My text is taken from a writer to whom every discourse on our
country goes for authority and illustrations.
Among all the provinces in Scotland, if an intelligent stranger
were asked to describe the most varied and the most beautiful, it
is probable he would name the county of Perth. A native, also, of
any other district of Caledonia, though his partialities might lead
him to prefer his native county in the first instance, would
certainly class that of Perth in the second, and thus give its
inhabitants a fair right to plead, that—prejudice apart—Perthshire
forms the fairest portion of the northern kingdom. Scott was an
alien in Perthshire, his judgment of which, then, should be
“neither partial nor impartial,” as the Provost of Portobello
desired; while it is so much my native heath that I give it no
place but that of first in all the counties of Britain. There can
be small doubt of the verdict pronounced by visitors, who take the
Scottish Highlands as the cream of our island’s scenery, and in
most cases know little of the Highlands beyond this central maze of
mountains and valleys, falling to the rich plain of Strathmore,
spread out between the{2} rugged Grampians and the green hills
of Ochil and Sidlaw.
Here arose the ancient Alban, or realm of Alpin, the core of
historic Scotland, a name that has been fondly identified with that
of the Alps; but I am not going to entangle myself in the snares of
philology. If the Perthshire Bens seem insignificant beside the
Alps, for the former, at least, no boastful pretensions are made by
their sons, who familiarly speak of them as the “hills” rather than
the mountains. Hill , indeed, is
used in the Highlands in a rougher sense, to denote the wild heathy
land as distinct from the cultivated glen. I have heard an
old-fashioned sportsman speak of going out on “the hill,” when he
was actually descending to a lower level; and so R. L. Stevenson
has it—
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Alban appears to have extended above Perthshire, taking in at
least the headwaters of the Spey and other streams flowing north.
It certainly included the basin of the Tay and the upper waters of
the Forth. And as Lowland and Highland scenery are finely mingled
on these rivers, so here met and blended the confluent torrents of
blood and language swelling into a steady stream of national life.
What may be called a Scottish kingdom first took shape on the banks
of Tay, where long was fixed its chief seat. Something like a
pattern spun by the shuttle of war comes at last to light on a torn
web of blood-dyed, mist-dimmed checks and stripes, hitherto a
puzzling blur for the most erudite spectacles. The Muse of early
history seems like that chameleon, whose fate was explained by a
Highland soldier: “I put it on my bonnet and it went black; I put
it on my coat and it turned red; but when I let it oot on my kilt,
the tartan fairly bursted it.”
It is an old reproach against us that every Scot looks on
himself as descended from “great and glorious but forgotten kings.”
If, indeed, we calculate by geometrical progression how many
millions of ancestors each of us can claim in the last thirty
generations or so, the chances seem to be against any Briton not
having some strain of quasi-royal blood in his veins. Scotland had,
at least, many kings to be descended from, several apocryphal
dozens of them, as named and numbered by George Buchanan, before he
comes down to chronicles that can be verified. But to our critical
age, the long row of early royal portraits exhibited at Holyrood,
painted by a Dutchman at so much the square foot, seem worth still
less as records than as works of art. The most ardent Scottish
patriot no longer sets store by such fables as historians like
Hector Boece wove into their volumes; nor is it necessary to
examine so fond imaginations as that of descent from a Pharaoh’s
daughter, Scota, or from a Ninus king of Nineveh. Finn and Fergus,
Oscar and Ossian, we must leave in cloudland, looking downwards to
pick our steps over slippery rock and boggy heather, among which
there is no firm footing upon traces of an aboriginal pre-Celtic
stratum of humanity.
When the Romans garrisoned rather than occupied southern
Scotland, and made reconnoitring expeditions into the north, its
fastnesses were stoutly defended by fierce Caledonians, woodland
savages, and Picti, painted warriors, who may or may not have been
the same people. If the same, they may well have split into hostile
tribes, warring against each other like the kindred Mohawks and
Hurons, sometimes amalgamated by conquest, sometimes uniting to
make raids on richer Lowland clearings. After the false dawn of
Roman annals ceases to throw a glimmer on those hardy barbarians,
darkness again falls over mountain and forest, lit only by the
twinkling lamp of adventurous missionaries. Then the twilight of
middle-age history shows a Pictish kingdom seated in Charlemagne’s
age on the Tay and its tributaries, but there presently overthrown
by pushful invaders.
