years before the publication of the Lady of the Lake, Wordsworth, with Coleridge and his sister, on a Scottish tour, turned aside to this beauty-spot, which they duly admired in spite of the rain ; and there they met a drawing-master from Edinburgh on the same picturesque-hunting errand. Dorothy Words- worth 's Journal tells us how the cottars were amused to hear of their secluded home being known in England ; how two huts had been erected by Lady Perth for the accommodation of visitors ; and how a dozen years before the minister of Callander had published an account of the Trossachs as a scene " that beggars all description."
The bad weather proved too much for Coleridge, who turned back from the tour here ; and his muse seems not to have been inspired by this land of the mountain which he found also a land of the flood. Wordsworth, however, made several attempts to annex Scotland to his native domain. Truth to tell, the lake poet's harp sounds some- times out of tune across the Border, as witness his woeful travesty of the " Helen of Kirkconnel " story, and the philosophic considerations which he attributes to Rob Roy over what may have been that bold outlaw's grave. There is one verse in his "Highland Reaper" which seems a perfect epitome of the future Laureate's qualities, who, if he " uttered nothing base," could come too near being commonplace. " Will no one tell me what she sings ? " is surely in the flat tone which one irreverent critic describes as a " bleat." " Perhaps the flaintive numbers flow " — is not this the false gallop of eighteenth-century verse, out of which Wordsworth vainly believed that he had broken
61
Bonnie Scotland
his Pegasus ? But in such pinchbeck setting, what a pearl
of price —
For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago !
Thus to him, too, "Caledonia stern and wild" could breathe her secret, while to put life into the raids and combats of long ago was for another bard who plays drum and trumpet in the orchestra of British poetry. I am not going to string vain epithets on the Trossachs, familiar to all readers if only from the pages of their great advertiser. But let me hint to tourists who come duly furnished with the Lady of the Lake, that Black's Guide to the Trossachs includes an excellent commentary on the poem from what may seem an unpoetical source, the pen of an Astronomer- Royal, Sir G. B. Airey, whose topographical analysis will be found most instructive. These scenes appear some- what trimmed since an old writer described the Highlands " as a part of the creation left undrest." The lake edges have been smoothed off, as the " unfathomable glades " of the Trossachs are opened up by a road, below the line of the old pass and the hill tracks by which the Fiery Cross was sped towards Strath-Ire.
For an account of this country as it is in our day, we may refer to a French story by a writer named, of all names, Andre Laurie, whose native heath ought to be the bonny braes of Maxwelton. This book has the serious purpose of giving a view of English school athletics, and pointing the moral that Frenchmen so trained would be all the fitter for la revanche. The hero, sent to school in England, is, as part of his educational course, taken by the schoolmaster on a shooting excursion in the High-
62
VEILED SUNSHINE, THE TROSSACHS, PERTHSHIRE
The Trossachs Round
lands. They put up at the White Heart, one of the principal hotels of Glascow, and the landlord is so inter- ested in their bold enterprise that he personally conducts them on the chasse am grouses. Nay more, he equips them with a pack of piebald pointers, well trained to retrieve in water, which he had come by in a remarkable manner : a certain Lord Stilton, breakfasting at the hotel, with true British generosity made his host a present of these matchless hounds by way of largesse for an excellent dish of trout — a rare treat, it seems, in this part of the world.
The first day's proceedings of the sporting troop are most notable. They " leave the civilised country " at Renfrew. How they get across the Clyde does not appear ; but there are no doubt stepping-stones in all Highland streams. Having thus invaded the Lennox, they forth- with stalk its desolate moors from Loch Lomond to Loch Katrine, where as a touch of local colour the author is careful to point out that one must not use the word lakes. Nine or ten strong, the company is thrown out in skirmishing order, those who have guns marching in front behind the dogs, while the unarmed members are invited to bring up the rear "as simple spectators." Scotland being such a proverbially hospitable country, they do not judge it necessary to provide themselves with leave or license, but their hotel-keeper for two or three shillings hires a bare-legged shepherd in " a short petticoat " to show them where the game lies. In spite of this liberality, towards the end of the day the bag amounts only to three or four head, including one hare, explained to be a rara avis hereabouts, and one fierce bull which has given a
63
Bonnie Scotland
spice of danger to their sport. In the evening, however, the grouse begin to " rise," spring up " every instant under their feet," and nearly two dozen are brought down, enough to serve for supper. The question of lodging presents more difficulty, the Trossachs being an "ab- solutely desert " country without a village for six leagues round ; but the whole party are comfortably accommo- dated in a fisherman's hut, fifteen to twenty feet square, which must have been a tight fit for ten, even though there was no furniture beyond a table, two benches and a sheepskin. With genuine Scottish pride the fisherman refuses to accept a bawbee from his guests ; though rather too much given to " bird's eye tobacco " and " that abominable product of civilisation Scotch whisky," he is a superior person, by his parents designed for the national church, but the honour of " wearing a surplice," it is ex- plained, had not seemed to him worth the frequent birch- ing which makes the discipline of parish schools in the north.
Next day, for a change, the strangers give themselves up to the kindred sport of angling ; and two of them undertake the Alpine ascent of one of the peaks above Loch Katrine, but, without a guide, come to sore grief, and have to be rescued by a search party led by those sagacious pointers in true Ben St. Bernard style. In such cases, our author points out " the superiority of the savage over the civilised man, at least in the desert." Only to the Highland fisherman had it occurred that those luckless adventurers might want something to eat ; but he, taught by experience, produces in the nick of time a bottle of whisky, a biscuit and a slice of bacon ; and thus
64
Bonnie Scotland
spice of danger to their sport. In the evening, however, the grouse begin to " rise," spring up " every instant under their feet," and nearly two dozen are brought down, enough to serve for supper. The question of lodging presents more difficulty, the Trossachs being an "ab- solutely desert " country without a village for six leagues round ; but the whole party are comfortably accommo- dated in a fisherman's hut, fifteen to twenty feet square, which must have been a tight fit for ten, even though there was no furniture beyond a table, two benches and a sheepskin. With genuine Scottish pride the fisherman refuses to accept a bawbee from his guests ; though rather too much given to "bird's eye tobacco" and "that abominable product of civilisation Scotch whisky," he is a superior person, by his parents designed for the national church, but the honour of " wearing a surplice," it is ex- plained, had not seemed to him worth the frequent birch- ing which makes the discipline of parish schools in the north.
Next day, for a change, the strangers give themselves up to the kindred sport of angling ; and two of them undertake the Alpine ascent of one of the peaks above Loch Katrine, but, without a guide, come to sore grief, and have to be rescued by a search party led by those sagacious pointers in true Ben St. Bernard style. In such cases, our author points out " the superiority of the savage over the civilised man, at least in the desert." Only to the Highland fisherman had it occurred that those luckless adventurers might want something to eat ; but he, taught by experience, produces in the nick of time a bottle of whisky, a biscuit and a slice of bacon ; and thus
64
NEAR ARDLUI, LOCH LOMOND, DUMBARTONSHIRE
The Trossachs Round
the perishing hero's life is saved to " dance a Scottish gigue " — O M. Laurie, M. Laurie, O !
The dancing comes through a luxurious experience of Highland high-life, when this band of youths fall in with an old schoolfellow, a Scottish nobleman who bears what seems the exotic tide of Lord Camember, but his family name is that well-known aristocratic one of Orton. He welcomes them to his castle, where his coming of age is being celebrated by crowds strangely enormous for such a " desert country," who are entertained under tents " vast as cathedrals," with splendid hospitality open to all comers, fountains flowing with beer, speeches, music, dancing, and fireworks. As bouquet of the festivities, he invites the strangers to a review of his stags, driven together " in full trot " till their gigantic antlers " gave the illusion of the marching forest in the Macbeth legend." The drive past lasts more than an hour, in the course of which are enumerated 5947 horns, so that, allowing for absentees, the young lord estimates a round number of seven thousand as the stock of his deer forest. There could have been no such head of game in the district when Fitz- James galloped all the way from the Earn to Loch Katrine after one stag, losing it as well as his way. One can't help feeling that our author's excursion through the scenes of his story must have been an equally rapid one.
The Trossachs pass leads us to that lake that gets a fair-seeming name not from any saint, but from the High- land Caterans who once infested its banks ; and it is hinted that " Ellen's Isle" may have come to be christened through Scott's mistaking the Gaelic word Eilean (island). There was, indeed, a certain Helen Stuart who played a grimly
65 9
Bonnie Scotland
fierce part in defending this place of refuge, as related in the poem, but her exploit was performed against Cromwell's soldiers. In sight of the " Silver Strand/* tourists are wont to take steamboat as far as Stronachlachar, and there cross by coach to the " bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond." They whose " free course" moves not by " such fixed cause," might well hold on to the head of Loch Katrine, crossing to Loch Lomond over the wild heights of Glengyle ; or they would not find it amiss to turn back to Aberfoyle, thence past Loch Ard and the Falls of Ledard, following the track round Ben Lomond on which Rob Roy led Osbaldistone and the Bailie out of his country. But one knows not how to direct strangers to that wild region vaguely outlined by the above-mentioned French author, where our generation may shoot grouse and bulls as they go, and find quarters in any convenient hut or castle, when the Trossachs hotel happens to have "not a bed for love or money." His story, one fears, must be counted with the mediaeval wonders of Loch Lomond, fish without fins, waves without wind, and such a floating island as still emerges after hot summers in Derwentwater. Dorothy Wordsworth, for one, rather belittles Loch Katrine as an " Ulswater dismantled of its grandeur and cropped of its lesser beauties," though she compliments the upper part as "very pleasing, resembling Thirlmere below Armboth." But no critic can carp at the fame of Loch Lomond as the most beautiful lake in Scotland ; and one author who, as a native of the Lennox, is not indeed unprejudiced, Smollett to wit, gives it the palm over all the lakes he has seen in Italy or Switzerland. Dr. Chalmers wondered if there would not be a Loch Lomond in heaven.
