Chapter III: Introduction (2)

No yachtsman as yet threaded his way through the almost countless islets of our western seas; the only sails as yet reflected on the unruffled surface of the land-locked firths were the fisher’s and the trader’s. For the sea as yet love was neither felt nor affected. There was no gladness in its dark-blue waters. Fifteen years were to pass before Byron was born—the first of our poets, it has been said, who sang the delights of sailing. A ship was still “a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”[126] No Southerner went to the Highlands to hunt, or shoot, or fish. No one sought there a purer air. It was after Johnson’s tour that an English writer urged the citizens of Edinburgh to plant trees in the neighbourhood of their town because “the increase of vegetation would purify the air, and dispel those putrid and noxious vapours which are frequently wafted from the Highlands.”[127] It was on an early day of August, in a finer season than had been known for years, that Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, complained that neither temperance nor exercise could preserve him in any tolerable health in the unfriendly climate of Loch Lomond.[128] Of all the changes which have come over our country, perhaps none was more unforeseen than the growth of this passion for the Highlands and the Hebrides. Could Johnson have learnt from some one gifted with prophetic power that there were passages in his narrative which would move the men of the coming century to scoff, it was not his references to scenery which would have roused his suspicion. I have heard a Scotchman laugh uproariously over his description of a mountain as “a considerable protuberance.” He did not know however where the passage came, and he admitted that, absurd as it was, it was not quite so ridiculous when taken with the context. “Another mountain,” said Boswell, “I called immense. ‘No,’ replied Johnson, ‘it is no more than a considerable protuberance.’”[129] It was his hatred of exaggeration and love of accurate language which provoked the correction—the same hatred and the same love which led him at college to check his comrades if they called a thing “prodigious.”[130] But to us, nursed as we have been and our fathers before us in a romantic school, the language of Johnson and of his contemporaries about the wild scenes of nature never fails to rouse our astonishment and our mirth. Were they to come back to earth, I do not know but that at our extravagancies of admiration and style, our affectations in the tawdry art of “word-painting,” and at our preference of barren mountains to the meadow-lands, and corn-fields, and woods, and orchards, and quiet streams of southern England, their strong and manly common sense might not fairly raise a still heartier laugh.

[Sidenote: MOUNTAIN SCENERY.]

The ordinary reader is apt to attribute to an insensibility to beauty in Johnson what, to a great extent, was common to most of the men of his time. It is true that for the beauties of nature, whether wild or tame, his perception was by no means quick. Nevertheless, we find his indifference to barren scenery largely shared in by men of poetic temperament. Even Gray, who looked with a poet’s eye on the crags and cliffs and torrents by which his path wound along as he went up to the Grande Chartreuse, yet, early in September, when the heather would be all in bloom, writes of crossing in Perthshire “a wide and dismal heath fit for an assembly of witches.”[131] Wherever he wandered he loved to find the traces of men. It was not desolation, but the earth as the beautiful home of man that moved him and his fellows. _Mentem mortalia tangunt._ He found the Apennines not so horrid as the Alps, because not only the valleys but even the mountains themselves were many of them cultivated within a little of their very tops.[132] The fifth Earl of Carlisle, a poet though not a Gray, in August, 1768, hurried faster even than the post across the Tyrol from Verona to Mannheim, “because there was nothing but rest that was worth stopping one moment for.” The sameness of the scenery was wearisome to his lordship, “large rocky mountains, covered with fir-trees; a rapid river in the valley; the road made like a shelf on the side of the hill.” He rejoiced when he took his leave of the Alps, and came upon “fields very well cultivated, valleys with rich verdure, and little woods which almost persuaded him he was in England.”[133]

There is a passage in Camden’s description of Argyleshire in which we find feelings expressed which for the next two centuries were very generally entertained. “Along the shore,” he writes, “the country is more unpleasant in sight, what with rocks and what with blackish barren mountains.”[134] One hundred and fifty years after this was written, an Englishman, describing in 1740 the beautiful road which runs along the south-eastern shore of Loch Ness, calls the rugged mountains “those hideous productions of nature.”[135] He pictures to himself the terror which would come upon the Southerner who “should be brought blindfold into some narrow rocky hollow, inclosed with these horrid prospects, and there should have his bandage taken off. He would be ready to die with fear, as thinking it impossible he should ever get out to return to his native country.”[136] This account was very likely read by Johnson, for it was published in London only nineteen years before he made his tour. In the narrative of a Volunteer in the Duke of Cumberland’s army, we find the same gloom cast by mountain scenery on the spirits of Englishmen. The soldiers who were encamped near Loch Ness fell sick daily in their minds as well as in their bodies from nothing but the sadness produced by the sight of the black barren mountains covered with snow, with streams of water rolling down them. To divert their melancholy, which threatened to develop even into hypochondriacal madness, races were held. It was with great joy that the volunteer at last “turned his back upon these hideous mountains and the noisy ding of the great falls of waters.”[137]

Even the dales of Cumberland struck strangers with awe. Six months before Wordsworth was born, Gray wandered up Borrowdale to the point where now the long train of tourist-laden coaches day after day in summer turns to the right towards Honister Pass and Buttermere. “All farther access,” he wrote, “is here barred to prying mortals, only there is a little path winding over the Fells, and for some weeks in the year passable to the Dale’s-men; but the mountains know well that these innocent people will not reveal the mysteries of their ancient kingdom, the reign of Chaos and Old Night.”[138]

