Glasgow

“ No wonder, then, that the purest of pure air, the bluest of blue waves, the most picturesque of noble hills, the most purple of heather, the greenest of ivy, the thickest of oak-leaves, the most fragrant of roses and honeysuckle, should fairly smash poor old Glasgow during the summer months, and leave her not a leg to stand on.
The ladies and children of the multitudinous families that go down the water, remain there permanently, of course: most of the men go up to business every morning and return to the sea-side every night. ”

“ Glasgow is indebted, in a great part, for the gigantic strides which it has made, to the genius, patience, and perseverance of a man who, in his boyhood, rather more than a hundred years ago, used to be scolded by his aunt for wasting his time, taking off the lid of the kettle, putting it on again, holding now a cup, now a silver spoon over the steam as it rose from the spout, and catching and counting the drops of water it fell into. ”

“ And, as everybody knows, Glasgow is the place where "the stately ocean greyhounds" are built. Fifty-five million dollars have been expended in "turning what was once a little salmon stream into one of the greatest navigable highways of the world." In 1768, the Clyde, at low water, was one foot deep, where now it is twenty-four feet. What is it that has given this venerable Presbyterian city this proud position, next to London? "Let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the word." ”

“ There are few places in our country where human enterprise has effected such vast and marvellous changes within the century as the country traversed by the river Clyde. Where Glasgow now stretches far and wide, with its miles of swarming streets, its countless mills, and warehouses, and foundries, its busy ship-building yards, its harbour thronged with vessels of every size and clime, and its large and wealthy population, there was to be seen, a hundred years ago, only an insignificant little burgh, as dull and quiet as any rural market-town of our own day. ”

“ Glasgow does not aspire to picturesqueness or to historicalness. Glasgow is content, more than content, in having her commerce and her industry always "in spate."
Glasgow is the second city of size in the United Kingdom, and the first city in being itself. London is too varied and divided in interests; it never forgets that it is the capital of the world, and a royal capital. Glasgow never forgets that it is itself, very honestly and very democratically, a city of Scots. ”

“ For years past, Glasgow has stood in the forefront
As a city given over to the small-pox
And magisterial reform.
It is, I believe,
An exceedingly well-managed city:
In fact, it appears to be managed
Out of all reasonable existence;
Hence, no doubt, it comes to pass
That it was lately visited
By a smart sample of the plague.
I have not the smallest doubt that your Worships
Are sincere and clean-thinking men.
I believe that you do what you do do, so to speak,
Out of sheer public spirit
And with a view to bettering the condition
Of the city over which you preside. ”

“ The money spent in statues of Wellington would more than suffice, and the Iron Duke would be none the worse off in Paradise.
Yes, this is what may be seen in Glasgow, in that city so pious, that to calm the feelings of some of the inhabitants, the literary and scientific lectures which used to be given to the people on Sunday evenings in Saint Andrew's Hall have had to be discontinued.
Heaven be thanked, Glasgow is not Scotland, and we can go and rejoice our eyes in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Braemar, and elsewhere, and admire the lakes and the blue mountains. ”

“ I may say at once that it is a great trial to leave Glasgow at that particular date. The city pours forth its myriads at such a time. The stations are surging and heaving with throngs of men, women, and children, all in a hurry and all impatient. Families by tens and dozens are swarming about. ”

“ There is no town so favourably circumstanced for the observation of the spots as Glasgow. The cloud of smoke that usually hangs over it, mingled with the fog of the river, affords an admirable darkening medium for viewing them with comfort. ”

“ The theorist holds up Glasgow as a model city—a pioneer—and the splendour of its municipal buildings is as the justice of Aristides. But if an ugly woman does not dress well, who should? With all its civic spirit, Glasgow remains grey, prosaic, intolerable—the champion platitude of commercial civilisation. Aberdeen would have been a far finer example of the schematic city of which theorists dream. ”