66
••"'^te
THE SILVER STRAND, LOCH KATRINE, PERTHSHIRE
The Trossachs Round
"A little Mediterranean " is the style given by a seventeenth- century English tourist, Franck, to what Scott boldly pronounces " one of the most surprising, beautiful, and sublime spectacles in nature," its narrow upper fiord " lost among dusky and retreating mountains," at the foot opening into an archipelago of wooded islands, threaded by steamboats, while up the western shore runs one of the best cycling roads in the kingdom, past memorials of Stuarts and Buchanans, Colquhouns and wild Macfar lanes. On the other side are caves associated with the adventures of Rob Roy, and spots sung by Wordsworth. And all this wonderland is overshadowed by Ben Lomond, its ascent easily made on foot or pony-back by a traveller not bound to do this whole round in one day. But let him beware of getting lost in the mist and having to spend all night on the mountain, as was the lot of that New England Sibyl, Margaret Fuller. Also he should not imitate a facetious friend of mine who left his card in the cairn at the top, and two or three days later received it enclosed in this note : " Mr. Ben Lomond presents his compliments
to Mr. and begs to say that not only does his position
prevent him from returning visits, but he has no desire
for Mr. 's further acquaintance."
At the foot of Loch Lomond we regain the rails that will carry us to Edinburgh, to Glasgow, to Stirling, or to the western Highlands. The first stage is down the Vale of Leven to Dumbarton, arx inexpugnabilis of old Scotland, its name Dunbritton recording the older days when it was the stronghold of a Cumbrian kingdom. Here the literary genius loci is that not very ethereal shade Tobias Smollett, who, born on the banks of Leven, has nothing to say of
Bonnie Scotland
the Trossachs, but looked back on the scene of Roderick Random's pranks as an eighteenth-century Arcadia, that could move him to a rare strain of sentiment in his " Ode to Leven Water."
Devolving from thy parent lake, A charming maze thy waters make, By bowers of birch, and groves of pine, And hedges flower'd with eglantine. Still on thy banks, so gaily green, May numerous herds and flocks be seen, And lasses chanting o'er the pail, And shepherds piping in the dale, And ancient faith that knows no guile, And industry embrown'd with toil, And hearts resolved, and hands prepared, The blessings they enjoy to guard.
68
LOCH ACHRAY AND BEN VENUE, PERTHSHIRE
CHAPTER IV
THE KINGDOM OF FIFE
LIKE Somerset, claiming to be something more than a mere shire, the county half fondly, half jestingly entitled a kingdom, lies islanded between two firths, cut off from the world by the sea and from the rest of Scotland by the Ochil ridges. The " Fifers " are thus supposed to be a race apart ; but it would be more like the truth to take Fifeishness as the essence of Saxon Scotland. Fife is, in fact, an epitome of the Lowlands, showing great stretches of practically prosaic farming, others of grimy coal-field, with patches of moor, bog, and wind-blown firs, here and there swelling into hill features, that in the abrupt Lomonds attain almost mountain dignity in face of their Highland namesake, sixty miles away. Open to cold sea winds, it nurses the hardy frames of " buirdly chiels and clever hizzies" ; and all the invigorating discipline of the northern climate is understood to be concentrated in the East Neuk of Fife, where a weakling like R. L. Stevenson might well sigh over the " flaws of fine weather that we call our northern summer." It is in the late autumn that this eastern coast is at its best of halcyon days. As we have
69
Bonnie Scotland
seen, the poet lived a little farther south who still laid himself open to Tom Hood's reproach —
1 Come, gentle spring, ethereal mildness come ! ' O Thomson, void of rhyme as well as reason, How could'st thou thus poor human nature hum — There's no such season !
In the Antiquary s period, we know how Fife was reached from Edinburgh by crossing the Firth at Queensferry, as old as Malcolm Canmore's English consort, or by the longer sail from Leith to Kinghorn, where Alexander III. broke his neck to Scotland's woe. A more roundabout land route was via Stirling, chosen by prudent souls like the old wife who, being advised to put her trust in Providence for the passage, replied, " Na, na, sae lang as there's a brig at Stirling I'll no fash Providence ! " Lord Cockburn records how that conscientious divine, Dr John Erskine, feeling it his duty to vote in a Fife election, when too infirm to bear the motion of boat or carriage, arranged to walk all the way by Stirling, but was saved this fort- night's pilgrimage by the contest being given up. Till the building of its Firth bridges, the North British Railway's passengers had to tranship both in entering and leaving Fife, a mild taste of adventure for small schoolboys. Now, as all the world knows, the shores of Lothian are joined to Fife by that monumental Forth Bridge that humps itself into view miles away. Then all the world has heard of the unlucky Tay Bridge, graceful but treacherous serpent as it proved in its first form, when one stormy Sabbath night it let a train be blown into the sea. By these con- structions the line has now a clear course on which to race its Caledonian rival, either for Perth or Aberdeen. But
70
THE CASTLE OF ST. ANDREWS, FIFESHIRE
The Kingdom of Fife
there is no racing done on the cobweb of North British branches woven to catch Fife-farers, at whose junctions, as a local statistician has calculated, the average Fifer wastes one-seventh of his life or thereabouts. Ladybank Junction, stranded on its moor, used to have the name of a specially penitential waiting-place, which yet lent itself to romantic account in one of those Tales from Blackwood.
The towns of Fife are many rather than much. Cupar, the county seat, is still a quiet little place, whose Academy stands on the site of a Macduff stronghold, recalling that Thane of Fife with whom the Dukedom of our generation is connected only in title. " He that maun to Cupar, maun to Cupar," says the proverb, but few strangers seem to risk this vague condemnation. When James Ray passed through the town on his way to Culloden, he has little to tell of it unless that he put up at the " Cooper's Arms" which, more by token, was kept by the Widow Cooper. The above proverb, by the way, seems to belong to Coupar-Angus, usually so distinguished in spelling, and is transferred to its namesake by " Cupar-justice," a Fife version of the code honoured at Jedburgh. A Scotch cooper or couper may not have to do with barrels, unless indirectly in the way of business, but is also a chaffer or chapman, par excellence, of horses ; and one would like to believe, if philologists did not shake their heads, that these towns got their name as markets, like English Chippings and Cheaps.
In an out-of-the-way edge of the county, below the Lomonds, lies Falkland, whose royal palace, restored by the late Marquis of Bute, was the scene of that dubious tragedy enacted in the Fair Maid of Perth, where the dissolute
7*
Bonnie Scotland
Duke of Rothesay is a little white-washed to heighten the dramatic atrocity of his death. A few miles behind Queensferry is Dunfermline, another place where kings once sat "drinking the blood-red wine," now a thriving seat of linen manufacture, among its mills and bleachfields containing choice fragments of royal and ecclesiastical architecture, as well as modern adornments given by its bounteous son Mr. Andrew Carnegie, native of the town where Charles I. was born, and Robert Bruce buried beside Malcolm Canmore and his queen. There are some fine modern monuments in the new church, which adjoins the monastic old one, testifying stiffly to Presbyterian distrust of Popish arts ; and altogether Dunfermline is one of those places that might well " delay the tourist."
But the largest congregation in Fife is that " long town" of Kirkcaldy, flourishing on jute and linoleum since the days when Carlyle and Irving were dominies here, the former a humane pedagogue, though he scourged grown- up dunces so unmercifully, while the bygone peace of the place was often broken by the wailing of Irving's pupils under the tawse with which he sought to drive them into unknown tongues. Kirkcaldy has older historic memories ; but somehow it is one of those Scottish towns that, like Peebles and Paisley, lend their names to vulgar or comic associations. Was it not a bailie of Kirkcaldy who said, <c What wi' a' thae schules and railways, ye canna' tell the dufference atween a Scotchman and an Englishman noo-a- days ! "
Let the above words be text for a sermon, to which I invite seriously-minded readers, while the otherwise-minded may amuse themselves by taking a daunder among the
72
The Kingdom of Fife
lions of Kirkcaldy. The subject is Scottish Humour, which Englishmen are apt to rank with the snakes of Ice- land or the breeks of a Highlander. Foreigners do not make the same mistake, as how can they when the best known English humorists are so often Scotsmen or Irish- men ? It is the pure John Bull whose notions of the humorous are apt to be rather childish ; so when he gets hold of a joke like that about the surgical instrument, he runs about squibbing it in everybody's face, and never seems to grow tired of such a smart saying, nor cares to ask if there be any truth in it beyond the fact that one people may not readily relish another's wit or wisdom.
The vulgar of all nations have a very rudimentary sense of the comic, coarse enough in many Scotsmen who can appreciate no more pointed repartee than —
The never a word had Dickie to say,
Sae he ran the lance through his fause bodie !