These were the Dalriad Scots from Ireland, who began their
independent career by getting precarious foothold on the nearest
coastland promontory of North Britain. Baffled, as it seems, in an
attempt thence to master the country of their origin, then driven,
perhaps, from their coast settlements by a stronger swarm of
Scandinavian hornets, this stirring race shoved their way across
the western Highlands to take a firmer stand in the heart of
Scotland, when Kenneth MacAlpine overthrew the Pictish kingdom at
Scone, its capital. Buchanan reports two successive battles, the
scene of the former a few miles off, at Forteviot, where he makes
Kenneth act on the motto of the Celtic Society,
Olim Marte, nunc arte . His chiefs, we
are told, not being very keen for the encounter, while they lay
snoring off their drink, the king worked upon them by means of a
young cousin of his, disguised as an angel in phosphorescent
fish-skins, and equipped with a sort of primitive megaphone,
through which he roused the sleepers by a promise of victory, then
slipped off his celestial raiment to disappear in the darkness
before these heavy-headed warriors were wide awake. It is not often
we are taken so well behind the scenes of a miracle.
At Forteviot, a name whose prefix is held as one of the rare
Pictish vocables left to build philological theories, Kenneth
appears to have fixed his own seat. The capital of such a kingdom
would be no more permanent than Abyssinia’s chief camp at Gondar or
Abbis Abbeba. At all events it was hereabouts that currents of
molten metal came together to mingle, cool and harden into the
foundation of the Scottish nation. As yet it was the kingdom of
Alban which spread around like a lava flood, to overrun a more or
less imperfect amalgamation of Briton and Saxon to the south, of
Norseman and Celt to the north and west, while, on all sides, it
once and again had nearly been drowned by fresh waves of invasion
from the Baltic. When, nearly two hundred years after Kenneth’s
Perthshire victories, Malcolm II. had added Lothian and Strathclyde
to his volcanic realm, the style of Scotia appears in history, by
which the settlers now dominant in Caledonia seem to kick off their
connection with Ireland, where their name dies out as it is born
again in the growing Scotland, and Duns Scotus becomes no longer in
danger of being confused with a Scotus Erigena.
There is early Scottish history boiled down to a page or two,
on which one might work in other changes that had made less violent
progress, while the tops of the Grampians were being weather-worn
into silt for the Tay. Those Picts had been in part conquered by
the Cross before they fell under the sword. The disciplined faith
of Rome overlaid the wild Christianity implanted from Iona. The
ecclesiastical metropolis was removed from the West to Dunkeld,
then for a time to Abernethy, another old Pictish centre, and
finally to St. Andrews. Intercourse with the world, and especially
with the Norman conquerors of England, imported the feudal system
with its dovetailing of power and ambition between kings who were
in turn sovereign and vassal on different estates of their
territories. The English tongue began to absorb that of the Gael,
as the Celtic leaven seemed to be lost in the Saxon dough. But when
Malcolm Canmore and his Anglicising queen did so much to bring
Scotland into touch with its more civilised neighbour, they moved
their chief seat no nearer the new border than
Dunfermline.
For long after Scotland had developed into a vertebrate
organism, its heart beat in the geographical centre. Its kings were
crowned at Scone, Charles II. the last of them, when indeed the
immemorial sanctity of that Pictish palace had fallen into some
disesteem. The adjacent city of Perth, with its Castle, its
Cathedral, and its four monasteries, was the Winchester of
Scotland, as Scone the Westminster. The early Parliaments met at
Perth more often than at other towns that might suit the
convenience of kings who had to be much on the move through their
agitated dominion. During the English intrusion, Perth was
garrisoned by the Edwards’ lieutenants, and suffered repeated
attacks from Wallace and Bruce, who found concealment and
rallying-place in the wild woods within a few miles of the city
walls. The honour of being the capital was not definitely taken
from Perth till the murder of James I. showed it too near the
stormy Highlands, while the Dunedin citadel seemed no longer in
close peril from the English side.
Before the seat of government came to be fixed at Edinburgh,
king and parliament are often found at Stirling, with Linlithgow
for the Versailles of Scottish Royalty. Perth still held a high
place, recognised by a decree of James VI. as second in the
kingdom. Down to the end of his reign, its Provosts were as often
as not the great lords of the neighbourhood. It had a leading voice
in national opinion. Some of the earliest martyrs suffered here;
then here broke out the first tumult of the Reformation. Later on,
it became a hot focus of Presbyterian and Covenanting zeal; and
after the popular worship had been firmly established, it was
around Perth that sprang up several of its sectarian
offshoots.