A few days after Johnson had arrived in Scotland, Mason, the poet, visited Keswick. Many of the woods which had charmed his friend Gray had been since cut down, and a dry season had reduced the cascade to scanty rills. “With the frightful and surprising only,” he wrote, “I cannot be pleased.”[139] He and his companion climbed to the summit of Skiddaw, where, just as if they were on the top of the Matterhorn, they found that “respiration seemed to be performed with a kind of asthmatic oppression.”[140] To John Wesley, a traveller such as few men have ever been, wild scenery was no more pleasing than to the man who wandered for the first time. Those “horrid mountains” he twice calls the fine ranges of hills in the North Riding of Yorkshire, whose waters feed the Swale and the Tees, though it was in summer-time that he was travelling.[141] To Pennant Glencroe was “the seat of melancholy.”[142] Beattie, Burns’s “sweet harmonious Beattie,” finds the same sadness in the mountains:

[Sidenote: THE MELANCHOLY HIGHLANDS.]

“The Highlands of Scotland” (he writes) “are a picturesque, but
in general a melancholy country. Long tracts of mountainous
desert, covered with dark heath, and often obscured by
misty weather; narrow valleys, thinly inhabited and bounded
by precipices resounding with the fall of torrents; a soil
so rugged, and a climate so dreary, as in many parts to
admit neither the amusements of pasturage nor the labours of
agriculture; the mournful dashing of waves along the friths and
lakes that intersect the country; the portentous noises which
every change of the wind, and every increase and diminution of
the waters, is apt to raise in a lonely region full of echoes,
and rocks, and caverns; the grotesque and ghastly appearance
of such a landscape by the light of the moon—objects like
these diffuse a gloom over the fancy which may be compatible
enough with occasional and social merriment, but cannot fail to
tincture the thoughts of a native in the hour of silence and
solitude.”[143]

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON. IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^{IE.} PARIS.]

The French writer, Faujas de Saint Fond, who visited the Highlands about the year 1780, was touched with the same unromantic gloom. When on his way from the barren mountains of the north he reached the fertile southern shore of Loch Tay, and caught the first glimpse of the change to happier climes, his soul experienced as sweet a joy as is given by the first breath of spring. He had escaped from a land where winter seemed eternally to reign, where all was wild, and barren, and sad.[144] Even Macleod of Macleod, the proprietor of nine inhabited isles and of islands uninhabited almost beyond number, who held four times as much land as the Duke of Bedford, even that “mighty monarch,” as Johnson called him,[145] looked upon life in his castle at Dunvegan as “confinement in a remote corner of the world,” and upon the Western Islands as “dreary regions.”[146] Slight, then, must have been the shock which Johnson gave even to the poets among his fellows, when on “a delightful day” in April, he set Fleet Street with its “cheerful scene” above Tempé, and far above Mull.[147] To the men of his time rocks would have “towered in horrid nakedness,”[148] and “wandering in Skye” would have seemed “a toilsome drudgery.”[149] Nature there would have looked “naked,” and these poverty-stricken regions “malignant.”[150] Few would have been “the allurements of these islands,” for “desolation and penury” would have given as “little pleasure” to them as it did to him.[151] In Glencroe they would have found “a black and dreary region,”[152] and in Mull “a gloomy desolation.”[153] Everywhere “they would have been repelled by the wide extent of hopeless sterility,”[154] and everywhere fatigued by the want of “variety in universal barrenness.”[155] In the midst of such scenes, as the autumn day was darkening to its close, they would have allowed that, “when there is a guide whose conduct may be trusted, a mind not naturally too much disposed to fear, may preserve some degree of cheerfulness; but what,” they would have asked, “must be the solicitude of him who should be wandering among the crags and hollows benighted, ignorant, and alone?”[156] Upon the islets on Loch Lomond they would have longed “to employ all the arts of embellishment,” so that these little spots should no longer “court the gazer at a distance, but disgust him at his approach, when he finds instead of soft lawns and shady thickets nothing more than uncultivated ruggedness.”[157] Everywhere they would have regretted the want of the arts and civilization and refinements of modern life.

[Sidenote: INDIFFERENCE TO SCENERY.]

Had Johnson been treated more kindly by the weather, doubtless the gloom of the landscape would have been less reflected upon his pages. Fifty-eight days of rain to three days of clear skies would have been sufficient to depress even the wildest worshipper of rude nature. In the eleven days in which he was kept prisoner by storms in Col, he had “no succession of sunshine to rain, or of calms to tempests; wind and rain were the only weather.”[158] When the sun did shine he lets us catch a little of its cheerful light. His first day’s Highland journey took him along the shore of Loch Ness in weather that was bright, though not hot. “The way was very pleasant; on the left were high and steep rocks, shaded with birch, and covered with fern or heath. On the right the limpid waters of Loch Ness were beating their bank, and waving their surface by a gentle undulation.”[159] The morrow was equally fine. How prettily he has described his rest in the valley on the bank, where he first thought of writing the story of his tour, “with a clear rivulet streaming at his feet. The day was calm, the air was soft, and all was rudeness, silence and solitude.”[160] Very different would have been the tale which he told had he travelled in the days of fast and commodious steamboats, good roads and carriages, comfortable inns, post-offices, telegraphs, and shops. He would not have seen a different system of life, or got an acquisition of ideas, but he might have found patience, and even promptings for descriptions of the beauties of rugged nature. “In an age when every London citizen makes Loch Lomond his wash-pot, and throws his shoe over Ben Nevis,”[161] the old man may easily be mocked, for his indifference to scenery. But the elderly traveller of our times, who whirled along “in a well-appointed four-horse coach,” indicates the beauties of nature to his companions, and utters exclamations of delight, as from time to time he takes his cigar from his lips, might have felt as little enthusiasm as Johnson, had he had, like him, to cross Skye and Mull on horseback, by paths so narrow that each rider had to go singly, and so craggy that constant care was required.