The characteristic form of English humour is more or less good-natured chaff, bearing the same relation to keen raillery as a bludgeon does to a rapier. A master of this fence was Dr. Johnson, who, if his pistol missed fire, knocked you down with the butt end of it. Sydney Smith's residence in Edinburgh should have given him a finer style, which he turned to so unworthy use in mocking at Scottish "wut." As to the distinction between wit and humour, I know of no better than that which defines the one as a flash, the other as an atmosphere. It may be granted that the Scottish nature does not coruscate in flashes. But what your Sydney Smiths do not observe is that it develops a very high quality of
73 i°
Bonnie Scotland
humour, which has self-criticism as its essence. Know thyself, has been styled the acme of wisdom ; and when the Scotsman's best stories come to be analysed, the point of them appears to be a more or less conscious making fun of his own faults and shortcomings, which is a whole- somer form of intellectual exercise than that parrot-trick of nicknaming one's neighbours. The bailie's boast above quoted is a characteristic instance over which an English- man may chuckle without seeing the true force of it. All those hoary Punch jests as to " bang went saxpence," and so forth, are good old home-made Scottish stories, which the southron brings back with him from their native heath, and dresses them up for his own taste with a spice of malice, then rejoices over the savoury dish which he has prepared by seething poached kids in their mother's milk. Yet often print fails to bring out the true gust that needs a Doric tongue for sauce ; and the Englishman who attempts any Scottish accent is apt to merit their fate who ventured to meddle with the ark, not being of the tribe of Judah. The effect of such a story depends as much on the actor as on the words. To mention but one of many noted masters of this art, who that ever spent an evening with the late Sir Daniel Macnee, President of the Scottish Academy, could hold the legendary view of his countrymen's want of fun ? He had to be heard to be appreciated ; but, at the risk of misrepresenting his gift, here is one of his anecdotes. He was travelling with a talkative oil merchant who, after much boast of his own business, began to rally the other on his want of com- municativeness— " Come now, what line are you in ? " — " I'm in the oil trade too," confessed the painter, where*
74
The Kingdom of Fife
upon his companion fell to pressing him for an order. — " We'll do cheaper for you than any house in the trade ! " At last, to get rid of his persistency, Sir Daniel said, " I don't mind taking a gallon from you." — "A gallon! Man, ye Ye in a sma* way ! "
Perhaps this humour is a modern production, like certain fruits cultivated in Scotland "with deeficulty." There were times, indeed, when life here was no laughing matter. But even the sun-loving vine is all the better for a touch of frost at its roots, and the best wines are not those the most easily made. In contrast with other home-brewed fun that soon goes flat, and with such cheap brands as " Joe Miller," the vintage of Scottish humour, if not distinguished by effervescing spurts of fancy, has body and character which only improve by age, keeping well even when decanted, and giving a marked flavour when mixed with less potent materials, into Punch, let us say. There is also a dry quality thrown away on palates used to the public-house tap ; Ally Sloper, for instance, might not taste the womanthropy, as he would call it, of that bachelor divine who began his discourse on the Ten Virgins with " What strikes us here, my brethren, is the unusually large proportion of wise Virgins." A good Scotch story, with the real smack upon the tongue, bears to be told again, like an aphorism distilled from the wisdom of generations. Sound humour is but the seamy side of common-sense, for a sense of the incongruous degenerates into nonsense if not shaped by a clear eye for the relation and proportion of things. If the reader will consider the many specimens of Scottish humour now current in England, or to be drawn from such
75
Bonnie Scotland
treasuries as Dean Ramsay's ; and if he will reflect on their weight and minting, he may understand the value of this coinage in the national life.
The northern Attic salt abounds in one savour that appears in a hundred stories like that of the preacher who, at Kirkcaldy or elsewhere, apologised for his want of preparation : "I have been obliged to say what the Lord put into my mouth, but next Sabbath I hope to come better provided ! " If there is any subject which the Scot takes seriously it is religion, that yet makes the favourite theme of his jests. Revilers have gone so far as to state that the incongruous elements of Scottish humour are usually supplied by a minister and a whisky bottle. It is certainly the case that a Scotsman relishes playing upon the edge of sacred things, and that the pillars of his church will shake their sides over stories which strike Englishmen as irreverent. But has not vigorous faith often shown a tendency to overflow into backwaters of comicality, as in the gargoyles of our cathedrals, the mediaeval parodies of church rites, and the homely wit of Puritan preachers ? There are some believers who can afford a laugh now and then at their sturdy solemnities, others who must keep hush lest a titter bring down their fane like a house of cards. Familiarity with the language of the Bible counts for a good deal in what seems the too free handling of it in the north. But note how the irreverence of the Scot's humour is usefully directed against his own tendency to fanaticism. It is only of late years, I think, that he has taken to joking on the religious practices of his neighbours, whose shortcomings once seemed too serious for joking. That
LOCH LUBNAIG, PERTHSHIRE
The Kingdom of Fife
" one " of the servant girl who described the services at Westminster Abbey as "an awful way of spending the Sabbath " may be taken as a sign of growing charity. Yet, in the past, too, a Scotsman seldom chuckled so heartily as over any rebuke to priestly pretension within his own borders. Jenny Geddes's rough form of re- monstrance with the dignitary who would have read the mass in her lug was a practical form of Scotch humour, that on such subjects is apt to have a good deal of hard earnest in it. As for the Kirk's own ministers, the tyranny ascribed to them by Buckle has long been tempered by stories at their expense. Buckle's famous comparison of Spain and Scotland is vitiated by his leaving out of account that natural sense of humour that has aided popular instruction in counteracting superstition. Dean Ramsay ekes out Carlyle and other weighty authors who explain how Irving found no depth of earth in Scotland for the seeds of his wild enthusiasm, and why the tourist seeks in vain for winking Madonnas at Kirkcaldy, long ago done with all relics and images but the battered figureheads of her whalers.
Kirkcaldy 's whalers now grow legendary, and strangers beholding her shipping to-day, may take for a northern joke that this ranks as the third Scottish port of entry ; but the fact is that a whole string of Fife harbours are officially knotted together under its name, as all North America was once tacked on to the manor of Greenwich, and every British child born at sea belongs to the parish of Stepney. The coast-line here is thick-set with little towns of business and pleasure, grimy coal ports and odorous fishing havens, alternating with bathing beaches
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and golf-links in the openings of the low cliffs. At the western edge has now been taken in the old burgh Culross, pronounced in a manner that may strike strangers as curious. Not far from the Forth Bridge is the prettiest of Edinburgh seaside resorts, Aberdour, with its own ruins to show, and the remains of an abbey on Inchcolm that shuts in its bay, and behind it Lord Moray's mansion of Doni- bristle, part of which stands a charred shell, burned down and rebuilt three times till its owner accepted what seemed a decree of fate. Opposite Edinburgh, Burntisland's prosaic features make a setting for the castle of Rossend, with its romantic scandal about Queen Mary and Chastelard. Beyond Kirkcaldy come Leven and Largo, trying to grow together about the statue of Alexander Selkirk ; and Largo House was home of a more ancient Fifeshire mariner, Andrew Wood, his " Yellow Frigate " a sore thorn in England's side, as commemorated by a novel of James Grant, who wrote so many once-so-popular romances of war. Fife coast towns have a way of sorting themselves in couples. At the corner of the bay overlooked by Largo Law, Elie and Earlsferry flourish together as a family bathing place, behind which, at the pronunciation of Kilconquhar the uninitiated may take a thousand guesses in vain. Then we have Anstruther and Crail on Fifeness, that sharp point of the East Neuk of Fife. Round this, at the mouth of the Eden, we come to St. Andrews, " gem of the province."
Everybody has heard of St. Andrews, but only those who have seen it understand its peculiar rank among sea- side resorts. It is distinguished by a certain quiet air, like some high-born spinster's, accustomed to command
The Kingdom of Fife
respect, whose heirlooms of lace and jewellery put her above any need of following the fashions. Her parvenu rivals must lay themselves out to attract, must make the best of their advantages, must ogle and flirt, and strain themselves to profit by the vogue of public favour. St. Andrews does not display so much as an esplanade, standing secure upon her sober dignity, a little dashed, indeed, of Saturday afternoons by excursions from Dundee. Other sea-side places may be said to flourish, but the word seems inappropriate in the case of this resort, that yet thrives sedately, as how should she not with so many strings to her bow ? First of all she is a venerable University city, whose Mrs. Bouncers ought to make a good thing of it with the students and the sea-bathing visitors playing "Box and Cox" for them through the winter session and the summer season. Then she is a Scottish Clifton or Brighton of schools, recommended by the singular healthiness of the place. Unless in the smart new quarter near the railway station, the dignified bearing of an ancient town carries it over the flighty manners of a watering-place. The only pier is a thing of use, where the wholesome smell of seaweed mingles with a strong fishy flavour. No gilded pagoda of a bandstand profanes the " Scores," that cliff road which your Margates would have made into a formal promenade. A few bathing machines on the sands alone hint at one side of the town's character. In one of the rocky coves of the cliff is a Ladies' bathing place, which I can praise only by report. But the Step Rock, with its recent enclosure to catch the tide, is now more than ever the best swimming place on the East Coast.
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What first strikes one in St. Andrews is its union of regularity and picturesqueness, and of a cheerful well-to- do present with relics of a romantic past. Its airy thoroughfares, with their plain solidity of modern Scottish architecture, form an effective setting for bits of antiquity, such as the ivy-clad fragment of Blackfriars' Chapel, and the Abbey wall, beneath which no professor cares to walk, lest then should be fulfilled a prophecy that it is one day to fall upon the wisest head in St. Andrews. The architectural treasures of this historic cathedral city would alone be enough to make it a place of pilgrimage. "You have here," says Carlyle, "the essence of all the antiquity of Scotland in good and clean condition." Southron strangers will hardly understand how these fragments of ecclesiasticism have become a nursery of Protestant sentiment. A generation ago it was stated that but one solitary Romanist could be found in the little city. Generations of Scottish children, like myself, have been shown that gloomy dungeon at the bottom of which once pined the victims of Giant Pope, a sight to fill us with shuddering horror and hate of persecuting times ; but we were not told how Protestants could persecute, too, while they knew not yet of what spirit they were. What shades of grim romance haunt these crumbling walls, what memories of Knox and Beaton, what dreams of the old Stuart days ! I never realised the power of their associations till one evening, on the Scores, there sat down beside me two French tourists who had somehow strayed into St. Andrews, and their light talk of boulevards, theatres, and such like, seemed sacrilegious under the shadow of the Martyrs' Memorial.
