Scotland

“ I had formed my opinion of Scotland from the same persons that, to the injury and the disgrace of Scotland, form the channel through which the British Government sees it; and therefore I was not prepared for that solemn and soul-stirring display,—that rush of the whole intellect of a reflective, and of the whole heart of a feeling people, adorned and kept in measured order, by that intermixture of moral tact and of national pride, which was exhibited to the delighted King, and the astonished courtiers. ”

“ Many a great writer, many a great artist, no doubt, has grown up and flourished like a blade of grass between the cobblestones of Calvinism. Scotland has a tale to tell. But Scotland has other strains, other traditions, books and scholars, gaieties, nobilities—how can we compare the fertile human soil of any spot in Europe with that dry, old, barren, horizonless Middle West of ours? ”

“ If there is one figure in the past that still acts powerfully upon the tradition, literature, and imagination of Scotland,—in a word, upon that which remains and is imperishable, after stone and brass are but mouldering relics,—it is the figure and fortunes of Charles, the Young Pretender to the throne of Great Britain. With him ended Celtic Scotland, Scottish feudalism, and the age of Highland romance. ”

“ First, A bloody sword, a bloody sword for thee, O Scotland, that shall tear the hearts of many. Secondly Many miles shall you travel, and shall see nothing but desolations and ruinous wastes in thee, O Scotland! Thirdly, The fertilest places in Scotland shall be as waste and desolate as the mountains. Fourthly, The women with child, shall be ript up, and dashed to pieces. Fifthly, Many a conventicle has God had in thee, O Scotland! but, ere long, God will have a conventicle that will make Scotland to tremble. ”

“ Such was south-eastern Scotland in the twelfth century: a country fitted to be the home of men of action rather than of thought; men whose joy should lie in the chase and the conflict with nature as yet unsubdued, who could track the savage creatures of the forest to their dens, and clear the land where it pleased them, and build, and dwell, and beget children in their own likeness, till by the labours of generations that country should become pastoral, peaceful, and fit for fertile tillage as we see it now. ”

“ On such simple lines of industry were laid the foundations of the material greatness of Scotland—its mines, its furnaces, its machine shops, its shipyards, its flax and jute mills, and all the other forms of productive energy that have placed this little country and its few millions of people in the front rank of the mechanical activity of the world. But is it because of such triumphs as these that the name of Scotland appeals so powerfully to the heart and the imagination of men? ”

“ To what other cause can you ascribe, what in my mind is still more astonishing, in such a country as Scotland, a nation cast in the happy medium between the spiritless acquiescence of submissive poverty and the sturdy credulity of pampered wealth; cool and ardent, adventurous and persevering; winging her eagle flight against the blaze of every science, with an eye that never winks, and a wing that never tires ”

“ In philosophy, in history, in law, in science, in poetry, in romance, in the arts of life, in trade, in government, in war, in the spread of our dominions, in the consolidation of our Empire, glorious has been the part which Scotland has played. ”

“ Scotland is the country above all others that I have seen, in which a man of imagination may carve out his own pleasures. There are so many inhabited solitudes, and the employments of the people are so immediately connected with the places where you find them, and their dresses so simple, so much alike, yet, from their being folding garments, admitting of an endless variety, and falling often so gracefully.
After some time we descended towards a broad vale, [Pg 185] passed one farm-house, sheltered by fir trees, with a burn close to it; children playing, linen bleaching. ”

“ IN Scotland shall reign the most noble and valient chieftain that ever was; full of wisdom and policy, cruel in justice as a lion, and fierce. He shall be meek as a lamb, but somewhat inclined to fragility of his flesh. ”

“ Oh, glory and honour of Scotland—thou holy fane, which we, poor wretched mortals, did fondly believe to be a habitation worthy of the omnipotent and mysterious Trinity, to whom thou wast dedicated—behold thee, for the sins of us the guilty servants of a just God, behold thee yielded up a prey to the destroyer! ”

“ On such an occasion as this, when we have met from all parts of Scotland, to do honour to the memory of the greatest genius Scotland ever knew, it surely is not only proper, but our bounden duty, to drink the health of the greatest genius which Scotland possesses now. ”

“ Who can observe without a feeling of sadness how the last feeble remnants of Scotland’s ancient masters, after having been expelled from the glorious Lowlands, cannot even now find rest among the barren rocks, and in the few arable valleys of the Highlands, but are obliged, year after year, in increasing numbers, to seek another home farther west, in the new world beyond the Atlantic? ”

“ But the flower of England was in France, while the flower of Scotland was here; and slain—the king, twelve earls, fifteen lords and chiefs, an archbishop, the French ambassador, and many French captains.
You walk back from the Field, and all the world is changed. The green haughs, the green woodlands, seem even in the summer sun to be dun and sere, and those burns which made merry on the outward way—can it be that there are red shadows in their waters? ”

“ When the Queen of Scots, the daughter of the House of Guise, the widow of a monarch of the line of Valois, set foot on English soil as a suppliant for the protection which came to her only by death, the last faint hope must have faded out of the hearts of the few who still longed for an independent Scotland, bound by gratitude and by ancient tradition to the ally who, more than once, had proved its salvation. ”

“ Had our race been distinguished only for its care of the bawbees, for its indomitable perseverance, its capacity to endure hardship, its adaptiveness, and its enterprise, I trow that the passionate pilgrim would not turn so eagerly to Scotland to cull the flowers of poesy and breathe the air of romance. And remember, our Scottish people are rather what the country has made them, than the country is what it has been made by them. ”

“ But we are to hold in remembrance that Scotland, though it be our native land, and the land of our fathers, is not like Goshen, in Egypt, on whilk the sun of the heavens and of the gospel shineth allenarly, and leaveth the rest of the world in utter darkness. ”

