Scots

“ Has not every instance proved somewhat similar to the so much dreaded union between England and Scotland, where the Scots, instead of becoming a poor, despicable, dependent people, have become much more secure, happy, and respectable? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Amusement and business walk hand-in-hand—you hardly know, from their cheerful countenances, which is which; for the Scots, though a high-cheeked, are not an ill-favoured folk in their features—and though their mouths are somewhat of the widest, their teeth are white as well as sharp, and on the opening of their ruddy lips, their ivory-cases are still further brightened by hearty smiles. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ I find by your tongues you are from Scotland, gentlemen; my grandmother by the father’s side was of your country, and I am so prepossessed in its favour, that I never meet a Scotchman but my heart warms. The Scots are very brave people. There is scarce a great family in the kingdom that cannot boast of some exploits performed by its ancestors many hundred years ago. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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.
13
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? ”

“ Just as among the Scots we find two distinct tongues, so we likewise find two different [4] ways of life and conduct. For some are born in the forests and mountains of the north, and these we call men of the Highland, but the others men of the Lowland. By foreigners the former are called Wild Scots, the latter householding Scots. The Irish tongue is in use among the former, the English tongue among the latter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This day, John Ray, the eminent naturalist, entered Scotland for a short excursion. In the Itineraries which he has left, he gives, besides zoological observations, some notes on general matters. ‘The Scots, generally (that is, the poorer sort) , wear, the men blue bonnets on their heads, and some russet; the women only white linen, which hangs down their backs as if a napkin were pinned about them. When they go abroad, none of them wear hats, but a party-coloured blanket which they call a plaid, over their heads and shoulders. The women, generally, to us seemed none of the handsomest. ”

“ The Scots were fierce fighters, and in the days when war meant conquest and conquest meant pillage the Scots were unexcelled in all lines. Now that the world is putting up a different standard for success we find the Scotchmen adapting themselves to modern ideas; and in science, invention, law and commerce they can show down with any lot of people twice their size on earth. They are proud of their country, and can recite its legends and its poems of Burns even if they are so poor that they don’t have a square meal a day. ”

“ Not so the Scots:—they are everywhere recommending the antiquity of their own country to public notice, vindicating its history, and setting off its poetry, and, by dint of constant attention to their grand national concern, have prevailed so far, as to have the broken jargon they speak to be considered as the most proper language for our pastoral poetry. Our most polite ladies affect to lisp out Scottish airs ”

“ V. J. PREFACE There are few poets to-day who write in the Scots vernacular, and the modesty of the supply is perhaps determined by the slenderness of the demand, for pure Scots is a tongue which in the changes of the age is not widely understood, even in Scotland. The various accents remain, but the old words tend to be forgotten, and we may be in sight of the time when that noble speech shall be degraded to a northern dialect of English. ”

“ Scotland saved herself from stupid kings and a multitude of horrors237 by previously giving her people the rudiments of knowledge. We in America have never had, from English writers, either fair play or full truth about the Scots, nor is the Scotsman’s part in the making of the United States generally appreciated. The Scotch Puritans not only exercised a marked and lasting influence upon their brethren in England, but upon those beyond sea. ”

“ One half of Scotland speaks Irish, and all these as well as the Islanders we reckon to belong to the Wild Scots. In dress, in the manner of their outward life, and in good morals, for example, these come behind the householding Scots.... From the mid-leg to the foot they go uncovered; their dress is, for an over garment, a loose plaid, and a shirt saffron-dyed. They are armed with bow and arrows, a broadsword, and a small halbert. They always carry in their belt a stout dagger, single-edged, but of the sharpest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ The conquest of Scotland proved a far more difficult matter than that of Wales. The early history of the kingdom of [Pg 279] Scotland is a complicated one. When the Angles and Saxons landed in Britain, a great part of the mountainous region north of the Firth of Forth was inhabited by a Celtic tribe, the Picts. There was, however, on the west coast a little kingdom of the Irish Celts, who were then called Scots. By the opening of the tenth century the Picts had accepted the king of the Scots as their ruler, and the annalists begin to refer to the highland region as the land of the Scots. ”

“ And hence is it that the English, besides other things, particularly challenge to themselves beauty, music, and feasting. The Scots are proud of their nobility, alliance to the crown, and logical subtleties. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I succeeded in drawing a Scottish couple, a man with his wife. For the most part the Scots are sturdy, with florid faces and powerful necks; they have many children and attractive, ancient clan-names. ”

“ On the whole, perhaps, Europe has not done so badly with her Scots, the reason being that she never allowed them to be any Scotcher than she could help, and turned them out the minute they became aggressive. In England, however, the more Scotch and the more aggressive the Scot becomes the more we seem to like him. ”

“ The Scots had a widely different origin: they originally came over from Ireland, where they inhabited the eastern coasts, settled in the neighbourhood of Loch Lomond, and made an alliance with the nearest tribes, for the purpose of ravaging the possessions of the Britons.
They were severely chastised by Theodosius, who visited Britain in 343. He succeeded in expelling them from the Roman provinces and driving them back to their wild retreats. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There were others who were far more successful.{63} “The conversation of the Scots,” wrote Johnson, “grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities wear fast away; their dialect is likely to become in half a century provincial and rustic, even to themselves. The great, the learned, the ambitious, and the vain, all cultivate the English phrase, and the English pronunciation; and in splendid companies Scotch is not much heard, except now and then from an old lady.” ”

“ That more of the Britons who fled northward, from the oppression and tyranny of the Romans, settled in the low lands of Scotland, than among the Scots of the mountains, may be easily imagined, from the very nature of the country. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 title continues:—“Among the Low Country Scots, as they are described by those who have the second sight, and now, to occasion farther enquiry, collected and compared by a circumspect enquirer residing among the Scottish-Irish (i.e., the Gael, or Highlanders) in Scotland.” ”

“ The Scots have something to plead for their easy reception of an improbable fiction; they are seduced by their fondness for their supposed ancestors. A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist, who does not love Scotland better than truth: he will always love it better than inquiry ”

“ A lady asked a very silly Scotch nobleman, how it happened that the Scots who came out of their own country were, generally speaking, men of more abilities than those who remained at home. "O madam," said he, "the reason is obvious. At every outlet there are persons stationed to examine all who pass, that, for the honor of the country, no one be permitted to leave it who is not a man of understanding."—"Then," said she, "I suppose your lordship was smuggled." ”