of the book when he had not written a line of it. His poem is a bad translation of part of the bad Latin original. It is instructive as to old notions of what was worth seeing and commemorating in Scotland, that the Don was evidently a much greater favourite than its neighbour the Dee, now reverenced as gathering round its upper reaches some of the most beautiful and most sublime scenery to be found in Scotland. The Don was a more substantially affluent stream, as sweeping between good corn and pasture lands. There was an old saying, "Don for corn and horn; and Dee for fish and tree." No special efforts of the muse were ever bestowed on the Dee, until just the other day the scholarly Dr. Adamson printed his Arundines Deva. The river was perhaps for the first time named in known poetry when, nearly contemporaneously, Hogg sung "the grisly rocks that guard the infant rills of Highland Dee;" and Byron in his forbidden poem said-"For auld lang syne brings Scotland-one and all Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills, the clear streams, The Dee, the Don, Balgownie brig's black wall, All my boy feelings, all my tenderer dreams Of what I then dreamt." The Tay has a poet-laureate of its own, whose work is very peculiar, puzzling its reader with the question whether it is or is not to be counted a work of genius. It is called The Muses Threnodie, which means the mournful muses.* It is a sort of In Memoriam, the memory of one who had departed from among three sincere friends being ever recalled in mournful numbers. The parts of the poem are ranged, like the history of Herodotus, by the order of the nine muses, but the special function of each has as little influence on the character of the division devoted to her, as she has on the unadorned narrative of the father of history. One of the triumvirate of friends commemorated in the book was a George Ruthven, a physician in Perth. It appears that he was more than ninety years old when the book was published in 1638. He was a boy, of the age at which events leave an indelible impression, at the epoch of the Reformation, and he was thus able to distribute gossip about momentous acts. His anecdotes thus make Adamson's verses of some importance as authority in history. But Ruthven had acquaintance with historical events coming rather too near to his own door. He belonged to the Gowrie family, who enacted the celebrated mystery with King James. Much as has been said about this, a good deal has still to be set forth, and may be so some day. Adamson's poem has for some time been in much esteem among people curious in the literature and antiquities of Perthshire; its merits have not been to the same extent known to, and acknowledged by, the rest of mankind. It seems that the author of the poem was diffident about letting it out to the world. As his editor says, "Mr. Adamson was importuned by his friends to publish the two poems. He resisted their solicitations, but the request of his friend Mr. Drummond at last prevailed." This is William Drummond of Hawthornden. Of course, to have excited his admiration, Adamson's muse is classical. In estimating it critically, one must remember that it belongs to the very beginning of the classic epoch, and was of such kind as, had it appeared half a century later, would have been termed imitative and conventional. But such as it is, it is original, and it is so unlike anything written in the present day, that we are perhaps better judges of its merit than our grandfathers, who were cloyed with such stuff. To those, indeed, who have got a little tired, first of the Scott and Byron, and next of the Tennyson and Longfellow school, matter like the following, which is the opening of "The eighth muse," will almost be refreshing :"What blooming banks sweet Earn, or fairest Tay, Or Almond doth embrace! these many a day We haunted! where our pleasant pastorals We sweetly sung, and merrie madrigals. Sometimes bold Mars, and sometimes Venus fair, And sometimes Phoebus' love we did declare; Sometimes on pleasant plaines-sometimes on mountains, And sometimes sweetly sung beside the fountains. But in these banks, where flows Saint Into those banks chiefly did we repair, air, The word "mountains" occurs in this passage, but it is used in a kind of pastoral sense. What comes more to the point is, that the pilgrims of the Tay begin a few miles above. Perth and sail downwards. The haugh or alluvial land here begins, and broadens downwards till it forms the broad, flat Carse of Gowrie. These carse lands were then the only portions of Scotland that resembled those broad acres of England that have been covered for centuries with oaks and appletrees and wheat. It was entirely on these fruitful plains that Adamson indulged his melancholy muse. We hear nothing from him about the majestic scenery of the upper regions of the river, now so ardently frequented by admiring pilgrims. He notices the Almond, thinking of the flat meadows through which it passes just before its junction with the Tay, but he has nothing to do with the narrow rocky glen some twenty miles farther up, where is the reputed grave of Ossian, now known to every reader by those wild lines of Wordsworth which so haunt the memory, "In this still place, remote from men." The Clyde is a sort of antithesis of the Tay and of most other rivers. It flows towards the Highlands. We have already dealt with the poet who commemorates its cataracts. He duly traces the stream down, describing all the specialties of scenery and life around it, to "Where Bute's green bosom spreads to meet the day, Round Rothesay's towers the morning sunbeams play." plexed how to deal with those vast porphyry "Far look thy mountains, Arran, o'er the main, course; View many a town in history's page enroll'd, Great Colin fell, with all his British host; Around are the