The scenery in which he took most delight was the park-lands of southern and midland England.

“Where lawns extend that scorn Arcadian pride,
And brighter streams than fam’d Hydaspes glide.
There all around the gentlest breezes stray,
There gentle music melts on every spray;
Creation’s mildest charms are there combin’d,
Extremes are only in the master’s mind.”[162]

“Sweet Auburn” would have been dearer to him than all the wilds of the Highlands. But Auburn scenery he did not find even in the Lowlands. Had Goldsmith passed his life in Ayrshire or even in “pleasant Teviotdale,” the _Deserted Village_ would never have been written. Burns had never seen an Auburn, nor even that simpler rural beauty which was so dear to Wordsworth. No “lovely cottage in the guardian nook” had “stirred him deeply.” He knew nothing of the sacredness of

“The roses to the porch which they entwine.”[163]

In Scotland was seen the reverse of the picture in which Goldsmith had painted Italy.

“In florid beauty groves and fields appear,
Man seems the only growth that dwindles here.”[164]

[Sidenote: POVERTY OF LANDSCAPE.]

In Scotland man was nourished to the most stubborn strength of character, but beauty was the growth that dwindled. In the hard struggle for bare living, and in the gloom of a religion which gave strength but crushed loveliness, no man thought of adorning his home as if it had been his bride. Wordsworth compared the manses in Scotland with the parsonages, even the poor parsonages in England, and said that neither they nor their gardens and grounds had the same “attractive appearance.”[165] The English country-house, with its lawns, its gardens, and its groves, which adds such a singular charm to our landscape, had not its counterpart on the other side of the border. Elderly men could still recall the day when the approach to the laird’s dwelling led past the stable and the cow-house, when the dunghill was heaped up close to the hall-door, and when, instead of lawns and beds of flowers, all around grew a plentiful crop of nettles, docks, and hemlocks.[166] Some improvement had been already made. A taste had happily begun for “neat houses and ornamental fields,” and to the hopeful patriot there was “the pleasing prospect that Scotland might in a century or sooner compare with England, not indeed in magnificence of country-seats, but in sweetness and variety of concordant parts.”[167] Even at that time it supplied England with its best gardeners,[168] and nevertheless it was a country singularly bare of gardens. “Pray, now, are you ever able to bring the _sloe_ to perfection?” asked Johnson of Boswell.[169] So far was nature from being adorned that she had been everywhere stripped naked. Woods had been cut down, not even had groups of trees been spared, no solitary oak or elm with its grateful shade stood in the middle of the field or in the hedge-row; hedge-rows there were none. The pleasantness of the prospect had been everywhere sacrificed to the productiveness of the field. The beautiful English landscape was gone. “The striking characteristic in the views of Scotland,” said an observant traveller, “is a poverty of landscape from a want of objects, particularly of wood. Park scenery is little known. The lawn, the clump, and the winding walk are rarely found.”[170] As he crossed the border he might have said with Johnson: “It is only seeing a worse England. It is seeing the flower gradually fade away to the naked stalk.”[171] “Every part of the country,” wrote Goldsmith from Edinburgh in his student days, “presents the same dismal landscape. No grove nor brook lend their music to cheer the stranger, or make the inhabitants forget their poverty.”[172] There was none of “the bloomy flush of life.” The whole country was open, and resembled one vast common with a few scattered improvements.[173] Along the western road from Longworth to Dumfries it exhibited “a picture of dreary solitude, of smoky hovels, naked, ill-cultivated fields, lean cattle and a dejected people, without manufactures, trade or shipping.”[174]

The eastern coast, along which Johnson travelled, was singularly bare of trees. He had not, he said, passed five on the road fit for the carpenter.[175] The first forest trees of full growth which he saw were in the north of Aberdeenshire.[176] “This is a day of novelties,” he said on the morrow. “I have seen old trees in Scotland, and I have heard the English clergy treated with disrespect.”[177] Topham, while attacking his _Journey to the Western Isles_, yet admitted that it was only in the parks of a few noblemen that oaks were found fifty years old.[178] Lord Jeffrey maintained so late as 1833 that within a circle of twenty miles from Watford there was more old timber than in all Scotland.[179] Burns, in his _Humble Petition of Bruar Water to the Duke of Athole_, testifies to the want of trees:—

“Would then my noble master please
To grant my highest wishes,
He’ll shade my banks wi’ tow’ring trees,
And bonnie spreading bushes.”

There were, of course, noble trees scattered throughout the country. Gray describes “the four chestnuts of vast bulk and height in Lord Breadalbane’s park,”[180] and Pennant, “the venerable oaks, the vast chestnuts, the ash trees, and others of ancient growth, that gave solemnity to the scene at Finlarig Castle.”[181] A love of planting, which began about the time of the Union, was gradually extending. Defoe noticed the young groves round the gentlemen’s houses in the Lothians, and foretold, that in a few years Scotland would not need to send to Norway for timber and deal.[182] The reviewer of Pennant’s _Tour_ in the _Scots Magazine_ for January, 1772, rejoiced to find that the spirit of planting was so generally diffused, and looked forward to the advantages arising from it, which would be enjoyed by posterity.[183] Sir Walter Scott defended Johnson against the abuse which had unjustly been cast on him. The east coast, if the young plantations were excepted, was as destitute of wood as he had described it.[184] Nay, to his sarcasms he greatly ascribed that love of planting which had almost become a passion.[185] It was not for nothing, then, that Johnson had joked over the loss of his walking-stick in Mull, and had refused to believe that any man in that island who had got it would part with it. “Consider, Sir, the value of such a piece of timber there.”[186]

[Sidenote: BACKWARDNESS OF FARMING.]