“ I have seen every corner of the great towns, and I do not hesitate to give the palm to Glasgow: it is the dirtiest, blackest, most repulsive-looking nest that it was ever given to man to inhabit.
I am bound to say that the Scotch themselves, so justly proud of their old Scotland, dare not take it upon themselves to defend Glasgow: they [Pg 145] give it over to the visitor, not, however, without having added, as a kind of extenuating circumstance:
"There is money in it."
At the time of the Reformation, Glasgow was but an insignificant little town with five thousand inhabitants. ”

“ There are so many delightful journeys to be made from Glasgow by rail and steamer that it is one of the best starting points in all Scotland for excursions, of which all children and most old folks are so fond. The Lindsays and the Gordons were accordingly to stay in Glasgow for a week, that the young people might enjoy more of these rare treats, and take some of the lovely sails on the river Clyde and among the near-by islands.
Don and Sandy were having some hot discussions as to which was the finest city in Scotland,—Glasgow or Edinburgh. ”

“ Lord Glasgow, who was distinguished in the sixties as possessing the longest string of useless yearlings, was, in addition to other peculiarities, the most hot-tempered explosive that epoch produced. Kind of heart in the bluffest of ways, and throwing money about with a lavish hand, I remember on one occasion finding myself on the railway station at Edinburgh as his plethoric lordship was purchasing his ticket. ”

“ On the right are the hills of Argyleshire. And now, for many miles on either side, the shores of the Frith, and the shores of the long arms of the sea that run up among those Argyleshire mountains, are fringed with villas, castles, and cottages—the retreats of Glasgow men and their families. It is not, perhaps, saying much for Glasgow to state that one of its greatest advantages is the facility with which one can get away from it, and the beauty of the places to which one can get. But true it is, that there is hardly a great city in the world which is so well off in this respect. ”

“ After a cheap breakfast in a Municipal Restaurant, where I had two big, thick slices of bread with excellent butter and a cup of good coffee for two cents, I bummed around the Clyde again, taking in the sights. I liked Glasgow first rate. The people were as friendly and sociable as they were out West, and their accent and ways were a never-ending source of interest to me. Everything that I saw interested me, for it was all so new and strange. No one can have the faintest idea what there is to be seen abroad unless he or she goes there and hears and sees for himself. ”

“ Glasgow is really a very modern city. As the city on Manhattan is the evolution from a fortress, so the cathedral was the nucleus around which the ancient town of the “dark glen” grew. The university, when founded, became also a magnet to attract dwellers. In the twelfth century, King William the Lion erected the settlement into a burgh, with the privilege of an annual fair. Yet even down to the sixteenth century, Glasgow was only the eleventh in importance among Scottish towns. It was the American trade, after the union with England, which gave an immense stimulus to its commerce. ”

“ The relations between the two chief cities of Scotland have been a little stiff since Glasgow rose so high in the world, as how should a laird of old pedigree, crippled by forfeitures and mortgages, not look askance from his castellated turrets on the spick and span buildings of an upstart millionaire neighbour, the one standing on his name and title, the other on his shrewdness, honesty, and strict attention to business rather than the graces of life. ”

“ The extraordinary motion of the ship had driven everybody else, including even the captain, away. My companion and I were busily discussing the beauties of Glasgow, when at last the ship was brought to anchor off Goletta. He was the only man I ever met with who declared that Glasgow was infinitely to be preferred as a place of residence to London! And he was no Glaswegian, but a sunburnt native of Marseilles. ”

“ But you mustn't think Glasgow is full of funnies, or that I am laughing at the dear place—not that it would care if I did, it can stand a bit of laughing at. I have the most enormous respect for Glasgow people for all they have done, for their tremendous capacity for doing, for their quite perfect taste in things that matter, and I love them for their good nature and 'well-pleasedness.' A very under-sized little man—one whose height might well have been a sore point—said to me once, 'They tell me my grandfather was six-foot-four—he would laugh if he saw me. ”