Accident of situation rather than its own choice again made
Perth a centre of affairs, when Mar’s melting army lay here through
the winter of 1715, watching King George’s force at Stirling; and
the forlorn Old Pretender reached Scone in time to chill the
spirits of his partisans, already too near freezing-point. Prince
Charlie made a more dashing appearance at Perth for a few days; but
when he had marched on, the douce burghers let it be seen that
their hearts did not go with him. They more warmly received the
Duke of Cumberland, as representing the orderly settlement that was
good for trade. The wild Highlandman, with his uncanny weapons and
his unbusiness-like sentiments, was here looked on as suspiciously
as the Red Indian warrior in a border city of America, who in New
York or Philadelphia would draw more sympathy or staring curiosity.
The Fair City, while willing to keep friends with the Tory lairds
whose names have been familiar to her for centuries, cast her douce
vote for prosperity and progress. In the Georgian age she gained
some such reputation as Norwich in England, cultivating arts and
letters as well as trade, and becoming known, in a modest way, by
her printing presses, of which the Encyclopædia
Perthensis was the most notable
production.
Meanwhile, the blending of once hostile races had gone on
faster in the centre of Scotland than at its extremities. Where
first a national government had come into being, a higher
organisation of tribal life was evolved. Here, as elsewhere,
civilisation proceeded by steps over which civilised philanthropy
shakes its head. The Perthshire Highlands, not to speak of
Strathmore, contained fertile straths and valleys that offered
themselves as cheap reward for the followers and favourites of
Scottish kings. Norman, Saxon, and still farther-fetched
adventurers got charters to make good by the sword against the sons
of the soil. Its lords, native or
fremd , lost and won at taking a hand
in the general game of Scottish history, as when the abetters of
Bruce turned out to have played on the right card, or again, when
the murderers of James I. paid dearly for their crime, to the
profit of those who hunted them down. But, in the main, plaids did
not hold out against coats of mail, so that for centuries the great
lords of Perthshire have been of Lowland origin. Like doughty Hal
Smith of the
Wynd, the sons of the plain in old times had claws as
sharp as the mountain cats’; it was only when cultivators and
craftsmen had ceased to handle arms, unless for holiday sport, that
a spate of Highland war could burst through the passes, even then
soon to scatter and spend itself in the face of disciplined
resistance.
But while those strangers rose to power and wealth upon the
heather, they fell captive to its spirit, taking on the manners,
sentiments, and dress of the dispossessed clans. The Stewarts from
England, the Campbells from Ireland, was it? the Drummonds from
Hungary or where? among other names of chivalrous antecedents,
bloomed out as clans, with new tartans, feuds, and legends, to
complicate the native pattern of flesh and blood; and in no long
time they became more Highland than the Highlanders themselves.
Most remarkable is the adoption of what has come to be called the
Scottish national dress, which, according to some modern critics,
ought rather to be the mackintosh. There was a time when Stewart or
Murray looked on the plaid as badge of a savage foeman; there would
be a time when the imported Highlanders grew as proud of kilt and
bagpipes as if these had come down to them straight from Adam. All
over the world have gone those badges of a race that gave them to
its conquerors in exchange for its proudest blood. The cult of the
tartan, revived in our own age by romantic literature and royal
patronage, is an old story. One of the early emigrants to the
Southern States of America is said to have rigged out all his
negroes in kilts and such-like, teaching them also to speak Gaelic
and to pipe and reel among cotton fields and cane swamps. But when
one of those blackamoor retainers, liveried in a kilt, was sent to
meet a practically-minded countryman landing from Scotland, the
effect of so transmogrified a figure proved appalling. “Hae ye been
long oot?” stammered the newcomer, and took his passage back by the
next ship.