The modern traveller who, as he passes through the Lothians or Aberdeenshire, looks with admiration on farming in its perfection, would learn with astonishment how backward Scotch agriculture was little more than one hundred years ago. While in England men of high rank and strong minds were ambitious of shining in the characters of farmers, in Scotland it was looked upon as a pursuit far beneath the attention of a gentleman. Neither by the learned had it been made a study.[187] There were those who attributed this general backwardness to the soil and climate; but it was due, said Lord Kames, “to the indolence of the landholders, the obstinate indocility of the peasantry, and the stupid attachment of both classes to ancient habits and practices.”[188] The liberal intercourse between the two countries, which was an unexpected result of the Rebellion of 1745, greatly quickened the rate of improvement.

“Before that time the people of Northumberland and the
Merse, who spoke dialects of the same language, and were
only separated by a river, had little more intercourse than
those of Kent and Normandy. After the Rebellion a number of
noblemen and gentlemen amused themselves with farming in the
English style. The late Lord Eglinton spared no expense in
getting English servants. He showed his countrymen what might
be done by high cultivation. Mr. Drummond, of Blair, sent
over one of his ploughmen to learn drill husbandry, and the
culture of turnips from Lord Eglinton’s English servants.
The very next year he raised a field of turnips, which were
the first in the country. And they were as neatly dressed as
any in Hertfordshire. A single horse ploughing the drills
astonished the country people, who, till then, had never seen
fewer than four yoked. About the year 1771 our tenants were
well-disposed to the culture of turnips. They begin to have an
idea of property in winter as well as in summer; nor is it any
longer thought bad neighbourhood to drive off cattle that are
trespassing upon their winter crops.”[189]

The young Laird of Col, just before Johnson’s visit, had gone to Hertfordshire to study farming, and had brought back “the culture of turnips. His intention is to provide food for his cattle in the winter. This innovation was considered by Mr. Macsweyn as the idle project of a young head heated with English fancies; but he has now found that turnips will grow, and that hungry sheep and cows will really eat them.”[190] Yet progress was not so rapid but that Adam Smith held that a better system could only be introduced “by a long course of frugality and industry; half a century or a century more perhaps must pass away before the old system which is wearing out gradually can be completely abolished.”[191]

The cultivation of vegetables for the table and of fruits was also taking a start, though much remained to be done. When Johnson was informed at Aberdeen that Cromwell’s soldiers had taught the Scotch to raise cabbages, he remarked, that “in the passage through villages it seems to him that surveys their gardens, that when they had not cabbage they had nothing.”[192] Pennant, however, the year before, in riding from Arbroath to Montrose, had passed by “extensive fields of potatoes—a novelty till within the last twenty years.”[193] It was not till Johnson had travelled beyond Elgin that he saw houses with fruit trees about them. “The improvements of the Scotch,” he remarks, “are for immediate profit; they do not yet think it quite worth their while to plant what will not produce something to be eaten or sold in a very little time.”[194] The Scotch historian of Edinburgh complained that “the apples which were brought to market from the neighbourhood were unfit for the table.”[195] “Good apples are not to be seen,” wrote Topham in his _Letters from Edinburgh_. “It was,” he said, “owing to the little variety of fruit that the inhabitants set anything on their tables after dinner that has the appearance of it, and I have often observed at the houses of principal people a plate of small turnips introduced in the dessert, and eaten with avidity.”[196] Smollett indirectly alludes to this reflection on his native country when, in his _Humphry Clinker_, he says that “turnips make their appearance, not as dessert, but by way of _hors d’œuvres_, or whets.”[197] Even in the present day, the English traveller far too often looks in vain for the orchards and the fruit tree with its branches trained over the house-wall. Yet great progress has been made. In Morayshire, in the present day, peaches and apricots are seen ripening on the garden walls. In the year 1852 an Elgin gardener carried off the first prize of the London Horticultural Society for ten varieties of the finest new dessert pears.[198] If Scotland can do such great things as this, surely justification is found for the reproaches cast by Johnson on Scottish ignorance and negligence.

[Sidenote: ENGLISH IGNORANCE OF SCOTLAND.]

So closely have the two countries in late years been drawn together by the wonderful facilities of intercourse afforded by modern inventions, that it is scarcely possible for us to understand the feelings of our adventurous forefathers as they crossed the Borders. At the first step they seemed to be in a foreign country. “The first town we come to,” wrote Defoe, “is as perfectly Scots as if you were one hundred miles north of Edinburgh; nor is there the least appearance of anything English either in customs, habits, usages of the people, or in their way of living, eating, dress, or behaviour.”[199] “The English,” Smollett complained, “knew as little of Scotland as of Japan.”[200] There is no reason to think that he was guilty of extravagance, when in his _Humphry Clinker_ he makes Miss Tabitha Bramble, the sister of the Gloucestershire squire, imagine that “she could not go to Scotland but by sea.”[201] It is amazing to how late a day ignorance almost as gross as this came down. It was in the year in which George II. came to the throne that Defoe, in his preface to his _Tour through Great Britain_ wrote:—“Scotland has been supposed by some to be so contemptible a place as that it would not bear a description.”[202] Eleven years later, in 1738, we find it described much as if it were some lately discovered island in the South Seas.

