Scots people

“ The people of Scotland did not like the union of the two kingdoms, at first, because the [151] king and many of the nobility went away to live in London, which, as there was little trade, left Scotland in a very poor condition; and it was a long time, indeed, not before the people had experienced the great benefits of British trade and commerce, that they began to feel as a part of the English nation; but now that the English and Scots have become like one people, it is certainly much happier and better for both. ”

“ The English language could scarcely furnish language violent enough for the purpose of describing the Scots: “The people are proud, arrogant, vain-glorious boasters, bloody, barbarous, and inhuman butchers. ”

“ He says—‘The manners and customs of the Scots vary with the diversity of their speech, for two languages are spoken amongst them, the Scottish and the Teutonic, the latter of which is the language of those who occupy the seaboard and plains, while the race of Scottish speech inhabits the highlands and outlying islands. The people of the coast are of domestic and civilised habits, trusty, patient, and urbane, decent in their attire, affable and peaceful, devout in divine worship, yet always prone to resist a wrong at the hands of their enemies. ”

“ The people were savage and uncultivated, bat they were generous,enthusiastic, and by no means deficient in a sort of rude chivalry. They had a wild imagination, fed by dark and gloomy traditions. They peopled the caves, the woods, the rivers, and the mountains with spirits, elves, giants, and dragons; and are we to wonder that the Scots, a nation in whose veins the blood of the races of Scandinavia is unquestionably mingled, should at a very remote period have evinced an enthusiastic admiration for song and poetry ”

“ Scotland and the court of Scotland were crowded with English and Norman knights, with English and Norman clerks. They got benefices, temporal and 26 spiritual, in the Scottish land. They may have converted; they may have civilized; but conversion and civilization are processes which are not always specially delighted in by those who are to be converted and civilized. Anyhow they were strangers, brought into the land by kingly favour, to flourish, as men would naturally deem, at the cost of the sons of the soil. Jealousy of the native Scots. The national spirit of the Scottish people arose ”

“ In the best Scottish houses, even the king’s palaces, the windows are not glazed throughout, but the upper part only, the lower have two wooden shuts or folds to open at pleasure and admit the fresh air. The Scots cannot endure to hear their country or countrymen spoken against. They have neither good bread, cheese, or drink. They cannot make them, nor will they learn. ”

“ For the cheer, my lord, a mess of white broth, a fat capon well larded, a dish of beef collops for auld Scotland's sake, and it may be a cup of right old wine, that was barrelled before Scotland and England were one nation—Then for company, one or two of our own loving countrymen—and maybe my housewife may find out a bonny Scots lass or so. ”

“ The dream of him who loved Scotland best would lie not so much in the direction of antiquarian revival, as in the hope that his country might be pointed out as one that in spite of rocks, and rigor, and poverty, could yet teach the world by precept and example, could lead the van and point the moral, where greater nations and fairer states had failed. Those who believe the Scots to be so eminently vain a race, will say that already we are in our opinion the tenth legion of civilization. ”

“ They augur, in whispers to each other, how high and how far you may push your fortune—and all that you design to make of it, is, to return to Scotland, eat raw oatmeal cakes, baked upon a peat-fire, have your hand shaken by every loon of a blue-bonnet who chooses to dub you cousin, though your relationship comes by Noah; drink Scots twopenny ale, eat half-starved red-deer venison, when you can kill it, ride upon a galloway, and be called my right honourable and maist worthy lord! ”

“ Take the single kingdom of Scotland alone. Englishmen are carelessly wont to suppose there is such a thing as a Scotch temperament. Scotchmen know better. Even if we omit from the reckoning such remoter and more doubtful elements as Black Celts, and so forth, we may say, roughly speaking, that Scotland consists of six distinct nationalities—the English of the Lothians, the Welsh of Strathclyde, the Irish Scots of Argyllshire, the true Gaels of the Highlands, the Picts of the east coast, and the Scandinavians of Orkney, Caithness, and Sutherland. ”

“ If, then, it was not by a displacement of race, but through the subtle influences of religion, feudalism, and commerce that the Scottish Lowlands came to be English in speech and in civilization, if the farmers of Fife and some, at least, of the burghers of Dundee or of Aberdeen were really Scots who had been subjected to English influences, we should expect to find no strong racial feeling in mediæval Scotland. ”

“ Acknowledging that the Scots had suffered much, and were in fact "a very ruined nation," yet what had befallen them had introduced, he hinted, a very desirable change in the constitution of Scottish society. It had enfranchised and encouraged the middle and lower classes. "The meaner sort in Scotland," he said, "love us well, and are likely to come into as thriving a condition as when they were under their own great lords, who made them work for their living no better than the peasants of France;" ”

“ 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. ”

“ We must advert to a peculiarity of our Scottish countrymen, which can be set down only on the credit side of their character—their sympathy with each other when they meet as wanderers in foreign countries. Scotland is just a small enough country to cause a certain unity of feeling amongst the people. Wherever they are, they feel that Scotsmen should stand, as their proverb has it, shoulder to shoulder. ”

“ Those who inhabit Scotland to the south of the Grampian chain, are tolerably civilized and obedient to the laws, and speak the English language; but those who inhabit [12] the north are more rude, homely, and unruly, and for this reason are called savages [or Wild Scots.] They wear, like the Irish, a large and full shirt, coloured with saffron, and over this a garment hanging to the knee, of thick wool, after the manner of a cassock. ”