Away from Scotland, all true Scots carry over the world an
outfit of which the colours, the trimmings, and the gewgaws come
from the Highlands, while the hard-wearing qualities of the stuff
are rather of Lowland manufacture. Both spinning and dyeing, I
maintain, have best been done in Perthshire, a county of varied
aspects, which set me the example of passing to a change of
metaphor. It is in this central region that a right proportion of
the Saxon dough and the Celtic yeast, baked for centuries by fires
of love and war, have risen into the most crusty loaf of Scottish
character. In the damp western Highlands and the cold north the
baking may have been less effectual, producing a more spongy mass,
not so full of nutriment, but more relished by some as a change
from the stodginess of modern life. In some parts of the Lowlands,
again, the dough turns out more dour and sour, not enough leavened
by fermentations that leave it too leathery for all teeth. While
all over Scotland there has been going on a more or less thorough
interaction and coalescence of once repellent bodies, in
Perthshire, I assert, the amalgamation has been most complete. “Hae
ye been happy in yer jeels?” is a civil question I have heard one
old wife ask of another. Here nature seems to have been happy in a
due mixture of sweet and acid, shredded and stirred, boiled and
moulded, with the success of Dundee marmalade.
The same fusion as between Highlander and Lowlander, between
Norman and Saxon, it has been the work of time to bring about
between Northerner and Southerner, the process there hindered by a
fixed border-line of hostile memories, of variant creeds, customs,
and laws, going to keep up natural antipathies. But such fences are
now so much fallen down that there is little to stop different
breeds from straggling on to one another’s fields, the movement
indeed being mostly one way, since the leaner flock is more tempted
from hill-sides eaten bare to the green pastures of the south. What
is as yet a mechanical mixture tends to become a chemical one, as
these wandering atoms find affinities in a fresh environment; then
the substance of national life should be enriched, as every
generation goes on incorporating the coarse good-humour and
practical temper of the plainsman, with the generous affections and
mettlesome hardihood of the mountaineer. The result as yet may be
best seen in London, that crucible of blood and manners, where
there are Englishmen who would fain affect to be Scots, and Scots
who have forgotten all but their pride in Scotland. I met one such
the other day in a train, who had his boy arrayed in a kilt, but
neither of them knew what tartan it was. Where a Campbell wears the
colours of a Cameron with indifference, he unconsciously continues
what was begun by a Graham or a Gordon inventing a tartan for
himself, and may end in plaid and tweed taking their turn of
fashion with serge and broadcloth, when Tros
Tyriusque are indistinguishably mixed in one name
and nature.
Such is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But there are
centrifugal as well as centripetal forces at work. When the fear of
a foreign foe no longer hangs over us, we fall into wars of
interests, of classes, of sexes; and piping times of peace breed
likewise artificial injuries, useless martyrdoms, unpractical
patriotisms, by which we would fain set our teeth on edge from the
real sufferings of our fathers. Idly retrospective persons find
nothing better to do than to rub up old sores into an imitation of
plague spots, instead of leaving them to heal and vanish in the way
of nature. Some discontented spirits among my countrymen have
lately been agitating for the protection of Scottish rights and
sentiments: it would appear more to the purpose if Englishmen got
up a league to bar out northern aggrandisement. While the sovereign
of the United Kingdom is bound to be of Scottish descent, and while
custom fills the English archbishoprics with an apostolic
succession of sons of the Covenant, there still, indeed, remains
such a scandal as the Prime Ministership being occasionally open to
mere Englishmen. This apart, however, most of our grievances may be
comfortably digested by chewing the cud of the Union in John Bull’s
own spirit of easy good-nature.
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts,
And power to him who power exerts:
Hast not thy share? On wingèd feet,
Lo! it rushes thee to meet.
And all that Nature made thine own,
Floating in air, or pent in stone,
Shall rend the hills and cleave the sea,
And like thy shadow follow thee.
The sorest gall of Scotland seems to be that her name has
been like to merge in England’s greater one, to which smart a
plaster must be applied in the revived title of Britain. No
school-book would sell north of the Tweed in this generation that
let an English army serve a king of England. Yet we cannot play the
censor on the speech of our Continental neighbours, who denounce as
England the power that has ruled the waves to their loss; and it is
England which so many sons and dependents, in so wide regions of
the world, speak of as “home.” In the London Library some vague
hint of dirks and claymores has availed to keep Scottish History a
separate department; but one notes with concern how works on the
Topography of Scotland are scattered under the head of England,
while London is set up with a heading to itself. But what is this
slight to the carelessness of foreign authors quoting Scott and
Burns among the English poets!