“The people in general,” we read, “are naturally inclined
to civility, especially to strangers. They are divided into
Highlanders who call themselves the antient Scots, and into
Lowlanders who are a mixture of antient Scots, Picts, Britons,
French, English, Danes, Germans, Hungarians, and others.
Buchanan describes the customs of the Highlanders graphically
thus:—‘In their diet, apparel, and household furniture they
follow the parsimony of the antients; they provide their diet
by fishing and hunting, and boil their flesh in the paunch or
skin of a beast; while they hunt they eat it raw, after having
squeezed out the blood.’... The Western Islands (the author
goes on to add) lie in the Deucaledonian Sea.... The natives of
Mull when the season is moist take a large dose of aqua-vitæ
for a corrective, and chew a piece of charmel root when they
intend to be merry to prevent drunkenness. The natives of
Skye have a peculiar way of curing the distempers they are
incident to by simples of their own product, in which they are
successful to a miracle.”[203]

Into so strange and wild a country it required a stout heart to enter. A volunteer with the English army at the time of the Rebellion of 1745 wrote from Berwick:—“Now we are going into Scotland, but with heavy hearts. They tell us here what terrible living we shall have there, which I soon after found too true.”[204] How few were the Englishmen who crossed the Tweed even so late as 1772 is shown by the hope expressed in the _Scots Magazine_ for that year, that the publication of Pennant’s _Tour_ would excite others to follow in his steps.[205] Two years later Topham wrote from Edinburgh that “the common people were astonished to find himself and his companion become stationary in their town for a whole winter.... ‘What were we come for?’ was the first question. ‘They presumed to study physic.’ ‘No.’ ‘To study law?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then it must be divinity.’ ‘No.’ ‘Very odd,’ they said, ‘that we should come to Edinburgh without one of these reasons.’”[206] How ignorant the English were of Scotland is shown by the publication of _Humphry Clinker_. The ordinary reader, as he laughs over the pages of this most humorous of stories, never suspects that the author in writing it had any political object in view. Yet there is not a little truth in Horace Walpole’s bitter assertion that it is “a party novel, written by the profligate hireling Smollett, to vindicate the Scots, and cry down juries.”[207] It was not so much a party as a patriotic novel. Lord Bute’s brief tenure of ignoble office as Prime Minister and King’s Friend, the mischief which he had done to the whole country, and the favour which he had shown to his North Britons, a few years earlier had raised a storm against the Scotch which had not yet subsided. “All the windows of all the inns northwards,” wrote Smollett, “are scrawled with doggrel rhymes in abuse of the Scotch nation.”[208] With great art he takes that fine old humorist, Matthew Bramble, from his squire’s house in Gloucestershire on a tour to the southern part of Scotland, and makes him and his family send to their various correspondents lively and pleasant descriptions of all that they saw. At the very time that he was writing his _Humphry Clinker_ a child was born in one of the narrow Wynds of Edinburgh who was to take up the work which he had begun, and as the mighty Wizard of the North, as if by an enchanter’s wand, to lift up the mist which had long hung over the land which he loved so well, and to throw over Highlands and Lowlands alike the beauty of romance and the kindliness of feeling which springs from the associations given by poetry and fiction.

While the English as yet knew little of Scotland, the Scotch were not equally ignorant of England. From the days of the Union they had pressed southwards in the pursuit of wealth, of fame, and of position. Their migration was such that it afforded some foundation for Johnson’s saying that “the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.”[209] England was swiftly moving along the road to Empire, sometimes with silent foot, sometimes with the tramp of war. In America and in the East Indies her boundaries were year by year pushed farther and farther on. Her agriculture, her manufactures, her trade and her commerce were advancing by leaps and bounds. There was a great stir of life and energy. Into such a world the young Scotchmen entered with no slight advantages. In their common schools everywhere an education was given such as in England was only to be had in a few highly favoured spots. In their universities even the neediest scholar had a share. The hard fare, the coarse clothing, and the poor lodgings with which their students were contented, could be provided by the labours of the vacation. In their homes they had been trained in habits of thrift. They entered upon the widely extending battle of life like highly trained soldiers, and they gained additional force by acting together. If they came up “in droves,” it was not one another that they butted. They exhibited when in a strange land that “national combination” which Johnson found “so invidious,” but which brought them to “employment, riches, and distinction.”[210] Their thrift, and an eagerness to push on which sometimes amounted to servility, provoked many a gibe; but if ever they found time and inclination to turn from Johnny Home to Shakespeare they might have replied in the words of Ferdinand:

“Some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters
Point to rich ends.”

[Sidenote: ADVANTAGES OF THE UNION.]