Argyleshire mountains and the peaks of Arran. The author has man- It is a remark, partaking of a truism, that fully done his poetic duty on streams, cata- accessibility promotes the popularity of sceneracts, bridges, lawns, forests, gardens, sheep ry. What nature in this respect owes to pastures, fish and fishers, shepherds, shep- science is well exemplified in the district we herdesses, and all the old accepted elements are now speaking of the Highlands accesof poetry. He has even gone out of the sible from the Clyde. It is almost impossible old routine to give poetic dignity to coal to estimate the blessings which this pleasuremines, manufactories, shipyards, salt-works, ground is to Glasgow. It raises one of the and various other institutions with which the densest, dirtiest, and most immoral conglomereal has much more to do than the ideal. rates of humanity to a stage above many of He seems, however, to be entirely at a stand the finest cities of the empire, as a place of for inspiration when he gets into that grand residence of one who must live in a city. group of mountain scenery which it is diffi- There is a sort of compensating spirit in that cult for us now to imagine any one looking steam which, having made the mills, created at without feeling the impulses of poetic also the delightful place of refuge from their thought throbbing within him. Having be- dust and din. No wonder that James Watt stowed his homage on Bute and the Cum-is a sort of deity here. How, even with the braes in due proportions, he could not evade luxuries of the Saut-Market, Glasgow could Arran. He seems to have been sore per- have been endurable without this refuge, it is difficult to conceive. But the adaptability of | He was repeated in the periodicals of the the human animal is amazing, and there are day, for his was an age of many magazines, those who can find satisfaction anywhere. nearly all of which lived by extracts, without Nay there is a very genial picture of what professing to give a single original sentence. are the enjoyments-the moral enjoyments- There was, besides the library quartos, a of a Gorbals or Stockwell Strect, without drawing-room abridgment of his Tour in The steamers, in a clever little book called Ram- British Tourists' or Travellers' Pocket Combles round Glasgow. panion. The volumes are very readable; so readable indeed as to be now rare, because they were used up. It was through Pennant that the world first received the eloquent outpouring of admiration and surprise with which Sir Joseph Banks commemorated his discovery of Fingal's Cave. It was by Pennant, too, if we mistake not, that the poem on the ascent of Ben Lomond, scratched on a window-pane at Rowardennan, was first published, and became so popular that until lately no Scotch guide-book could any more dispense with it than it now can with "The western waves of ebbing day The stratum of transition, to use a geological phrase, where the love of waters passes on to their rocky banks, may be hit at Dunkeld, where the soft in forest and meadow blends into the wild. In Captain Slezer's hard engravings of Scottish towns and mansions, scratched about the period of the Revolution, there is just one in which an attempt is made to bring out picturesqueness in mountain scenery, and that one is of Dunkeld. The scene becomes still more picturesque when it is transferred into the Délices de la Grand Bretagne of Beverell, printed in 1727, where it is said of Dunkeld that it stands "dans une campagne, où l'on voit d'un côté d'agréables forêts et de l'autre de hautes montagnes pelées et fort roides qui semblent la menacer de leurs cimes." Roll'd o'er the glen their level way." Jane Maxwell, Duchess of Gordon,* was a very extraordinary woman. Her strong colours are now fading away almost to extinction, in fulfilment of the destiny of all social reputations. Had she not been a Duchess she would have been famous still, because, filling a rank insufficient within its own bounds to afford work for so active a spirit, she must have done something in literature or otherwise that posterity would have remembered. An anecdote about her father, Sir William Maxwell of Monreith, affords one of the boldest and sharpest of the retorts preserved in Dean Ramsay's pleasant Reminiscences, and shows the blood she inherited. Towards the end of the last century, Highland scenery obtained a considerable rise in the market through the combined influence of four great social powers, all working separately and independently of each other, but all helping in one cause. These were, Pennant the traveller, Jane Duchess of Gordon, Robert Burns, and James Macpherson. Pennant, who is now much forgotten, was an eccentric man of genius. Perhaps he is less remembered for his books than for that enmity of his towards the prevailing fashion of wigs, which make his portraits look, even at the The three great points of the Duchess were present day, as if there were something want her beauty, her wit, and her impudence. She ing that should accompany the single-breasted was, to use a modern slang expression, "up coat and huge waistcoat, and must have to anything." In the great world she could brought on him when in the flesh an amount of hold her own with Fox and Talleyrand. But social torment, which nothing but the strong- her remarkable powers enabled her to approest sense of an imperious duty could strength-priate whatever was mentally remarkable in en any human being to endure. One story about him is, that in a tavern in Coventry he had taken such offence at the wig of a peppery old colonel, that nothing would serve him but to snatch it and throw it in the fire; whereupon he had to run for his life, and the community of Coventry-renowned for a rather remarkable procession in old times were blessed with the vision of the bald traveller fleeing before