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IN GLENFINLAS, PERTHSHIRE
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I have an acquaintance with St. Andrews going back more than half a century. My introduction to club life was at the club here, then a cottage of two or three rooms, into which I was invited under charge of my nurse, and treated to the refreshment of gingerbread snaps by a member who seemed to me little short of a patriarch. In the scenery of my childhood, nothing stands out more clearly and cheerfully than those sandy green links dotted with red jackets and red flags, not to speak of the red balls with which enthusiasts bid defiance to snow and ice. Nay, another among my earliest reminiscences is of seeing the multitudinous seas themselves incarnadined, when, for once, the golfers allowed their attention to be drawn from their own hazards. A cry had been raised that a lady was drown- ing ; then every group of red jackets within hearing forgot their balls, flung down their clubs, raced across the links, dashed into the waves, and struggled emulously to the rescue. I think a caddie, after all, was the fortunate youth who had the glory of achieving such an adventure. Since those days, when feather balls cost half-a-crown and few profane foreigners had penetrated its mysteries, the Golf Club has been transformed in a style becoming the chief temple of this Benares, hard by a more modest "howff" for the "professionals" who are its Brahmins, where little " caddies " swarm like the monkeys of an Indian sanctuary. For golf is the idol of a cult that draws here many pilgrims from far lands, now that, in the international commerce of amusement, while bare- legged little Macs take kindly to cricket, the time-honoured Caledonian game spreads fast and far over England, over
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the world, indeed, for on dusty Indian maidans good Scotsmen can be seen trying to play the rounds of Zion in that strange land, and under the very Pyramids a golf course is laid out, where the dust of Pharaohs may serve as a tee, or a mummy pit prove the most provoking of bunkers. In the home of its birth this pastime flourishes more than ever. Parties are given for golf along with tea and tennis ; schools begin to lay out their golf ground as well as their football field ; and at St. Andrews we have the Ladies' Links, where many a masculine heart has been gently spooned or putted into the hole of matrimony. Fair damsels may even be seen lifting and driving in a " foursome," an innovation frowned at by some old stagers, who hardly care to talk about the game till it is ended, and then can talk of nothing else. " Tee, veniente die, fee, decedente — !" is the song of St. Andrews, which asks for no more absorbing joy than a round in the morning and a round in the evening. In the eyes of inveterate golfers, all prospects are poor beside those links that make the Mecca, the Monte Carlo, the Epsom of the royal game, so one is free to give up the surrounding country as not much contributing to the attractions of the place, many of whose visitors hardly care to stir beyond their beloved arena, unless for a Sunday afternoon walk along the shore as far as that curious freak of the elements known as the Spindle Rock.
Besides its devotion to the game where clubs are always trumps, St. Andrews has in the last generation had an attraction for celebrities in literature and science. The University staff, of course, makes a permanent depot of intellect. The facile essayist A.K.H.B. was long parish
The Kingdom of Fife
minister here, when the Episcopal bishop was a nephew of Wordsworth, himself an author too well known to schoolboys. Here Robert Chambers spent the evening of his days, Blackwood the publisher had a house close at hand, where many famous authors have been guests. In the vicinity, too, is Mount Melville, seat of Whyte- Melville, the novelist. Not to mention living names, the late Mrs. Lynn Linton was a warm lover of St. Andrews. It must have been well known to Mrs. Oliphant, more than one of whose novels take this country for their scene.
Is it impertinent to say a word in praise of a writer, too soon forgotten at circulating libraries, where she was but too voluminously in evidence for the best part of her lifetime ? Had she been content with a flat in Grub Street, Mrs. Oliphant might now be better remembered than by the mass of often hasty work for which her way of life gave hostages to fortune and to publishers. Her novels often smell too much of an Aladdin's lamp that had to be rubbed hard for copy ; there is awful example to money- making authorship in a middle period of them that scared off readers for whom again she would rise to her early charm. Defects she had, notably a curious warp of sympathy that led her to do less than poetic justice to prodigal ne'er-do-weels ; but her chief fault was in writing too much, when at her best she was very good. Her best known stories are those which deal with English life ; yet she was not less happy in describing her native Scotland, having an extraordinary insight that set her at home in very varied scenes and classes of society. Few writers are found in touch with
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so many phases of life. Even George Eliot, sure as she is in portraying her Midland middle-class life, seems a little depayse when she strays among fine folk ; and many a skilful novelist might be mentioned who falls into con- vention or caricature as soon as he gets out of his own familiar environment. But, after Sir Walter, I doubt if there be any author who has given us such a varied gallery of Scottish characters, high and low, divined with Scott's sympathy and often drawn with Jane Austen's minute skill. Her servants and farmers seem as natural as her baronets and ministers, all of them indeed ordinary human beings, not the freaks and monsters of the overcharged art that for the moment has thrown such work as hers into the shade.
Of her tales dealing with Fife, perhaps the best, at least the longest, is "The Primrose Path," a beautiful idyll of this East Neuk, its scene laid within a few miles of St. Andrews, evidently at Leuchars, where such a noble Norman chancel is disgraced by the modern meeting-house built on to it, and the old shell of Earl's Hall offered itself as a fit setting for the drama of an innocent girl's heart, that at the end shifts its stage to England. The hero, he that is to be made happy after all, plays a somewhat colourless part in the background ; but heroes have license to be lay figures. The real protagonist, the imperfectly villainous Rob Glen, seems to walk out of the canvas ; and all the other characters, from the high-bred, scholarly father to the love-sick servant lass, are alive with humour and kindliness. As for the scenery, it is thus that Mrs. Oliphant puts the East Neuk in its best point of view : —
ON THE DOCHART, KILLIN, PERTHSHIRE
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" There does not seem much beauty to spare in the east of Fife. Low hills, great breadths of level fields : the sea a great expanse of blue or leaden grey, fringed with low reefs of dark rocks like the teeth of some hungry monster, dangerous and grim without being picturesque, without a ship to break its monotony. But yet with those limitless breadths of sky and cloud, the wistful clearness and golden after-glow, and all the varying blueness of the hills, it would have been difficult to surpass the effect of the great amphitheatre of sea and land of which this solitary grey old house formed the centre. The hill, behind which the sun had set, is scarcely considerable enough to have a name j but it threw up its outline against the wonderful greenness, blueness, goldenness of the sky with a grandeur which would not have misbecome an Alp. Underneath its shelter, grey and sweet, lay the soft levels of Stratheden in all their varying hues of colour, green corn, and brown earth, and red fields of clover, and dark belts of wood. Behind were the two paps of the Lomonds, rising green against the clear serene : and on the other side entwining lines of hills, with gleams of golden light breaking through the mists, clearing here and there as far as the mysterious Grampians, far off under Highland skies. This was one side of the circle ; and the other was the sea, a sea still blue under the faint evening skies, in which the young moon was rising ; the yellow sands of Forfarshire on one hand, stretching downwards from the mouth of the Tay, the low brown cliffs and green headlands bending away on the other towards Fifeness — and the great bow of water reaching to the horizon between. Nearer the eye, showing half against the slope of the coast, and half against the water, rose St. Andrews on its cliff, the fine dark tower of the college church poised over the little city, the jagged ruins of the castle marking the out- line, the cathedral rising majestically in naked pathos ; and old St. Rule, homely and weather-beaten, oldest venerable pilgrim of all, standing strong and steady, at watch upon the younger
turies."
From the flattest part of Fife, let us turn to its
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inland Highland side. The main North British line to Perth, after passing a dreary coal-field, brings us suddenly beneath the bold swell of Benarty, round which we come in view of the Lomonds with Loch Leven sparkling at their foot. Here indeed we soon get into the small shire of Kinross ; but this may be taken as a dependency of the kingdom of Fife, its lowlands also running on the west side into a miniature Highland region, reached by the railway branch that from Loch Leven goes off to Stirling by the Devon Valley and the Ochils, at the end of which Clackmannan vies with Kinross as the Rutland of Scottish counties.
Loch Leven is celebrated for its breed of trout, and for that grey tower half hidden by trees on an islet, which was poor Mary Stuart's prison. The dourest Scotsman's heart has three soft spots, the memory of Robert Burns, the romance of Prince Charlie, and the misfortunes that seem to wash out the errors of that girl queen. This is dubious ground, into which tons of paper and barrels of ink have been thrown without filling up a quaking bog of controversy. I myself have heard a distinguished scholar hissed off the most philosophic platform in Scotland for throwing a doubt on Queen Mary's innocence, so I will say no more than that her harshest historian, if shut up with her in Loch Leven as page or squire, might have been tempted to steal the keys and take an oar in the boat that bore her over those dark waters to brief freedom and safety. Had Charles Edward only had the luck to get his head cut off in solemn state, how much more gloriously dear might now be his memory !
As Scott points out, Fife was noted for a thick crop of
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gentry, who were apt to be found on the side of the Queen Marys and Prince Charlies, whereas its sturdy common folk rather favoured Whig principles. Not far from Kinross, the grey homespun of Scottish life is proclaimed by one of those ugly obelisks that have so much commended them- selves for the expression of Protestant sentiment. At Gairney Bridge, on the Fife and Kinross border, in 1733, four sus- pended ministers formed themselves into the first Presbytery of the Original Secession Church, a most fissiparous body which brought forth a brood of sects not yet altogether swallowed up in the recent union of the Free and United Presbyterian churches. I am bound to special interest in that foundation, for as a forebear of mine appears riding away from the shores of Loch Leven in Queen Mary's train, so one of those four seceders was my great-great-great-great (or thereabouts) grandfather, Moncrieffof Culfargie, himself grandson of a still remembered Covenanter. His spiritual descendants make a point of the fact that being a small laird, he yet ^estified against the unpopular system of patronage, and thus is taken to have been before his time. But Plato amicuS) etc., or as Sterne translates, " Dinah is my aunt, but truth is my sister," and a closer examination reveals among the heads of my forefather's testimony against the Church of Scotland a conscientious protest in favour of executing witches and persecuting Roman Catholics, so perhaps the less said about his views the better. A few years before, a poor old wife, rubbing her hands in crazy delight at the blaze, had been burned as a witch for the last time in Scotland ; and the " moderate " ministers were now content to ignore an imaginary crime which a few years later became wiped out of the statute-book.