On the advantages of the Union to Scotland Johnson was not easily tired of haranguing. Of the advantages to England he said nothing probably because he saw nothing. Yet it would not be easy to tell on which side the balance lay. Before the Union, he maintained, “the Scotch had hardly any trade, any money, or any elegance.”[211] In his _Journey to the Western Islands_ he tells the Scotch that “they must be for ever content to owe to the English that elegance and culture which, if they had been vigilant and active, perhaps the English might have owed to them.”[212]

Smollett, who in national prejudice did not yield even to him, has strongly upheld the opposite opinion. In his _History_ he describes Lord Belhaven’s speech against the Union in the last parliament which sat in Scotland—a speech “so pathetic that it drew tears from the audience. It is,” he adds, “at this day looked upon as a prophecy by great part of the Scottish nation.”[213] The towns on the Firth of Forth, he maintained, through the loss of the trade with France, had been falling to decay ever since the two countries were united.[214] In these views he was not supported by the two great writers who were his countrymen and his contemporaries. It was chiefly to the Union that Adam Smith attributed the great improvements in agriculture which had been made in the eighteenth century.[215] It was to the Union that Hume attributed the blessing “of a government perfectly regular, and exempt from all violence and injustice.”[216] Many years later Thomas Carlyle, in whom glowed the _perfervidum ingenium Scotorum_ as it has glowed in few, owned that “the Union was one of Scotland’s chief blessings,” though it was due to Wallace and to men like him “that it was not the chief curse.”[217]

It must never be forgotten that in this Union England was no less blessed than Scotland; that if she gave wealth to Scotland, Scotland nobly repaid the gift in men. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the English stock had been quickened and strengthened and ennobled by fugitives seeking refuge on her shores from the persecutions of priests and kings, which passed over the coward and the base, and fell only on the brave and the upright. To the Fleming and the Huguenot was now added the Scot. 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. Her poet’s prayer has been answered, and in “bright succession” have been raised men to adorn and guard not only herself but the country which belongs to Englishmen and Scotchmen alike. Little of this was seen, still less foreseen by Johnson. The change which was going on in Scotland was rapid and conspicuous; the change which she was working outside her borders was slow, and as yet almost imperceptible. What was seen raised not admiration, but jealousy of the vigorous race which was everywhere so rapidly “making its way to employment, riches, and distinction.” That Johnson should exult in the good which Scotland had derived from England through the Union was natural. Scarcely less natural that he should point out how much remained to be done before the Scotch attained the English level, not only in the comforts and refinements, but even in the decencies of life. One great peculiarity in their civilization struck him deeply. “They had attained the liberal without the manual arts, and excelled in ornamental knowledge while they wanted the conveniences of common life.”[218] [Sidenote: A DISPUTATIOUS PEASANTRY.] Even the peasantry were able to dispute with wonderful sagacity upon the articles of their faith, though they were content to live in huts which had not a single chimney to carry off the smoke.[219] Wesley, each time that he crossed the Borders, found a far harder task awaiting him than when he was upbraiding, denouncing, and exhorting an English congregation. To the Scotch, cradled as they had been in the Shorter Catechism, and trained as they were from their youth up in theology, his preaching, like Paul’s to the Greeks, was too often foolishness. He spoke to a people, as he complained, “who heard much, knew everything, and felt nothing.”[220] Though “you use the most cutting words still they _hear_, but _feel_ no more than the seats they sit upon.”[221] Nowhere did he speak more roughly than in Scotland. No one there was offended at plain dealing. “In this respect they were a pattern to all mankind.” But yet “they hear and hear, and are just what they were before.”[222] He was fresh from the Kelso people and was preaching to a meeting in Northumberland when he wrote: “Oh! what a difference is there between these living stones, and the dead unfeeling multitudes in Scotland.”[223] “The misfortune of a Scotch congregation,” he recorded on another occasion, “is they know everything; so they learn nothing.”[224]

[Sidenote: POVERTY OF THE COMMON PEOPLE.]

With their disputatious learning the meagreness of their fare and the squalor of their dwellings but ill contrasted. “Dirty living,” said Smollett, “is the great and general reproach of the commonalty of this kingdom.”[225] While Scotland sent forth into the world year after year swarms of young men trained in thrift, well stored with knowledge, and full of energy and determination, the common people bore an ill-repute for industry. They were underfed, and under-feeding produced indolent work. “Flesh-meat they seldom or never tasted; nor any kind of strong liquor except two-penny at times of uncommon festivity.”[226] “Ale,” wrote Lord Kames, “makes no part of the maintenance of those in Scotland who live by the sweat of their brow. Water is their only drink.”[227] Adam Smith admitted that both in bodily strength and personal appearance they were below the English standard. “They neither work so well, nor look so well.”[228] Wolfe, when he returned to England from Scotland in 1753, said that he had not crossed the Border a mile when he saw the difference that was produced upon the face of the country by labour and industry. “The English are clean and laborious, and the Scotch excessively dirty and lazy.”[229]

This dirtiness would offend an Englishman more than a man of any other nation, for “high and low, rich and poor, they were remarkable for cleanness all the world over.”[230] Matthew Bramble, in Smollett’s _Humphry Clinker_, notices the same change. “The boors of Northumberland,” he wrote, “are lusty fellows, fresh-complexioned, cleanly and well-clothed; but the labourers in Scotland are generally lank, lean, hard-featured, sallow, soiled and shabby. The cattle are much in the same style with their drivers, meagre, stunted, and ill-equipt.”[231] Topham, in his _Letters from Edinburgh_, asserts the misery, but denies the idleness. Temperance and labour were, he says, in the extreme; nevertheless, on all sides were seen, “haggard looks, meagre complexions, and bodies weakened by fatigue and worn down by the inclemency of the seasons.” Neither were the poor of the capital any better off. Their wretchedness and poverty exceeded, he thought, what was to be found anywhere else in the whole world. But though as a nation the Scotch were very poor, yet they were very honest.[232] A traveller through the country in 1766 goes so far as to maintain that the common people in outward appearance would not at first be taken to be of the human species. Though their indigence was extreme, yet they would rather suffer poverty than labour. Their nastiness was greater than could be reported. Happily their rudeness was beginning to wear off, and in the trading towns where the knowledge of the use of money was making them eager enough to acquire it, they were already pretty well civilized and industrious.[233] Wages were miserably low. The Scotch labourer received little more than half what was paid to the Englishman; yet grain was dearer in Scotland than in England.[234] The historian of Edinburgh thus sums the general condition of the labouring poor:—