a bald warrior with a drawn sword in his hand. Pennant had great influence in his day; He described everything he saw, and described it with spirit. Pottering among his heavy quartos, written in an old-fashioned style, one might suppose that all his influence was through hard pounding, but it was not so. the small world without losing caste-the terror of all people of high rank when they unbend. Thus she had about her Lord Kames, Harry Erskine, Clerk of Eldin, and among men of genius, Beattie the poet and Robert Burns. The two last named were born peasants. The one had made himself a learned professor, and of course a gentleman entitled to hold his head up. The other was what all the world knows; but it served to allay his morbid irritation towards the world, to come within the influence of one so lofty, as to see little difference between the position of the country gentleman or eminent lawyer on the one side of her, and the *See North British Review, No. lxxviii. peasant poet on the other. She had a pas- | scenery, but there is a feeling that the whole sion for the scenery in her neighbourhood, and it was worthy of her admiration. She lived on the western slope of the Cairngorm mountains, at almost the nearest inhabitable point to the grand scenery walled in by them. All the great folks had to go there whether they liked it or not, and the precipices and scenery of Braeriach and Ben Muich Dhui were thus better known in that day than they have been since. Her daughters succeeded to her taste. There was a story in the country-we forget whether it was about the mother or one of the daughters-how being one day on the top of Ben Muich Dhui with a child and a large dog, she was caressing the child, when the dog either in jealousy or fancying she was injuring the child, flew at her and bit her so as to pull part of the flesh of the forehead over her eyes, and so through that terrible wilderness she had to find her way home bleeding and blinded. It seems to have been through this influence that Burns was prompted to sing of the Highlands, and of course whatever he said was well listened to. He did honour to Foyers, and the power of his pen is attested by the leafy covering that shelters the Bruar Water-the fruit of his poetic Petition. Still these are not Burns's great works, nor is his strong spirit in them. Though he proclaimed that his heart was in the Highlands, he never celebrated them with so much heart as in that yell of rage and disappointment in which he says "There's naething here but Hieland pride, But Hieland scab and hunger." Burns seems to have loved lowland scenery best. This, of course, is matter of opinion, but we shall put it to something like a test. Every one knows the land of Burns as a professional tourist's district. That land is lowland, though it is close to a fine Highland district which would have been included in it, had Burns been partial to wandering there. He sang of the "banks and braes of bonny Doon," blooming so fresh and fair; this is the lowland part of the Doon where it winds through the pastures of Ayrshire. But far up, the Doon roars between great walls of rock, and brings you to a lake surrounded by grand mountains of granite. This region where Kirkcudbrightshire and Ayrshire meet would have been in itself probably an illustrious touring district, but for the case with which the western Highlands are reached. Throughout Macpherson's Poems of Ossian, however, which, though written earlier, reached the climax of their celebrity about the same time, there is quite a Highland spirit. It is not that there are set descriptions of action goes on in a land of wild heaths, great mountains, torrents, tempests, and ancient forests. People have occupied themselves so much about the great question of genuineness that they have overlooked the mighty poetic genius of the author. Whatever he got from authentic sources, the scenery is his own, for it is not the way of the old Irish writers to touch it. Indeed this was one of the metamorphoses necessary in the subtraction of the stories from Ireland and their adaptation to Scotland, since the portion of Ireland ruled by Fingal or the Fin M'Coull of the annalists has little or no mountain scenery. He does not deal in detailed pictures of scenery, but the feeling of it is in almost every line, and sometimes a little sketch weaves itself into the narrative, as in the description of an ancient tomb: "A mountain stream comes roaring down, and sends its waters round a green hill. Four mossy stones in the midst of withered grass rear their heads on the top. Two trees which the storms have bent spread their whistling branches around. This is thy dwelling, Eragon; this thy narrow house." Or take a passage from the many addresses to the sun: "Thou too, perhaps, must fail: thy darkening hour may seize thee, struggling as thou rollest through the sky. But pleasant is the voice of the bard-pleasant to Ossian's soul. It is like the shower of the morning when it comes through the rustling vale on which the sun looks through mist just rising from his rocks. . . Pleasant is thy beam to the hunter sitting by the rock in a storm, when thou showest thyself from the parted cloud, and brightenest his dewy locks; he looks down on the streamy vale, and beholds the descent of roes." Again: "Pleasant from the way of the desert the voice of music came. It seemed at first the voice of a stream far distant on its rocks. Slow it rolled along the hill, like the ruffled wings of a breeze when it takes the tufted beards of the rocks in the still season of night." The poems of Ossian were one of the literary feats that from time to time have taken the world by storm. They filled the hearts of their readers with their own sentiment; and thus the roaring of the mountain-torrents, the sighing of the winds among the rocks, the grey