It is perhaps inevitable that a firm with a long title should
come to be best known by the name of the prominent partner. One
never could be expected to style Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap in
full, unless by way of formal address; had it been no more than
Dodson and Fogg, one might make shift at an Austria-Hungary
bracketing. Lord Bute is accused of prompting George III. to pride
in being born a Briton ; but the
grievance seems more philosophically handled in a story of two
Sandy tars at Trafalgar, one of whom found fault with Nelson’s
famous signal: “‘England expects’—aye, but nothing about poor old
Scotland!” was his grumble. “Hoots!” answered his comrade, “don’t
they know that every Scotsman is sure to do his duty?”
I confess to having lukewarm sympathy with the perfervid
patriotism that is too ready to find quarrel in straws. Scotland
has got quite her share of practical benefit from the “sad and
sorrowful Union,” and need not grudge to England the nominal
advantages of size and wealth, which the latter sometimes appears
to occupy as caretaker for her neighbour. So long as Scottish
enterprise, thrift, and industry are allowed fair play on both
sides of the Border, it seems childish to lament over lost titles
and ensigns, toys of history, that only in a museum may escape
being broken, and sooner or later will be swept into time’s
dustbin. When one sees how we have peacefully imbued our fellow
subjects with our best blood, I for one am not too sorry that our
dark record of feuds and slaughter and bigotry falls into its place
in the background of a grander scene, and that instead of
cherishing thistly independence as a romantic Norway or an austere
Portugal, we merge our national life into the greater kingdom’s,
which, by good luck or good guidance, has come to stand so high in
the world for freedom, enlightenment, and solidity. In this kingdom
we take much the same place as the Manchus in China. All over the
world we go forth to prosper like that Chosen People of the old
dispensation, with this difference, that we have our Sion in our
own hands, to which come pilgrims from all nations. The comparison
would fit better if it allowed me to call Perthshire the Scottish
land of Judah.
True Scots should have more philosophy than to imitate
unenlightened patriotisms that would interrupt a natural process
defined by Herbert Spencer as change from an incoherent homogeneity
to a coherent heterogeneity accompanied by the dissipation of
motion and the integration of matter. So Penelope peoples, in their
darkness, undo the work of civilising daylight. Let Bohemia rage
and the states of the Balkans imagine vain things. But why should
Scotland waste time and electric light on looking back too fondly
to the things that are behind, while she cannot help pressing
forward to the inevitable destiny before her? With the warning of
Ireland at hand, some of us cry out for Home Rule and such-like
retrogressions that might go to giving back, at one end of the
United Kingdom, the shadow of its cloudy dignity along with the
substance of its old discords.
Where is this reactionary
Particularismus to stop? There are
parts of Caledonia which, in its stern and wild times, were
independent of each other, some that still are as different from
one another in blood and speech, as most of Scotland is from
England. Shall Badenoch or Buchan awake its overlaid individuality?
May not Galloway and Strathclyde set up for recognition of their
ex-independence? Then why not encourage Strathbogie, the Cumbraes,
the Braes of Bonny Doon, or the parish of Gandercleugh, to lament
upon the fate that has made them members of one greater body? Nay,
now that the clans are broken up, could they not contrive to respin
their warp of local loyalty, crossing the woof of national
patriotism? Such reductio ad absurdum
is worth thinking about, when at this moment there are signs
of relapse in the long convalescence from that Jacobite fever that
“carried” hard heads as well as soft hearts, and set old grudges
against the Union flaunting in plaid and philibeg.