“ That the citizens of Glasgow have done honour to departed worth is abundantly proved by the monuments and statues erected in the city; and that their gratitude is not confined to the dead is daily evinced by their respect and admiration of living merit. Such is the testimony borne to them by one of their fellow-citizens. Such they are known to be in their intercourse with strangers; and none, we will venture to say, have ever spent a week in the precincts of the Broomielaw, and shared in its hospitalities, without a cordial assent to the city motto—Let Glasgow flourish! ”

“ Such a man readily found among the solid burghers of Glasgow a large "following" of a very serious kind, douce, dour men, whose strongly-marked features looked as if they had been chiselled out of their native granite—men who settled themselves with a grave kind of enjoyment to listen to a full hour's sermon, and who watched every point their minister made with a critical acumen that seemed more fitting to a synod of divines than a congregation of weavers and traders. ”

“ Glasgow, not quite so large as Edinburgh in James Watt’s lifetime, had then begun to give the capital the go-by, even before she became environed by a wilderness of “pits and blast furnaces that honeycomb and blacken the earth, and burn with a red glare throughout the night for many a mile around,” where another writer describes daylight showing “patches of sour-looking grass surrounded by damp stone walls; gaunt buildings soot-begrimed and gloomy; and an ever-increasing blue-grey mist pierced by tall chimneys.” ”

“ We flew away from Glasgow on the top of the mail, ten miles an hour, past steaming meadows and smoking chimneys, to the Cumberland lakes, to Keswick, Kendal, and the prettiest towns and villages. The whole country is like a drawing-room. The rocky walls are papered with bushes, moss, and firs; the trees are carefully wrapped up in ivy; there are no walls or fences, only high hedges, and you see them all the way up flat hill-tops. On all sides carriages full of travellers fly along the roads ”

“ The permanent wealth of Glasgow comes, however, from its situation in the midst of a district rich in coal and iron. Furthermore, the improvements made in the steam engine by James Watt, and the demonstration, by Henry Bell, that navigation with this motive power was possible, wrought the transformation of Glasgow into the richest of Scottish cities. Speaking broadly, however,26 as to time, Glasgow’s wealth is the creation of the nineteenth century, and its influence upon the world at large is not much older. ”

“ THE WHIG COUNTRY SCORCHED and blasted as much of the ground about Glasgow is, this city lies hard by some of the finest and most famed scenes of Scotland, to be easily reached by land or water. Even busy Paisley, nurse of poets as well as of weavers, has a point of high antiquarian interest in its restored Abbey Church; and a stretch of moorland rises behind smoky Greenock, with its monuments to James Watt and to “Highland Mary.” ”

“ We say 'Ucha,' and when we meet each other in July we think it is funny to say 'A good New Year'; and always our accent grates on the ears of the genteel. I have heard it said that nothing could make Glasgow people gentlefolks because we are 'that weel-pleased'; and the less apparent reason there seems for complacency the more 'weel-pleased' we are. As an Edinburgh man once said to me in that connection, 'If a Glasgow man has black teeth and bandy legs he has cheek enough to stand before the King.' But we have none of the subtle vulgarity that pretends: we are plain folk and we know it.... ”

“ Tolcross and its lengthy continuation, Gallowgate, are one long-drawn slum, and so conduct shamelessly to the very heart of things: the junction of Trongate, Saltmarket, and High Street, where stands the old centre of the city in coaching days, Glasgow Cross.
Here Glasgow is at its busiest, and the hurrying crowds look as though they had little time for sentiment. Yet the Glasgow people have, of course, an interest in Sir Walter Scott, and some there are who can point out to the stranger the house, once an inn, in King Street, turning out of Trongate, which Scott once frequented. ”

“ Not of royal Stewarts, and no castle dominates it. But a city made out of the most inveterate Scottish characteristics. Or I think I would better say Scotch. That is a practical adjective, and somewhat despised of culture; therefore applicable to Glasgow. While Scottish is romantic and somewhat pretending.
Glasgow is the capital of the Whig country, of the democratic Scotland of covenanting ancestry. Glasgow is precisely what one would expect to issue out of the energy and honesty and canniness and uncompromise of that corner of the world. ”