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money, I must tell you they do not want manners; and one piece of humanity they are masters of, which you, with all your boasted improvements, are without and that is, courtesy to strangers, in which they outdo even the French themselves." 1

There probably never was a man better endowed with the power of making out an alibi; of taking the reader with him to Dumfries or Inverness while he was all the while in his own study at Cripplegate. But he goes into the particularities of travel with a profuseness which would lay him open to detection even at the present day, and must have put him in the power of a multitude of contemporary readers, if he sat at home and shammed the traveller. He had not the advantage of an unpeopled island like Selkirk's Juan Fernandez. So we find him enjoying the hospitalities of Lauder, the minister of Mordinton, who writes on the Cyprianic age. He tells us that Lord Tweeddale's pictures are at Pinkey, because the mansion of Yester is not finished. On one journey a very remarkable phenomenon enables him to walk through the Clyde dry-shod above Glasgow Bridge, which he laughs at, with its great skeleton-looking arches striding over an empty water-course; and next time he goes that way, the Clyde in flood is rushing through the streets on either side, and threatening to carry the bridge before it. Then at Drumlanrig, along with a Derbyshire man, at the request of the Duke of Queensberry, he goes poking among the hills for lead ore, and "here we were surprised with a sight which is not now so frequent in Scotland as it has been formerly-I mean one of their field-meetings, where one Mr. John Hepburn, an old Cameronian, preached to an auditory of near 7000 people, all sitting in rows on the steep side of a green hill, and the preacher on a little pulpit made under a tent at the foot of the hill. He held his auditory, with not above an intermission of half an hour, almost seven hours; and many of the poor people had come above fifteen or sixteen miles to hear him, and had all the way to go home again on foot.""

He is here close to the deep chasm called the Enterkin, which he describes not only in his book of travels, but also in his Memoirs of the Church of Scotland, as the scene of an affair between Covenanters and dragoons. He describes it as terrible, for it would have been too bad at that time to have introduced such a scene to good society like an orange grove or a shaven lawn; but there is a fascination in its horror which makes him eloquent and descriptive. It is a curious testimony to the enduring freshness of these descriptions, that Dr. John Brown has cited both of them in one of his popular miscellanies on Scottish scenery; has cited them of course as 1 Review, vi. 174. 2 Review, iii. 62.

attractive to readers of the present age, though that to which they were addressed looked upon all such scenery as odious.

The charm of De Foe is that he is perfectly natural, yielding to the influences around him, and giving himself up to the absolute control of no conventionality. He begins hill-climbing at the Cheviots, and lets out his greenness and Cockneyism by his anxiety about the question, whether he shall find standingroom on the top. "We all had a notion that when we came to the top we should be just as upon a pinnacle, that the hill narrowed to a point, and we should have only room enough to stand, with a precipice every way round us," but the end of the adventure, on the contrary, is, "I was agreeably surprised when, coming to the top of the hill, I saw before me a smooth, and with respect to what we expected, a most pleasant plain of at least half a mile in diameter, and in the middle of it a large pond, or little lake of water; and the ground seeming to descend in every way from the edges of the summit to the pond, took off the terror of the first prospect." 1

All men of action have their special sagacities and prowess. An Orkney cragsman is frightened to descend a stair, and a chamois-hunter would be unnerved at a crossing in the Strand. De Foe's courage and wisdom were both exercised ou man rather than on inanimate nature, and his simplicity about the culmination of a mountain is well compensated by the sagacity contained in the following dream of a New Town of Edinburgh that might have been, and now is :-" On the north side of the city is a spacious, rich, and pleasant plain, extending from the Lough which joins the city to the river of Leith, at the mouth of which is the town of Leith, at the distance of a long Scots mile from the city; and even here were not the north side of the hill, which the city stands on, so exceeding steep, as hardly (at least to the westward of their flesh-market) to be clambered up on foot, much less to be made passable for carriages. But, I say, were it not so steep, and were the Lough filled up, as it might easily be, the city might have been extended upon the plain below, and fine beautiful streets would, no doubt, have been built there; nay, I question much whether, in time, the high streets would not have been forsaken, and the city, as we might say, run all out of its gates to the north." 2