“The common people have no ideas of the comforts of life. The
labourers and low mechanics live in a very wretched style.
Their houses are the receptacles of nastiness, where the spider
may in peace weave his web from generation to generation.
A garden, where nothing is to be seen but a few plants of
coleworts or potatoes, amidst an innumerable quantity of weeds,
surrounds his house. A bit of flesh will not be within his door
twice a year. He abhors industry, and has no relish for the
comforts arising from it.”[235]

Lord Elibank’s famous reply to Johnson’s definition of _oats_ had every merit but a foundation of fact. “Oats,” wrote Johnson, “a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” “Very true,” replied his lordship, “and where will you find such men and such horses?”[236]

The natural result of this general poverty was seen in the number of beggars who thronged the streets and roads. Scotland was neither blessed with a good poor-law nor cursed with a bad one. The relief of want was left altogether to charity. In Edinburgh Johnson thought that the proportion of beggars was not less than in London. “In the smaller places it was far greater than in English towns of the same extent.” The mendicants were not, however, of the order of sturdy vagabonds. They were neither importunate nor clamorous. “They solicit silently, or very modestly.”[237] Smollett went so far as to maintain in his _Humphry Clinker_, which was published only two years before Johnson’s visit, that “there was not a beggar to be seen within the precincts of Edinburgh.”[238] For some years, indeed, the streets had been free of them, for a charity workhouse had been erected, to which they were all committed. But the magistrates had grown careless, and the evil had broken out afresh. “The streets are crowded with begging poor,” wrote one writer. “We see the whole stairs, streets, and public walks swarming with beggars every day,” wrote another.[239]

[Sidenote: HOUSES AND MEALS.]

The general neglect of the decencies of life was due chiefly to poverty, but partly, no doubt, to that violent outburst against all that is beautiful and graceful which accompanied the Reformation in Scotland. A nation which, as a protest against popery, “thought dirt and cob-webs essential to the house of God,”[240] was not likely in their homes to hold that cleanliness was next to godliness. The same coarseness of living had been found in all classes, though it was beginning to yield before English influence. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, in the year 1742, notices as a sign of increasing refinement, that at the tavern in Haddington, where the Presbytery dined, knives and forks were provided for the table. A few years earlier each guest had brought his own. There was, however, only one glass, which went round with the bottle.[241] The same custom had prevailed in Edinburgh when Lord Kames was a young man. French wine was placed on the table, he said, in a small tin vessel, which held about an English pint. A single drinking-glass served a company the whole evening, and the first persons who called for a new glass with every new pint were accused of luxury.[242] Boswell could remember the time when a carving knife was looked upon as a novelty. One of his friends was rated by his father, “a gentleman of ancient family and good literature, for introducing such a foppish superfluity.” In the previous generation whatever food was eaten with a spoon, such as soup, milk, or pudding, used to be taken by every person dipping his spoon into the common dish.[243] When an old laird was complimented on the accomplishments which his son had brought home from his travels, “he answered that he knew nothing he had learnt but to cast a sark (change a shirt) every day, and to sup his kail twice.”[244] Of the food that was served up, there was not much greater variety than of the dishes in which it was served. When Wesley first visited Scotland, even at a nobleman’s table, he had only one kind of meat, and no vegetables whatever. By the year 1788, however, vegetables were, he recorded, as plentiful as in England.[245] The butter in these early days made in country houses, “would have turned stomachs the least squeamish.” But by the introduction of tea a great improvement had been made. Bread and butter was taken with it, and a demand arose for butter that was sweet and clean. Wheaten bread, too, began to be generally eaten. So great a delicacy had it been, that the sixpenny loaf and the sugar used to be kept “locked up in the lady’s press.”[246] In the Highlands, at all events, there was a great variety as well as abundance of food. The following was the breakfast which in Argyleshire was set before the travellers in _Humphry Clinker_:—

“One kit of boiled eggs; a second full of butter; a third full
of cream; an entire cheese made of goat’s milk; a large earthen
pot full of honey; the best part of a ham; a cold venison
pasty; a bushel of oatmeal made in thin cakes and bannocks,
with a small wheaten loaf in the middle for the strangers; a
large stone bottle full of whisky, another of brandy, and a
kilderkin of ale. There was a ladle chained to the cream kit,
with curious wooden bickers to be filled from this reservoir.
The spirits were drunk out of a silver quaff, and the ale out
of horns. Finally a large roll of tobacco was presented by way
of desert, and every individual took a comfortable quid, to
prevent the bad effects of the morning air.”[247]

Knox, in his _Tour through the Highlands_,[248] gives a still vaster bill of fare. The houses of the country gentlemen were for the most part small. “It was only on festivals or upon ceremonious occasions, that the dining-room was used. People lived mostly in the family bed-chamber, where friends and neighbours were received without scruple. Many an easy, comfortable meal,” writes Ramsay, of Ochtertyre, “had I made in that way.”[249] It was to this custom that the Scotch had of turning a bed-room into an eating-room that an English traveller refers, when he says that the Edinburgh taverns are the worst in the world, for “you sup underground in a bed-chamber.”[250] Even at the modern houses there was generally a total absence of an accommodation such as would not at the present day be tolerated in a labourer’s cottage by a sanitary inspector in any district in England.[251]