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The ancestral shade should know how filial piety urged me, perhaps alone in this generation, to perform the rite of reading his works, which indeed want such " go " and "snap " as are admired by congregations who "have lost the art of listening to two hours' sermons. " He was truly a painful and earnest preacher, in one volume of whose discourses I note this mark of wide-mindedness, that it is entitled "England's Alarm/' whereas other old Scottish divines seem rather to treat the neighbour country as beyond hope of alarming. His brother-in-law, Clerk of Penicuik, characterises Culfargie as " a very sober, good man, except he should carry his very religious whims so far as to be very uneasy to everybody about him." It is recorded of him that he prayed from his pulpit for the Hanoverian King in face of the Pretender's bristling soldiery, like that other stout Whig divine whose petition ran, " As for this young man who has come among us seeking an earthly crown, may it please Thee to bestow upon him a heavenly one ! "
Loyalty to the same line was less frankly shown by a very different member of our clan, Margaret Moncrieff, a name little renowned on this side the Atlantic, while she figures in more than one American book as the "Beautiful Spy." Being shut up among rebels in New York, when the besieging Engineers were commanded by her father Colonel Moncrieff, she got leave to send him little presents, among them flower-paintings on velvet, beneath which were traced plans of the American works. The device being discovered, it might have gone hard with her but for Yankee chivalry, that expelled that artful hussy unhurt, in the end to bring no honour upon her name, if all tales of her be true.
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The ancestral worthy whose memory has led me into a digression, lived and laboured in Strathearn, to which from Kinross we pass by Glenfarg, no Highland glen but a fine gulf of greenery with stream, road, and railway winding side by side through its banks and knolls, that called forth Queen Victoria's warm admiration on her first visit to Scotland. At the other end of this Ochil gorge we are welcomed to Perthshire by the wooded crags of Moncrieff Hill, round which the Earn bends to the Tay ; then some dozen miles behind, rises the edge of the true Highlands, where " to the north-west a sea of mountains rolls away to Cape Wrath in wave after wave of gneiss, schist, quartzite, granite, and other crystalline masses."
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CHAPTER V
THE FAIR CITY
PERTH, the central city of Scotland, whose name has been so flourishingly transplanted to the antipodes, is a very ancient place. Not to insist on fond derivation from a Roman Bertha, there seems to have been a Roman station on the Tay, probably at the confluence of the Almond ; and curious antiquarians have found cause for confessing to Pontius Pilate as perhaps born in the county, a reproach softened by the consideration of his father being little better than a Roman exciseman. The alias of St. John- ston Perth got from its patron saint, who came to be so scurvily handled at the Reformation. At this date it was the only walled city of Scotland. Before this, it had been intermittently the Stuart capital in such a sense as the residence of its Negus is for Abyssinia ; and farther back Tayside was the seat of the Alpine kingdom that succeeded a Pictish power. Now sunk in relative importance, Perth makes the central knot of Scottish railway travelling ; so on the Eve of St. Grouse its palatial station becomes one of the busiest spots in the kingdom, though the main platform is a third of a mile long. To the stay-at-home public it may perhaps be best known by an industry that
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PERTH FROM THE SLOPES OF KINNOUL HILL
The Fair City
has given rise to the proverb "See Perth and dye" one which might have darker significance in days when this low site depended for drainage on the floods of the Tay flushing its cellars and cesspools. But its own citizens are brought up to believe that no Naples of them all has so much right to the title of the " Fair City."
Legend tells how Roman soldiers gaining a prospect of the Tay from the heights south of Perth, exclaimed on its North Inch as another Campus Martius ; but later visitors have not always shared the local admiration. One modern Italian traveller, Signor Piovanelli, after wandering two or three hours about the Perth streets, took away an im- pression of dull melancholy ; but then he began with an unsatisfactory experience at the Refreshment Room. An else conscientious French tourist explains the bustle of Perth station as its being the rendezvous of the inhabit- ants seeking distraction from their triste life. These be ignorant calumnies. At least our northern York is a typical Scottish town, well displaying the strata of its development. In quite recent years it has been much transmogrified by a new thoroughfare, fittingly named Scott Street, which, running from near the station right through the city, has altered its centre of gravity. The old High Street and South Street, with their " vennels " and " closes," lead transversely from Scott Street to the river, cut at the other end by George Street and John Street, which had supplanted them as main lines of business. "Where are the shops ? " I was once asked by a bewildered party of country excursionists, wandering unedified about the vicinity of the station. In those days one had to send them across the city to the streets parallel with the river ;
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but now Scott Street has attracted the Post Office, the Theatre and the Free Library, and bids fair to become the Strand or the Regent Street of the Fair City, fringed by such a display of latter-day villas as attests the prosperity of its business quarters.
Fragments of mediaeval antiquity also must be sought for towards the river. Off John Street stands the old Cathedral, in the practical Scottish manner shared into three places of worship, once containing dozens of altars, among which an impudent schoolboy threw the first image-breaking stone that spread such a ripple of icono- clasm through the shrines of Scotland. Close by, on the river bank, the Gaol occupies the site of Gowrie House, where James VI. had his mysterious or mythical escape from treason. The Parliament House, too, has vanished, its memory preserved by the name of a " close," the Scottish equivalent for alley. The citizens have lately adopted a traditional " Fair Maid's " house as their official lion, to which indicators point the way from all over the city. This, whatever the higher criticism may say of its claims, has been well restored as a specimen of a solid burgher's home in those days when Simon the Glover was so vexed by the vagaries of his Highland apprentice and by the roistering suitors of his daughter. Since then, Perth has not wanted Fair Maids ; but in our time the title has sometimes had a satiric tang as implying what the French stigmatise as une rosse.
Simon, as we know, lived close to the royal lodging, which, after the destruction of the castle, was wont to be thriftily taken in the great monastery of Blackfriars, now represented only by the names of a house and a street.
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Iii it were enacted stirring scenes of history as well as of nction, its darkest tragedy the murder of James I. on a February night of 1437. Handsome, brave, a scholar and poet, with the advantage of an involuntary English educa- tion, in quieter times this king might have shown himself the best of the Stuarts. He had the welfare of the people at heart, and on his return from the captivity in which he spent his boyhood, tried to bring some degree of order among the lawless feuds of his barons, using against them indeed high-handed and crooked means that were the statecraft of the age. Thus he roused fell enemies who were able to take him unawares, though the story goes that, like Alexander and Caesar, he had warning from an uncredited seer. Betrayed by false courtiers, he was retiring to bed when the monastery rang with the tramp and cries of the fierce Highlandmen seeking his blood. While the queen and her ladies tried to defend the door, Catherine Douglas giving her broken arm, says the legend, as a bar, James tore up the flooring and let himself down into a drain which he had, unluckily, blocked up a few days before, since in it his tennis balls got lost. There he was discovered by the conspirators, and after a desperate struggle their leader, Sir Thomas Graham, stabbed him to death. Not a minute too soon, for already the good burghers were roused to the rescue, and the regicides had some ado to spur off to the Highlands, safe only for a time, the principal criminals being taken for tortures that horrified even their cruel contemporaries.
From the windings of the Blackfriars quarter, one emerges by what was the North Port, upon Perth's famous Inch, bordered by erections that a generation ago
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were the modest West End of the city — Athole Place, the Crescent, Rose Terrace, and Barossa Place. At the foot of the Inch, by the river, stands a tall obelisk in honour of the 9bth Regiment, the " Perthshire Volunteers," now amalgamated with the Cameronians ; and near it the customary statue of Prince Albert, one of the first inaugurated by Queen Victoria, who then insisted on knighting the Lord Provost of the city, a worthy grocer, much to his discontent, and, if all tales be true, to his loss in business. Perth, as becomes the ex-capital, has a Lord Provost, who cannot meet the Lord Provost of Glasgow without raising sore points of precedence. Invested with special powers when Perth was a royal residence, its magistrates were not persons to be trifled with, as an English officer found early in the eighteenth century. This mettlesome spark, quartered here, had fatally stabbed a dancing-master who stood in the way of troublesome attentions to one of his pupils. The same day, tradition has it, the slaughterer was seized, tried, and hanged under the old law of " red-hand," then put in force for the last time. An ornament to the story is that the criminal's brother commanded a ship of war in the Firth of Forth, over which was the way to Edinburgh, and that he long kept watch for a chance of capturing some Perth bailie on whom to take revenge. These were the good old times.
By the bridge at the foot of the North Inch, a pre- tentious classical structure, marking the era of Provost Marshall whom it commemorates, rears its dome above a Museum of Antiquities such as becomes an ancient city. This faces the end of Tay Street, the pleasant river- side boulevard between the North and South Inches,
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BEN A AN, CORNER OF LOCH KATRINE, PERTHSHIRE
The Fair City
towards the farther end of which a newer Museum contains a remarkable natural history collection. At its corner of South Street are the County Buildings, adorned with portraits of local worthies, and at the end of High Street, the City Buildings with windows illustrating Perth's history. Perth has now two bridges and everything hand- some about it — besides the Dundee railway bridge with its footway from the South Inch. The central bridge is only three or four years old, but here stood one washed away in 1621, since when the citizens had long to depend on what is now the old bridge below the North Inch.