“ Many volumes and countless articles have been written about Scottish life and character, while the grand and beautiful in the scenery of Scotland have been reproduced in numerous ways, from the rough wood-cut to the latest colour process, but in the present book the hard-beaten path is departed from, and some of the less familiar pictures of Scottish life are represented. ”

“ Here—for the present, at least—ends our record of domestic occurrences and things in Scotland. It brings the life of the nation from the rudeness of the middle of the sixteenth century down to the comparative civilisation of the close of the seventeenth, when the existing political system was nearly settled. A strange phantasmagoria, beginning with the half mail-clad baron and his band of followers in swords and pistols, and ending in the silken and embroidered gallant in full periwig and a rapier for show. ”

“ The young lawyer was, indeed, unwittingly preparing for his mission to paint Scottish scenery so vividly, and Scottish character so charmingly, that he may almost be said to have created a new country which succeeding generations delight to visit. No man was ever a greater benefactor to Scotland, whose glories and beauties he was the first to reveal, showing how the most thrifty, practical, and parsimonious people may be at the same time the most poetic. ”

“ I have seen his eyes sparkle and his cheek flush as he spoke out some old heroic ballad of the days of the Douglas and the Græme, and I have felt, as I listened to the accents of his manly voice, that whilst Scotland could produce amongst her children such men as him beside me, her ancient spirit had not departed from her, nor the star of her glory grown pale! For he was a man, indeed, cast in nature’s happiest mould. ”

“ Exhibiting, as it peculiarly does, almost all those objects of interest and research, Scotland has been diligently studied both by native and foreign observers; and she has sent into the geological field a distinguished group of inquirers, who have performed a noble feat in exploring the general structure of the Earth, in decyphering its ancient monuments, and in unlocking those storehouses of mineral wealth, from which civilized man derives the elements of that gigantic power which his otherwise feeble arm wields over nature. ”

“ I shall lodge in humble cottages, wear a humble dress, and see what is to be seen by humble men only,—society without its mask. I shall explore, too, for myself, the formations wanting in the geologic scale of Scotland,—the Silurian, the Chalk, and the Tertiary; and so, should there be future years in store for me, I shall be enabled to resume my survey of our Scottish deposits with a more practised eye than at present, and with more extended knowledge. ”

“ Yet no literature excels that of the Scots, in the perfect frankness with which the sons of the soil confess their recent emergence from barbarism into the admired civilization of to-day.
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Thus the initial spell of the Scottish landscape lay first of all upon us who had known Scotland only through books or by word of mouth. Yet to such the human appeal is immense. Who can look upon this egg-shaped island of Arran, with its jagged peaks and its singularly grand scenery, without emotion? ”

“ Quite true, Scotland may some time reassert itself, demand its independence, cease from its romantic reliance on the fact that it did furnish to England, to the British Empire, the royal line, the Stewarts. ”

“ Indeed, you will waste your time if you look for pleasure-making of any sort in Scotland to-day. Scotland has gone back to her ancient business of war, and she is carrying it on in the most businesslike way, sternly and relentlessly. ”

“ Our sister kingdom is like a cultivated field,—the farmer expects that, in spite of all his care, a certain number of weeds will rise with the corn, and can tell you beforehand their names and appearance. But Scotland is like one of her own Highland glens, and the moralist who reads the records of her criminal jurisprudence, will find as many curious anomalous facts in the history of mind, as the botanist will detect rare specimens among her dingles and cliffs. ”

“ Scotland has no sentimental politics. Scotland says, in her own homely adage, “Claw me and I’ll claw thee.” Scotland insists that there should be Scotchmen everywhere—in the Post-Office, in the Privy Council, in the Pipewater, and in the Punjab! ”

“ And thus Scotland, instead of being one of the idlest and most backward countries in Europe, has, within the compass of little more than a lifetime, issued in one of the most active, contented, and prosperous,—exercising an amount of influence upon the literature, science, political economy, and industry of modern times, out of all proportion to the natural resources of its soil or the amount of its population. ”

“ Since 1745, Scotland has quadrupled her population. The commercial prosperity of Scotland, with all that this involves, dates from the same period. It is since that period that Scotland has sent forth most of that series of eminent men who have left their names memorable in the various walks of active and industrial life, at home and abroad. From that period, with some allowance for those numerous Scottish thinkers who taught philosophy in the European Universities in earlier centuries, dates the rise and development of what is known as the Scottish Philosophy. ”

“ Amid such scenes the Scottish national character has been developed, and under their influence have naturally been created the exquisite poetry, the enchanting music, the noble art and architecture, and the austere civilisation of imperial Scotland. ”

“ That in such circumstances so many men in Scotland, and especially so many men of the legal profession, should have maintained the obnoxious creed, and maintained it with such tenacity and mutual fidelity in spite of all temptation, is a fact of which Scotland may well be proud. As a body, the Scottish Whigs of 1802 seem to have been as courageous and pure-minded a set of men as there were in Great Britain. ”

“ Scotland had but little of the constitutional evolution so conspicuous in the history of England. The reason is that while the English kings, with their fiefs and wars in France, had constantly to be asking their parliaments for money, and while Parliament first exacted the redress of grievances, in Scotland the king was expected “to live of his own” on the revenue of crown-lands, rents, feudal aids, fines exacted in Courts of Law, and duties on merchandise. ”

“ I suppose you have often been in Scotland before, and you are not Scottish yourself, so perhaps you can't quite feel as I do about it. Basil, who has travelled so much, says that Scotland has in miniature almost all the picked bits of scenery of other countries; but they do not appear to be in miniature when you're motoring through them. They seem on an enormous scale; and each beauty spot is different from every other. ”