I am informed of a movement for putting the kingdom of Fife
in its right place before a world too apt to jest at its
pretensions. These are many and serious. Of old,
Fibh had kings of its own, of such
immemorial antiquity that their very names, much more their
portraits, are not forthcoming. Enclosed between two firths, this
region makes almost an island, with the Ochils as border-line
cutting it off from the rest of Scotland. Thus the Roman legions
thundered by it; and its maiden independence was never violated, if
we reject a scandalous suggestion as to Cupar being the Mount
Graupius of Tacitus. The kings of Scotland were much at home here,
notably Malcolm Canmore, that effectual founder of the modern
kingdom. If Bruce were born who knows where, he came to be buried
at Dunfermline. History tells how Queen Mary was lodged at
Lochleven, and how more than one King James had to be snatched
away, by force or fraud, from his chosen residence in Fife. The
dialect of Fife, mixed with that of Lothian, made the standard
Court language, while Gaelic was ebbing out of the Perthshire
straths. The see of the old Scottish Church was at St. Andrews,
where arose the first northern university, the local Saint Regulus
being supplanted by that apostle who, according to scoffers, was
chosen as Scotland’s patron because of the keen eye he showed on
earth for loaves and fishes. In Protestant days, several of the
religious leaders—Knox, the Melvilles, the Erskines, John Glas,
Edward Irving, Thomas Chalmers—were all either natives of or
sojourners in Fife. This
many-havened coast was the nursery of the Scottish navy
and commerce. The most famous national product, next to flesh and
blood and whisky, is golf, whose headquarters are in the East Neuk
of this choice shire. When we consider the many towns of Fife, its
wealth in horn and corn, and coal and fish, its output of textile
fabrics, and remember its past history, should we not allow that
this and not Perthshire is truly the heart of Scotland? It has even
a Wales in Kinross, whose craving for separate status might one day
raise a troublesome question. Nor does it want a classic bard to
invoke for it the trumpet of fame:
Nymphae, quae colitis highissima monta Fifaea,
Seu vos Pittenwema tenent, seu Cralia crofta,
Sive Anstraea domus, ubi nat haddocus in undis,
Codlineusque ingens, et fleucca et sketta
pererrant
Per costam, et scopulis lobster monifootus in
udis
Creepat, et in mediis ludit whitenius undis,
etc.
Gentle reader, can you guess what standard poet I
quote? Je vous le donne en cent.
The most hackneyed citation, it seems, ought nowadays to be
labelled, for when in Bonnie Scotland
I aired a verse beginning, “Fairshon had a son who married
Noah’s daughter,” a certain Caledonian newspaper critic was moved
to applaud by calling for the author. Such be the proficient
patriots who scunner at King Edward’s title as Seventh across the
Tweed, and at other bawbeeworths of offence to Scottish
nationality!
After this fling by the way, I fall back into my jogtrot. It
seems claimable for Fife, then, that its county council be
glorified as a parliament sitting by turns at Cupar, Dunfermline,
and Kirkcaldy; or, at least, that in a revived Scottish parliament
its representatives shall assert their old privilege of voting
first, before that presumptuous Perthshire. The sovereign’s title
raises some difficulty. Edward VII., of course, is out of the
question. But it has to be admitted that Edward I. of England
received the homage of Fife at Dunfermline, so his present Majesty
might justly be styled Edward II. qua
King of Fife. There being, indeed, a doubt as to how far
Edward Baliol made his reign a fait
accompli in Fife, some precisians propose to meet
the case by treating our king locally as the second and a half
Edward. In the army, of course, it is not to be borne that the Fife
contingent shall be lumped together with English forces. In future,
one or more British regiments must be equipped and distinguished as
Fifers. The epithet Fifeish should come into more constant use; but
as misconception might arise from vulgar misuse,
Fifeian may be coined as an untarnished
adjective, the old one to be applied to the less admirable or more
commonplace features of the county, its distilleries, railway
junctions, colliery villages, east winds, and so forth, while a
discrimination is to be made in quoting those qualities and
achievements that have made Fife the noblest member of the greatest
empire in the world, whose style shall forthwith run, at least in
local acts, The Kingdom of Fife, with the adjacent kingdoms of
Scotland, England, and Ireland, and the rest of the British
dominions, etc., etc.
For Perthshire, I make no such pretensions to isolated
dignity, only for having set a pattern to all Scotland, and thus
exhibiting some title to be taken as hub of the universe. But in
rambling over its hills and glens, I hope to let it show for itself
the truth of Scott’s estimate, justified by his reference to other
writers, such as might be quoted by the hundred, all in the same
tale of due admiration.
It is long since Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, with that
excellent taste which characterises her writings, expressed her
opinion that the most interesting district of every country, and
that which exhibits the varied beauties of natural scenery in
greatest perfection, is that where the mountains sink down upon the
champaign, or more level land. The most picturesque, if not the
highest hills, are also to be found in the county of Perth. The
rivers find their way out of the mountainous region by the wildest
leaps, and through the most romantic passes connecting the
Highlands with the Lowlands. Above, the vegetation of a happier
climate and soil is mingled with the magnificent characteristics of
mountain-scenery; and woods, groves, and thickets in profusion,
clothe the base of the hills, ascend up the ravines, and mingle
with the precipices. It is in such favoured regions that the
traveller finds what the poet Gray, or some one else, has termed,
Beauty lying in the lap of Terror.