This bridge leads over into the transpontine suburb, above which, on the slopes of Kinnoul Hill, the rank and fashion of the city have inclined to seek " eligible building sites," Scottid, "feuing plots." The banks of the river, too, on this side have long been bordered by villas and cottages of gentility ; but about " Bridge End " there is still a fragment of the humbler suburb that has had more than one famous sojourner in our time. Here, in a house now distinguished by a tablet, and afterwards in Rose Terrace opposite, John Ruskin spent bits of his child- hood with an aunt, wife of the tanner whose unsavoury business had the credit of keeping the cholera away from Bridge End. That amateur of beauty, for his part, has nothing but good to say of Perth : he remembers with pleasure the precipices of Kinnoul, the swirling pools of the "Goddess-river," even the humble "Lead," in which other less gifted children have found "a treasure of flowing diamond," now covered up to belie his vision of its defilement ; and his lifelong impression was that
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"Scottish sheaves are more golden than are bound in other lands, and that no harvests elsewhere visible to human eyes are so like the ' corn of heaven ' as those of Strath Tay and Strath -Earn.'* Yet youthful gladness turned to pain, when through his connection with Perth Ruskin came to make that ill-matched marriage with its fairest maid, afterwards known as Lady Millais. Their brief union he passes over in silence in his else most com- municative reminiscences ; and the writer were indiscreet indeed who should revive rumours spun round a case of hopeless incompatibility. One misty legend, probably untrue, declares him, for certain reasons, to have vowed never to enter the house in which her family lived, that Bowerswell mansion, a little up the hill, where a crystal spring had often arrested his childish attention. He did enter the house once, to be married, according to the custom of the bride's Presbyterian Church : hinc illae lacrimae, according to the legend.
Like that great prose-poet, the reader's humble servant, without being able to boast himself a native of Perth, spent part of his youth here and has pleasant memories that tempt him, too, to be garrulous. I have no recollection of seeing Ruskin at Perth, but I well remember Millais in the prime of manly beauty. In the early days of his fame he lived much with his wife's family at Bowerswell ; and several of the children he then painted so charmingly were playmates of mine, who would come to our Christmas parties in the picturesque costumes he had been putting on canvas. For some reason or other, he never proposed to immortalise my features ; but I have boyish memories of him that seem to hint at the two sides of his art. My
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sister sat for one of his most famous pictures, on which, in the capacity of escort to his child model, I had the unappreciated privilege of seeing him at work. What struck a little Philistine like me was how the painter paid no attention to a call to lunch, working away in such a furor of industry as I could sympathise with only if mischief were in question. Someone brought him a plate of soup and a glass of wine, which he hastily swallowed on his knees, and again flung himself into his absorbing task. My internal reflection was that in thus despising his meals this man showed such sense as Macfarlane's geese who, as Scott records, loved their play better than their meat. But a quite different behaviour on another occasion excited stronger disapproval of the future P.R.A. in my schoolboy mind. When out shooting with my father one hot day, I took him to a little moorland farm where the people would offer us a glass of milk. Millais rather scornfully asked if they had no cream. They brought him a tumblerful, the whole yield for the day probably, and he tossed if off with a " Das ist kleine Gabe ! " air that set me criticising the artistic tempera- ment. It was a fixed notion with young Scots that all English people were greedy : "Set roasted beef and pudding on the opposite side o' the pit o' Tophet, and an Englishman will make a spang at it ! " exclaimed the goodwife of Aberfoyle. Thus we give back the southron's sneer for our frugal poverty. Our old Adam might welcome the good things of life that fairly came our way ; but we schooled each other in a Spartan point of honour that forbade too frank enjoyment. Millais was born very far south ; and there are those who say that he might
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have been a still greater painter, had he shown less taste for the cream of life.
From Bowerswell, an artist had not far to go for scenes of beauty. The road past the house, winding up to a Roman Catholic monastery built since those days, leads on into the woods of Kinnoul Hill, which is to Perth what Arthur's Seat is to Edinburgh. No tourist should, as many do, neglect to take the shady climb through those woods, suggesting the scenes of a tamed German "Wald." At the farther side one comes out on the edge of a grand crag, the view from which has been compared to the Rhine valley, and to carry out this similitude, a mock ruin crowns the adjacent cliff. We have here turned our backs on the Grampians so finely seen from the Perth slope of the hill, and are looking down upon the Tay as it bends eastward between this spur of the Sidlaws and the wooded outposts of the Ochils opposite, then, swollen by the Earn, opens out into its Firth in the Carse of Gowrie, dotted with snug villages and noble seats such as the Castle of Kinfauns among the woods at our feet, a scene most lovely when
The sun was setting on the Tay, The blue hills melting into grey ; The mavis and the blackbird's lay Were sweetly heard in Gowrie.
The Gowrie earldom, once so powerful in Perth, has disappeared from its life ; but the title is still familiar as covering one of those districts of a Scottish county that bear enduring by - names, like the Devonshire South Hams or the Welsh Vale of Glamorgan. To a native ear, the scene is half suggested by the word Carse,
LOCH VENNACHAR, PERTHSHIRE
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implying a stretch of rich lowland along a riverside, whereas Strath is the more broken and extensive valley of a river that has its upper course in some wilder Glen or tiny Den, the Dean of so many southern villages. The course of the Tay from Perth to Dundee, below Kinnoul, ceases to be romantic while remaining beautiful in a more sedate and stately fashion as it flows between its receding walls of wooded heights, underneath which the " Carles of the Carse " had once such an ill name as Goldsmith's rude Carinthian boor, but so many a " Lass of Gowrie " has shown a softer heart — , ;
She whiles did smile and whiles did greet ; The blush and tear were on her cheek.
There are various versions of this ballad, whose tune makes the Perth local anthem ; but they all tell the same old tale and often told, with that most hackneyed of ends —
The old folks syne gave their consent ;
And then unto Mass-John we went ;
Who tied us to our hearts' content, Me and the Lass o' Gowrie.
Many a stranger comes and goes at Perth without guessing what charming prospects may be sought out on its environing heights. But half an hour's stroll through the streets must make him aware of those Inches that prompt a hoary jest concerning the size of the Fair City. The North and South Inches, between which it lies, properly islands, green flats beside the Tay, are in their humble way its Hyde Park and Regent's Park. The South Inch, close below the station, is the less extensive,
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once the grounds of a great Carthusian monastery, then site of a strong fort built by Cromwell, now notable mainly for the avenue through which the road from Edinburgh comes in over it, and for the wharf at its side that forms a port for small vessels and excursion steamers plying by leave of the tide. On the landward side, beyond the station, Perth is spreading itself up the broomy slopes of Craigie Hill, which still offers pleasant rambles. Beyond the farther end stands a gloomy building once well known to evil-doers as the General Prison for Scotland ; but of late years its character has undergone some change ; and I am not sure how far the old story may still keep its point that represents an i'hmate set loose from these walls, when hailed by a friendly wayfarer as " honest man," giving back glumly " None of your dry remarks ! "
A more cheerful sight is the golf links on Moncrieff Island, above which crosses the railway to Dundee. This neighbour has long surpassed Perth, grown on jute and linen to be the third city of Scotland, its name perhaps most familiar through the marmalade which used to be manufactured, I understand, in the Channel Islands, when wicked wit declared its maker to have a contract for sweeping out the Dundee theatre. Northern under- graduates at Oxford and Cambridge are believed to have spread to southern breakfasts the use of this confection in the form so well known now that its materials are so cheap. The name has a Greek ancestry, and the thing seems to have come to us as quince-preserve, through the Portuguese marmeloy in time transferred and restricted to another fruit. Oranges, indeed, could not have been as
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plentiful as blackberries in Britain, when the Euphuist Lyly compared life without love to a meal without marmalade.
Such a twenty-miles digression from the South Inch implies how little there is to say about it. Now let us take a dander up the larger North Inch, Perth's Campus Martius, at once promenade, race-course, review ground, grazing common, washing green, golf links, cricket-field, and area for unfenced football games in which, summer and winter, young Scots learn betimes to earn gate-money for English clubs. Opposite the Perth Academy appears to have been the arena where that early professional, Hal o' the Wynd, played up so well in the deadly match by which the Clan Kay and the Clan Chattan enacted the less authentic tragedy of the Kilkenny cats. This spacious playground is now edged by a neat walk, which makes the constitutional round of sedate citizens, who on the safe riverside have the spectacle of pleasure boating against the difficulties of a strong stream and shallow rapids, and of the pulling of salmon nets in the season. Here a bare- legged laddie, with the rudest tackle, has been known to hook a 3O-lb. fish, holding on to the monster for two hours till some men helped him out with his fortune. The salmon of the Tay, reared in the Stormontfield Ponds above Perth, are famous for size, a weight of over 70 Ibs. being not unknown ; and cavillers on other streams can- not belittle its bigger fish by the sneer of " bigger liars there ! " The keeping of fish in ice, and railway com- munications, have much enhanced the price, to the astonishment of a Highland laird who in a London tavern ordered a steak for himself and a " salmon for Donald "
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without guessing that his henchman's meal must be paid for in gold as his own in silver. The old story of masters contracting not to feed their servants on salmon more than twice a week, is told, by Ruskin for one, of Tay- side as of other river-lands. But so masterful are the demands of London now, that salmon may sometimes be dearer on the banks of the Tay than in the glutted metropolitan market. The Tay has another treasure, for now and then valuable pearls have been fished out of it by boys who, in a dry summer, can wade across its shallows just above the old bridge. A very different sight might be seen here when the river was frozen across and roughened by a jam of miniature icebergs.