The state of the capital was far worse even than the state of the country. It was one of the last places in the world on which would have been bestowed that favourite and almost exalted epithet of praise—_neat_.[252] The houses, indeed, were solidly built, and the rooms of the well-to-do people were comfortable and clean, and often spacious. “Nothing could form a stronger contrast than the difference between the outside and the inside of the door.” Within all was decency and propriety, without was a filthy staircase leading down into a filthy street. Every story was a complete house, occupied by a separate family. The steep and dark staircase was common to all, and was kept clean by none. It was put to the basest uses.[253] The gentry did not commonly occupy the lowest stories or the highest. The following is the list of the inhabitants of a good house in the High Street:—

“First door upstairs, Mr. Stirling, fishmonger.
Second door, Mrs. Urquhart, who kept a lodging-house of good repute.
Third flat, the Dowager Countess of Balcarras.
Fourth flat, Mrs. Buchan, of Kelly.
Fifth flat, the Misses Elliots, milliners.
Garrets, a great variety of tailors and other tradesmen.”[254]

[Sidenote: THE SCAVENGING OF EDINBURGH.]

There were no water pipes, there were no drain pipes, there were no cess-pools, and there were no covered sewers in the streets. At a fixed hour of the night all the impurities were carried down the common staircase in tubs, and emptied into the street as into a common sewer, or else, in defiance of the law, cast out of the window. “Throwing over the window” was the delicate phrase in which this vile practice was veiled. It was “an obstinate disease which had withstood all the labour of the Magistrates, Acts of Council, Dean of Guild Courts for stencheling,[255] tirlesing,[256] and locking up windows, fines, imprisonments, and banishing the city.”[257] The servants were willing to serve for lower wages in houses where this practice was winked at. It gave rise to numerous quarrels which caused constables more trouble than any other part of their duty.[258] According to the account given by the English maid in _Humphry Clinker_, when “the throwing over” began, “they called _gardy loo_ to the passengers, which signifies _Lord have mercy upon you_.”[259] A young English traveller, who, the first night of his arrival in Edinburgh, was enjoying his supper, as he tells us, and good bottle of claret with a merry company in a tavern, heard, as the clock was striking ten, the beat of the city drum, the signal for the scavenging to begin. The company at once began to fumigate the room by lighting pieces of paper and throwing them on the table. Tobacco smoking, it is clear, could not have been in fashion. As his way to his lodgings lay through one of the wynds he was provided “with a guide who went before him, crying out all the way, _Hud your Haunde_.”[260] The city scavengers cleansed the streets as fast as they could, and by opening reservoirs which were placed at intervals washed the pavement clean.[261]

To this intolerable nuisance the inhabitants generally seemed insensible, and were too apt to imagine the disgust of strangers as little better than affectation.[262] Yet it was not affectation which led John Wesley, in May, 1761, to make the following entry in his Journal:—

“The situation of the city on a hill shelving down on both
sides, as well as to the east, with the stately castle upon a
craggy rock on the west, is inexpressibly fine. And the main
street so broad and finely paved, with the lofty houses on
either hand (many of them seven or eight stories high) is far
beyond any in Great Britain. But how can it be suffered that
all manner of filth should still be thrown, even into this
street, continually? Where are the Magistracy, the Gentry,
the Nobility of the Land? Have they no concern for the honour
of their nation? How long shall the capital city of Scotland,
yea and the chief street of it, stink worse than a common
sewer?”[263]

Ten years earlier he had described the town as dirtier even than Cologne. According to Wolfe, it was not till after Christmas, when the company had come into it from the country, that it was “in all its perfection of dirt and gaiety.”[264] Gray called it “that most picturesque (at a distance) and nastiest (when near) of all capital cities.”[265] “Pray for me till I see you,” he added, “for I dread Edinburgh and the —.”[266] To add to the insalubrity, the windows would not readily open. In Scotland they neither opened wide on hinges, nor were drawn up and down by weights and pulleys. For the most part the lower sash only could be raised; and when lifted, it was propped open by a stick or by a pin thrust into a hole.[267] “What cannot be done without some uncommon trouble or particular expedient will not often be done at all. The incommodiousness of the Scotch windows keeps them very closely shut.”[268] From this closeness Johnson suffered not a little, for he loved fresh air, “and on the coldest day or night would set open a window and stand before it,” as Boswell knew to his cost.[269] Topham, who sided with his Scotch friends against Johnson, scoffed at these observations on window-frames and pulleys. “Men of the world,” he wrote, “would not have descended to such remarks. A petty and frivolous detail of trifling circumstances are [_sic_] the certain signs of ignorance or inexperience.”[270] Johnson, in introducing the subject, had guarded himself against such reflections. “These diminutive observations,” he said, “seem to take away something from the dignity of writing. But it must be remembered that the true state of every nation is the state of common life.”[271] This indifference to pure air no doubt spread death far and wide. In Sir Walter Scott’s family we see an instance of the unwholesomeness of the Old Town. His six elder brothers and sisters, who were all born in the College Wynd, died young. It was only by sending him to breathe country air that he was reared. His father’s younger children were born in one of the new squares, and they for the most part were healthy.[272]

[Sidenote: ABOLITION OF VAILS.]