moors, and the stormy hill-tops were rescued from vulgarity; they were associated with the sublimity, instead of the coldness, bleakness, and sterility that chilled the soul of Captain Burt. Still there were several steps ere the passion for scenery in its present shape reached its climax in the Lady of the Lake. It is a pleasant task to endeavour to throw a little sunshine on a reputation which has been overshadowed by another. Of all those who have heard of Scott's Lady of the Lake, only a few have heard of the little book called "Sketches descriptive of Picturesque Scenery on the Southern Confines of Perthshire," published in 1806, by Patrick Graham, minister of Aberfoyle. Though it was Scott who made the Trossachs illustrious, Graham was their discoverer. This book is meritorious and curious in literature, from its being among the earliest not only to notice the specialties of Higland scenery, but to notice them in the same aesthetic spirit in which they are now cultivated. Take this "Ben-Venue, in Aberfoyle, is perhaps one of the most picturesque mountains in Britain. Its height is about 2800 on the north; besides the immense masses of rock which appear in this and in all other mountains to have been, by some couvulsion of nature, torn from the summit, the whole slope is covered, for two-thirds upwards, with alders, birches, and mountain ashes of ancient growth, and sprinkled over the surface with a grace and beauty unattainable by the hand of art. At the first opening of Loch Katrine especially, and for a considerable way along the lake, the shoulder of Ben-Venue stretching in abrupt masses towards the shore, presents a sloping ridge, elegantly feathered with birches, in a style which the pencil may in some degree exhibit, but which verbal description cannot possibly represent." He offers his advice to the visitor in a way which shows his decided conviction that he was revealing to the world what it was a great loser by not being acquainted with, and the crowds who have since flocked thither confirm his testimony. Having induced his stranger to visit his favourite district, he says "On entering the Trossachs, let him remark on the right the beautiful disposition into which nature has thrown the birches and the oaks which adorn the projecting cliffs; let him remark the grouping of the trees, with their elegaut figure an form. Some aged weeping birches will attract. Ben-An and Ben-Venue will present at every step varied pictures. In passing through the dark ravine that opens on Loch Katrine, whilst he admires again the disposition of the birches, the hawthorn, the hazels, and oaks, and mountain ashes, let him remark an echo produced by the concave rock on the left, which, though too near to repeat many syllables, is remarkably distinct and loud. Immediately on entering Loch Katrine, let him attend to the magnificent masses of Ben-Venue as they tumble in upon the eye from the south; there can be nothing more sublime." Observe we are not maintaining that this would be either very remarkable thinking or very fine writing were it some quarter of a century nearer us. There are some conventionalisms of a past style in it, not in full harmony with the genius of the place, such as the word "elegant," which reminds you of the Irish guides at Killarney, with their "illigant" waterfalls and "illigant" echoes. But remember that Mr. Graham is a beginner of a school. We test him as we do Chaucer in poetry, or Van Eyck in painting, and in this sense he challenges admiration and respect. He proposed that some plan should be taken to open up his favourite district by giving visitors the means of accommodation. Recent pilgrims to the Trossachs will perhaps be amused by the modest bound within which he retained his suggestions. "It has often," he says, "occurred to the writer of this sketch, that it might well reward the trouble and expense of the innkeepers of Callander, or of the occupier of the farm of Brenchyle, on which the northern part of this celebrated scenery lies, to build a cottage either at the eastern extremity of the lake, or in a small neck of land which runs into it about a mile to the west. Two comfortable bedrooms, with a kitchen and an open shade, with some provisions for horses, would be enough. There from the 1st of May to the 1st of November should a servant be kept, and a supply of provisions sent from time to time from the inn at Callander or Aberfoyle." Worthy Mr. Graham was not aware of the splendid destiny that awaited the spot on which he had bestowed his affections. Had Scott, before he wrote the Lady of the Lake, "invested" in a handsome hotel at the Trossachs, it would have been a better speculation than many he indulged in. There have been quack doctors who have acted in this managing way, setting up establishments on the chance of a system of cure to be promulgated by them becoming famous. Nature has a balance, however, in the distribution of her gifts, and perhaps the genius that could invent and perfect such a scheme is not the same as that which can create a great poem. No productions of the present day, not even Macaulay's History, created such a wild sensation as the great works which were the successive steps in fame to Scott and Byron. There are those alive who remember the astonishment of the country folks at the impetuous influx of all peoples, nations, and languages to their wild solitudes. The poem was a great wonder in its fresh novelty of social life as well as of scenery. We have seen how the same subject, the life and social condition of a reiver, was treated by an author, his contemporary. That author would doubtless have thought it just as impossible to make a hero out of a Roderic Dhu, as we would now think it impossible to make a hero out of any prowling thief who casts a furtive squint at the policeman as he skulks away. |