Half-way up the town side of the Inch, where a few trees dotted across it mark its old limits, extended more than a century ago, stands the now restored mansion of Balhousie, which used to be known as Bushy by that curious trick of contraction, more common in Scottish than in English names, that drove a bewildered foreigner to complain of our pronouncing as Marchbanks what we spelt as Cholmondeley. But one notes how in Scotland as in England, the tendency is to restore such words to their full sound, as in this case. Near the station in Perth is Pomarium Street, marking the orchard of the old Carthusian monastery, or, as some have held, the outskirt of the Roman City. Consule Planco, I knew it only as the Pow ; but out of curiosity I lately tried this abbreviation in vain on a postman and on a telegraph boy of the present genera- tion. Methven, near Perth, was always pronounced Meffen\ Henry VIII. spells it Muffyn ; as Ruthven was and perhaps still is Riven. The station of Milngavie is no longer
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A CROFT NEAR DALMALLY, 'ARGYLLSHIRE
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proclaimed by railway porters as Millguy, and the place Claverhouse — no hero indeed at spelling — spells Ruglen, tends to assume its full dignity of Rutherglen, as Ciren- cester or Abergavenny lose their old contractions in this generation's mouth. Many other examples might be given of a change, with which, I fancy, railway porters have much to do ; but one of the best authorities on such matters. Dr. H. Bradley, puts it down to what he calls half-education, setting up spelling as an idol. As for the altered pronunciation of Scottish family names, that seems often to come from English blundering, modestly adopted by their owners. Balfour, to take a distinguished example, was Balfour, till the trick of southern speech shifted back the accent. Forbes is still vernacularly a dissyllable in the Forbes country, as in Marmion^ and in the old school- boy saw about General 4 B's, who marched his 4 C's, etc. Dalziels and Menzies must have long given up in despair the attempt to get their names properly pronounced in the south as Deel and Meengus. The family known at home as Jimmy son become now content to have made a noise in the world as Jameson. But some such changes have been long in progress. It was " bloody Mackenzie " whom audacious boys dared to come out of his grave in Grey friars1 Churchyard ; and if we go far enough back we find the name of this persecutor written Mackennich. In the good old times every gentleman had his own spelling, as what for no ? There is a deed, and not a very ancient one, drawn up by certain forebears of mine, in which, among them, they spell their name five different ways. In general, it may be remembered, the z that makes such a stumbling- block to strangers in so many Scottish names, is to be taken
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as a y. When we have such real enigmas as Colquhoun and Kirkcudbright to boggle over, the wonder is that Milton should make any ado at Gordon or " Galasp," by which he probably meant Gillespie.
Nearly opposite Balhousie, which has suggested this digression, across the Tay, peeps out the house of Spring- lands, which reminds me how Perth has been the cradle of a sect. The Sandemans of Springlands in my youth exhibited some marked religious leanings, but none of them, I think, followed the doctrine of their ancestor. The sect in ques- tion was founded in the days of early methodism by John Glass, a Scottish clergyman ; but his son-in-law, Robert Sandeman, proved so much the Paul of the new faith by preaching it as far as America, that there, as in England, the body is known as Sandemanians, while in Scotland they still sometimes bear the original name Glassites. Their most famous member was Michael Faraday, who preached in the London meeting-house. Its doctrine had, like Plymouth Brethrenism, a strange attraction for old Indian officers, who, cut off from home influences, repelled by surrounding heathenism, and their brains perhaps a little addled by the sun, have often been led to read odd meanings into revelations and prophecies, studied late in life. There used to be a detachment of retired veterans encamped about Perth as headquarters of their Bethel, whose wives and children, in some cases, attended the Episcopal Chapel. A peculiarity of their belief was an absolute horror of being present at any alien worship, even family prayers, as I could show from some striking instances. This must have borne hard on soldier converts, who, in the army, are allowed a choice of only three forms
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of worship. " No fancy religions in the service," growled the sergeant to a recruit who professed himself a Seventh Day Baptist : " fall in with the Roman Catholics ! " Another note of the Sandemanians was an unwillingness to communicate their views, what even seemed a resentful- ness of inquiry by outsiders. Disraeli excused a similar trait in the Jews by the dry remark, " The House of Lords does not seek converts." I once in the innocent confid- ence of youth asked a Glassite leader to enlighten me as to their faith, and was snubbed with a short " The doors are open." But I never heard of any stranger trusting himself within the doors of that meeting-house. Report gave out a love-feast as a main function, from which the sect got " kailites " as a nickname. The kiss of peace, it was understood, went round ; and ribald jesters represented the presiding official as obliged to exhort, "Dinna pass over the auld wife ! " This much one can truly say of the congregation, that they were kind and helpful to each other, a Glassite in distress being unknown in the Fair City, where they had adherents in all classes. As for their spiritual exclusiveness, against that reproach may be set the old story of the " burgher " lass who, having once attended an " anti-burgher " service with her lad, was rebuked by her own kirk-session for the sin of "pro- miscuous hearing."
Above the Inch comes the less trim space called the " Whins," where lucky caddies glean lost golf balls in its patches of scrub and in pools formed by the highest flowing of the tide from the Firth. With this ends the public pleasure-ground ; but the walk may be prolonged along the elevated bank of the river, above the sward that
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makes the town bathing-place, and brown pools that Ruskin might have found perilous as well as picturesque, but as he speaks of himself as keeping company with his girl cousin, not to speak of the fear of his careful mother, we may suppose that he made no rash excursions into the water. One deep swirl within a miniature promontory is aptly known as the " Pen and Ink " ; then higher up a shallow creek encloses the " Woody Island," no island to bare-legged laddies who here play Robinson Crusoe.
The opposite bank shows a lordly park with timber that should bring a blush to the cheek of Dr. Johnson's ghost, concealing the castellated Scone Palace, seat of its Hereditary Keeper, Lord Mansfield, who has another enviable home beside Hampstead Heath. Little remains of the old royal Castle and Abbey of Scone ; the Stone of Destiny, that ancient palladium, fabled pillow of Jacob's vision of the angels, on which the Scottish kings were crowned, has been in Westminster Abbey since Edward I.'s invasion. The modern mansion contains some relics of Queen Mary and her son, but its owners do not encourage visitors. An eminence near at hand is known by the curious name of the Boot Hill, tradition making it formed by the earth which nobles after a coronation emptied out of their boots, so stuffed that each proud baron might feel the satisfaction of standing on his own ground !
Half-a-dozen miles farther up the river, on this side, one is free to seek the top of Dunsinnan Hill for what is believed to have been the site of Macbeth's Castle, and for a fine prospect of the Grampians with Birnam Wood in the foreground. Shakespeare, and the legend he followed,
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WET HARVEST TIME NEAR DALMALLY, ARGYLLSHIRE
The Fair City
make no account of the fact that a considerable river guarded Dunsinnan from hostile advance of its distant neighbour. Yet a parish minister of these parts has con- vinced himself that the author of Macbeth must have known the neighbourhood. One conjecture is that he visited Perth with a far-strolling troop of actors. " You will say next that Shakespeare was Scotch ! " exclaimed a scornful southron to a Scot who seemed too patriotic ; and the cautious answer was, "Weel, his abeelity would warrant the supposeetion." As for Macbeth and his good lady, it is time that some serious attempt were made to whitewash their characters, as Renan has done for Jezebel, and Froude for Henry VIII. No doubt these two worthies represented the good old Scottish party, strong on Dis- ruption principles and sternly set against the Anglican in- fluences introduced through Malcolm Canmore, in favour of whose family the southern poet shows a natural bias. Did we know the whole truth, that gracious Duncan may have had a scheme to serve the Macbeths as the Macdonalds of Glencoe were served by their guests. The one thing clear in early Scottish history is that the dagger played a greater part than the ballot box, and that scandals in high life might sometimes be obscured by an eloquent advocate on one side or other. Sir Walter does give some hints for a brief in Macbeth's case, though in his Tales of a Grandfather}^ sets the orthodox legend strutting with its "cocked hat and stick." Macbeth, as he says, probably met Duncan in fair fight near Elgin ; and the scene of his own discomfiture appears to have been the Mar country rather than the Tay valley.
But we are still strolling on the right bank of the Tay,
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to be followed for a mile or two up to the mouth of the Almond, a pretty walk, which few strangers find out for themselves. There is in Scotland a want of the field paths which Hawthorne so much admired in England, " wander- ing from stile to stile, along hedges and across broad fields, and through wooded parks leading you to little hamlets of thatched cottages, ancient, solitary farmhouses, picturesque old mills, streamlets, pools, and all those quiet, secret, unexpected, yet strangely -familiar features of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in his idylls and eclogues." Every inch of tillable land is in the north more economic- ally dealt with ; the farmer, struggling against a harsher climate, cannot afford to leave shady hedges and winding paths ; his fields are fenced by uncompromising stone walls against a looser law of trespass. Embowered lanes, too, " for whispering lovers made," are rarer in this land of practical farming. Here it is rather on wild " banks and braes " of streams, unless where their waters can be coined into silver as salmon-fishings, that lovers and poets may ramble at will, shut out from the work-a-day world by thickets of hawthorn, brier, woodbine, and other "weeds of glorious feature " :—
The Muse, nae poet ever fand her Till by himsel' he learned to wander Adown some trotting burn's meander, An' no think lang.
If any ill-advised stranger find the streets of the Fair City dull, as would hardly be his lot on market-day, let him turn to Kinnoul Hill for a noble scene, and to the Tay banks for a characteristic one of broad fields and stately woods, backed by the ridge of the Grampians a dozen
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miles away. For another sample of Scottish aspects he might take the Edinburgh road across the South Inch, and over by Moncrieff Hill to the Bridge of Earn, where he comes into the lower flats of Strathearn, on which a tamed Highland stream winds sinuously to the Tay between its craggy rim and the rounded ridge of the Ochils. The village has a well-built air, due to the neighbourhood of Pitkaithly spa, that in Scott's day was a local St. Ronan's, whose patrons lodged at the Bridge of Earn, or even walked out from Perth, to take the waters, which before break- fast, on the top of this exercise, must have had a notable effect in certain cases. The original Spa in Belgium owed much of its credit to the fact of its springs being a mile or two out of the town. Our forefathers' ignorance of microbes seems to have been tempered by active habits : it was more than a dozen miles Piscator and his friends had to trudge from Tottenham before reaching their morning draught at Hoddesdon. As for Pitkaithly, there is at present an attempt to resuscitate the use of its waters, still dispensed near Kilgraston, a house founded by a Jamaica planter, who had two such sons as General Sir Hope Grant and Sir Francis Grant, P.R.A.