“ These men be pleased with flesh, apples, and fruit for meat, and with milk for drink: and give them more to plays and to hunting, than to work and travail.
The land Scotia hath the name of Scots that dwell therein, and the same nation that was sometime first in Ireland, and all according thereto in tongue, in manners, and in kind. The men are light of heart, fierce, and courageous on their enemies. They love nigh as well death as thraldom, and they account it for sloth to die in bed, and a great worship and virtue to die in a field fighting against enemies. ”

“ I know not whether it be not peculiar to the Scots to have attained the liberal, without the manual arts, to have excelled in ornamental knowledge, and to have wanted not only the elegancies, but the conveniences of common life. Literature soon after its revival found its way to Scotland, and from the middle of the sixteenth century, almost to the middle of the seventeenth, the politer studies were very diligently pursued. The Latin poetry of Deliciæ Poëtarum Scotorum would have done honour to any nation, at least till the publication of May's Supplement the English had very little to oppose. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Posterity will look back with avidity and pleasure, to trace, if possible, the era of this or that particular settlement.
Pray, what is the reason that the Scots are in general more religious, more faithful, more honest, and industrious than the Irish? I do not mean to insinuate national reflections, God forbid! It ill becomes any man, and much less an American; but as I know men are nothing of themselves, and that they owe all their different modifications either to government or other local circumstances, there must be some powerful causes which constitute this great national difference. ”

“ It failed in Scotland, because the areas of the two contending kingdoms, though greatly unequal, were yet more approximate; and because the martial qualities and spirit of proud independence had been long fostered in Scotland by the arduous contests of different clans and parties. The Scotch were a hardy and an heroically brave people, with their magnificent mountains at their back; and, in their struggles with the ponderous power of England, discovered an invincible vigour, not only of resistance, but of resilience. ”

“ In the history of civilization therefore the sudden suppression of Scots, with all its unique expressive qualities may prove to have been a providential postponement; it may have been driven underground to emerge more triumphantly later. ”

“ The Scottish philosophy of realism and common sense dominated largely our infant colleges. It swayed the thinking and shaped the conduct of our public men in bar and pulpit. It was translated into action by the leaders of the Revolution.
So long as the Scots were able to hold their own against the tyrannical Stuart kings of England, and even while they were pouring by the tens of thousands into Ulster, making a new272 nation in northern Ireland,—the old land of the Scots,—there were but few emigrants, from Scotland direct, to the Atlantic Coast colonies. ”

“ In Scotland fleas are rare. They would starve on the skin of the Scotch men and are too well-mannered to attack that of the Scotch ladies.
As to good society it is no exception to the rule here. [Pg 90]
To study the manners of the Scotch, as well as to study the manners of any other nation, you must mix with the middle classes, with the people above all, for they are the real repository of the traditions of the country. You must travel third-class; there is nothing to be learnt in first. ”

“ I cannot conceive that the Scottish emigrants, to whom I imagine you allude, can be under greater obligations to this country than to the King, under whose gracious and merciful government they alone could have been enabled to visit this western region: And I trust, Sir, it is in the womb of time to say, that they are not that deluded and ungrateful people which you would represent them to be. ”

“ In education almost every classical school and colonial college in the South was established by these people. In character and abilities—trained and nourished by education, morals, and religion—the Scotch-Irish were excelled by no other people.
In our land—new birth of the ages—the names of the clans and of individuals who bear Caledonian names do not only call up scenes in Scotland’s history, but do forcibly emphasize our blessings of peace after long strife. One of the earliest Scottish stories I remember was of a Grant and a Macpherson, who met one day upon a log spanning a chasm. ”

“ Could you ever mistake a Scot for an un-Scot? No! Our wide-apart eyes and our dreamy yet practical expression, our high cheekbones, our sensitive, clear-cut nostrils, and the something mysterious in our gaze which no one can explain or understand, not even ourselves, is all our own. I have just found this out since crossing the border. And am I not a MacDonald of Dhrum?
I can't say that the first Scots I met—men, women, or children—looked like descendants of the robber hordes who used to make the Borderland their home ”

“ When the Apostolic See, according to her practice in all the world, stationed us in these western parts to preach to the pagan nations here, and so it came to pass that we entered into this island which is called Britain, before we were acquainted with it, supposing that they walked in the ways of the universal church, we felt a very high respect for the Britons as well as the Scots, from our regard to their sanctity of character; but when we came to know the Britons, we supposed the Scots must be superior to them. ”

“ Even in 1831 a Scottish member declared that Scots could never assemble without drawing blood; and one of their champions, Lord Cockburn, made the quaint admission: "The Scots are bad mobbers. They are too serious at it. They never joke, and they throw stones." ”

“ It is since Scottish writers have abandoned the search of a lost political history, have dropped their enthusiasm for a timid and turbulent ecclesiastical history, and have been content to depict the domestic annals of the people, to enter their shops and their houses, to follow them in the streets and the fields, and to record their everyday life—their eating and their drinking, their dress, their pleasures, their marriages, their wealth and their science—that Scottish history has become an enticing study. ”

“ For it has been truly said that the Scotch people have been made what they are by Scotland; that the Land has moulded and fashioned the People; and that in their literature, their religion, their manners, their history, the influence is seen of the physical characteristics of the country. ”