This part of Strathearn is a flat lowland plain, on which, once in a way, I have seen a pack of foxhounds, whereas, in the ruggeder mass of the county, as English squires must be scandalised to learn —
Though space and law the stag we lend, Ere hound we slip or bow we bend, Whoever recked where, how, and when, The treacherous fox is trapped or slain.
Where foxes are sometimes like wolves for size and
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destructiveness, a Highland fox-hunter ranks with a rat- catcher. But Fife, at hand over the Ochils, is a civilised region in which Reynard claims his due observance. Near its border, still in Perthshire, is the sadly-decayed town of Abernethy, whose Round Tower makes the only monument of the days when it was a Pictish capital. Another seat of Pictish princes, not far away, was at Forteviot, near the Kinnoul Earls' Dupplin Castle, where Edward Balliol defeated the Regent Mar in a hot fight, before marching on to Perth to be crowned for a time, when Scotland, like Brentford, had two kings. If only for their natural amenities, these spots might well be visited ; yet to tourists they are unknown unless as way-stations respectively on the rival North British and Caledonian railways from Edinburgh to Perth. But to me each of their now obscure names is dearly familiar, since the days when they were landmarks on my way back from school, from which in those days one came back more gladly ; and Auchterarder^ FORTEVIOT, FORGANDENNY, made a crescendo of joyful sounds, each hailing a stage nearer home.
no
CHAPTER VI
THE HIGHLAND LINE
FROM Perth to Inverness runs the Highland Railway, that pierces through the heart of the Grampians. Giving off a branch to Loch Tay and coach routes to other choice nooks of the noblest northern county, this line mounts among the wilds of Atholl, and near its highest level brings us into Inverness-shire ; then it descends to the old Badenoch Forest, down the upper course of the Spey, past Kingussie to Aviemore, where its main track turns over the Findhorn, and by Culloden to the capital of the Highlands. There is not a finer railway ride in the kingdom, as the tourist knows well enough from his pro- grammes, so the Highland line needs no advertisement here. But there is an older use of this name, for the irregular line along which the Highlands fall in a broken wave upon the richer country, a zone pointed out by Scott and other writers as the most charming part of Scotland. The austere spirit of mountain solitudes is not so easily caught as the varied charms of a debateable land, where " the rivers find their way out of the mountainous region by the wildest leaps, and through the most romantic passes," and Nature's rugged features straggle down
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among good roads and inns, the practical and the picturesque throwing each other into alternate relief. This is the special loveliness of southern and eastern Perthshire, across which the Grampians make an oblique border, once too often marked with fire and sword, while its straths and lake basins repeat in miniature the same mingling of Highland and Lowland scenery, and of homes thus contrasted by " Ian Maclaren " : —
" The lowland farm stands amid its neighbours along the high- way, with square fields, trim fences, slated houses, cultivated after the most scientific method, and to the last inch, a very type of a shrewd, thrifty, utilitarian people. The Highland farm is half- a-dozen patches of as many shapes scattered along the hillside, wherever there are fewest stones and deepest soil and no bog, and those the crofter tills as best he can — sometimes getting a harvest, and sometimes seeing the first snow cover his oats in the sheaf, sometimes building a rude dyke to keep off the big, brown, hairy cattle that come down to have a taste of the sweet green corn, but often finding it best to let his barefooted children be a fence by day, and at certain seasons to sit up all night himself to guard his scanty harvest from the forays of the red deer. Some- where among the patches he builds his low-roofed house, and thatches it over with straw, on which by and by, grass with heather and wild flowers begins to grow, till it is not easy to tell his home from the hill. His farm is but a group of tiny islands amid a sea of heather that is ever threatening to overwhelm them with purple spray. Anyone can understand that this man will be unpractical, dreamy, enthusiastic, the child of the past, the hero of hopeless causes, the seer of visions."
We have already crossed the Highland line to the Trossachs. Now, in a few hours' walk by less famous scenes, let me lead the reader right up into the Highlands
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THE GRAMPIANS FROM BOAT OF GARTEN, INVERNESS-SHIRE
The Highland Line
from the North Inch of Perth. Our way shall be the green banks of the Almond, with only now and then a turning aside on the roads which are seldom the most pleasing features of a Scottish countryside. The name, properly Almaine, as Wordsworth has it, seems of the same origin as the Irish Bog of Allen, Moine Almhaine in Celtic. There is more than one Almond in Scotland, which has countless streams of which this is a type, a true Highland water, now gathering into creamy pools, now rushing over pebbly shallows, here pent in a leafy glen, there rippling by open fields and works of man, everywhere wilful, cheerful, and eager.
At the Almond mouth, over which it straggles thinly in summer to join the swirls of the Tay, is believed to have stood the Roman station that may or may not have been the original Perth. The tributary's right bank is edged by a wide sward, up which anglers and other idlers can stroll freely for miles, unless barred by the red flag of a rifle range that has sent not a few marksmen to Wimbledon and Bisley. On this side stands a fragment of Huntingtower, a castle of the Cowries, widely known by the song founded on an obscure ballad, with the same motive as the English " Nut-brown Maid," in which a high-born lover — supposed to have been a Duke of Atholl — puts his sweetheart to the test by pretending to take leave, to be poor, to be already married ; then, when nothing can shake her fidelity, rewards her with full avowal —
Blair in AtholPs mine, Jeanie!
Little Dunkeld is mine, lassie !
St. Johnston's bower and Huntingtower —
And a' that's mine is thine, lassie !
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Here the idle stream is harnessed to service in bleach- works, whose white ware spread on green slopes makes a feature of the scenery about Perth. Above the villages of Almondbank and Pitcairn Green, the stream, like Simon Glover's apprentice, throws off its industrial disguise to put on a Highland garb of rocks and dells and bosky braes. A beautiful spot is the Glen of Lynedoch, famed by a touching tradition which the graves of Bessie Bell and Mary Gray attest as no mere legend. These " bonny lasses, " as their song styles them, were bosom friends who beside the Almond built them- selves a bower as refuge from the Great Plague, raging in Perth as in London. According to the story, they were visited by a lover who brought them food, and with it the fatal infection. Prosaic critics point out that such bowers were used as isolation huts for suspected cases. At all events, the girls died in their hermitage, and were brought to be buried at Methven Church, but the Methven folk stoned back the bearers of contagion from the ford ; then in death, as in life, the bodies found a home by the Almond. Their fate was so well though vaguely remembered, that both Burns and Scott came to make inquiries about the grave, which had already been enclosed by the owner of the property, and is now marked by a railing, beneath a clump of yews, and by the inscrip- tion " They lived — they loved — they died."
A more modern romance haunts this glen. Here stands in ruin the deserted mansion of a laird driven by grief into renown. This was Thomas Graham, who in the latter part of the eighteenth century devoted himself to such " improvements " as were then the fashion with
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KILLIN, PERTHSHIRE
The Highland Line
cultured landowners, and planted exotic growths now running wild among the native greenery. The death of his beautiful wife, painted by Gainsborough, struck him so deeply to heart, that, when over forty years of age, he went to the wars, and rose to be the Lord Lynedoch who won the battle of Barossa. He had two other Peninsular veterans as neighbours, all three of them eye- witnesses of Sir John Moore's burial at dead of night, Sir George Murray, Wellington's Quartermaster-General, and Sir David Baird, of whom it is told that, when his mother heard how he was among Hyder All's prisoners, chained two and two, her first remark was, " Lord pity the chiel that's chained to oor Davie ! " On either side are scenes of battles long ago : to the south, Methven, a disaster for Bruce, and its neighbour Ruthven, a victory for Montrose ; to the north, Luncarty, where the founder of the Hay family is said to have turned the tide of battle against the Danes, by rushing in with his plough coulter like a legendary Nicol Jarvie.
Glenalmond, little sought as it is by strangers, is better known to many of Mudie's subscribers than they may be aware, being clearly the chief scene of " Ian Maclaren's" popular tales, in which, while dwelling so much on the character of the inhabitants, the author seems strangely reticent as to natural charms, well hinted at indeed in the title Bonnie Brier Bush. Drumtochty — the real name of a farm — is Logic Almond with its Heriotsfield village ; Kildrummie is Methven ; and Muirton, of course, is Perth. Some of his personages, also, appear taken from real prototypes, touched up into very much of fancy pictures, if neighbours are to be believed.
"5
Bonnie Scotland
A little higher comes Trinity College, Glenalmond, founded as a buttress to the Scottish Episcopal Church, on the model of English public schools. Its first head was Dr. Charles Wordsworth, nephew of the poet, formerly second master at Winchester, and once tutor to Mr. Gladstone, with whom his conscientious disagreement in politics barred the ecclesiastical promotion which he de- served as well as his brother, Christopher of Lincoln. He never rose farther than the elective bishopric of the diocese which it pleases Scottish Episcopalians to style that "of St. Andrews, Dunkeld, and Dunblane"; and of late years their prelates have taken to sign themselves by such terri- torial designations, assumed by men whose legal status in the country is that of dissenting ministers. When Dr. Wordsworth became bishop, the whole income of himself and his score of clergy was some £2000 a year ; but he had a private endowment in " Wordsworth's Greek Grammar," which enabled him without shame to give out from the pulpit, as I have heard, " It is my dooty to announce to you that a collection will be made in this chapel, next Sunday, for the purpose of increasing the income of the Bishop of the diocese." He was a learned and amiable man, but without much knowledge of human nature, as shown by his