Burt tells a story of a surveyor who had gone to the Highlands, taking his credentials with him as a Government officer, but who found them so little available for his protection that arrangements for putting him to death looked quite serious. In his terror he remembered that a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh had given him a letter of introduction to a local 1 Tour, iii. 118. 2 Tour, iii. 33.

magnate. The production of this brought immediate security and hospitality, with the question, Why the teil he had used that tamned Covernment paper instead of Cousin Lachlan's letter. De Foe found that it would have been useless to go to the Glengary or the Macrae country without the countenance. of the chiefs and other local powers. He seems to have made himself so good a fellow among them indeed, that their hospitalities became rather oppressive to him; and he sketches out a plan for traversing the country, calculated to avoid entire dependence either on the futile resources of public places of entertainment, or on local hospitality. His plan is a delightful one, alive with the spirit of the genuine explorer and lover of nature. He proposes that a small party should organize themselves, and carry tents and baggage with them. It would be madness to attempt this without the countenance of the local magnates, "but if they are first well recommended as strangers, and have letters from one gentleman to another, they would want neither guides nor guards, nor indeed would any man touch them; but rather protect them, if there was occasion, in all places; and by this method they might in the summertime lodge when and wherever they pleased with safety and pleasure, travelling no farther at a time than they thought fit. And as for their provisions, they might supply themselves with their guns with very great plenty of wild-fowl." He knew, indeed, a party of five, "two Scots and three English gentlemen," who had actually carried out an expedition after this fashion into the unknown wilds of the north Highlands, and in a very tantalizing way winds up the affair by saying, " It would be very diverting to show how they lodged every night; how two Highlanders who had been in the army went before every evening and pitched their little camp; how they furnished themselves with provisions, carried some with them, and dressed and prepared what they killed with their guns; and how very easily they travelled over all the mountains and wastes without troubling themselves with houses or lodgings; but, as I say, the particulars are too long for this place."1

By the way, this book has an interest for the bibliographer, the bibliomaniac, the book-hunter, or whatever the collector of literary specialties may call himself. In fact, in the eyes of this class it should be invested with a certain romantic interest, for, like the hero of a deep plotted romance, its position has been claimed in the eye of the world by an impostor, against whom it has been vindicated, with no better fate, after all, than to show that the writer is a spurious De Foe, and that the reality had long been lost sight of in the contest between rival shams.

1 Tour, iii. 211, 212.

In most good libraries, from sixty to eighty years old, will be found a book, in four small volumes, called The Tour through the whole Island of Great Britain. As a work both popular and useful, it went through many editions. It used to go by the name of De Foe's Tour, and it was not rated as an imposture. It had some title to the name, in as far as it grew out of that book, becoming towards it what a stupidish, plodding, elderly gentleman is to a wild adventurous youth. It became a sort of travellers' guide and statistical companion. It had everything that the sanction of a high name could give to recommend it, for its reconstruction was known to be the work of Samuel Richardson, who went through the ordeal of being the most fashionable novelist of his day. Still, in later times, the four volumes were looked on rather disdainfully, and collectors preferred the fresh and genuine De Foe. Now, it happened that one John Mackay, unknown to fame, printed, in several editions, the latest of which is dated in 1732, " A Journey through England, in Familiar Letters from a Gentleman here to his Friend Abroad," in two volumes, followed by a third, called " A Journey through Scotland, etc., being the Third Volume, which completes Great Britain." A tacit resolution seems to have been passed in the bookish world to make this personate De Foe's book. Look at the catalogue of any public library, under the name of De Foe, and you will find that the genuine book is carefully distinguished from Richardson's recasting, and when you get your hand on the genuine' book, behold it is Mackay's. Go to any vender of old books, and ask if he has De Foe's Tour,"the genuine, mind, not Richardson's," the dealer understands you perfectly; he has the genuine article; he produces the three volumes, and, lo, they are the inevitable Mackay's. The world owes to Mr. Wilson, in his life of De Foe, the exposition of this curious history of a bibliographical changeling.

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The best way to enjoy De Foe's Tour is to read it after Johnson's. The true-born Englishman was free from the lexicographer's burden of dictionary words, and his obligation to turn. every sentence in his rounding lathe. Going from one to the other, then, is like going from social conventionalism to freedom; it feels as if one were escaping from a highly-served establishment, with its pomps and ceremonies, its plush and shoulderknots, and systematic organization for the day's tediousness, and taking to the hill as a wanderer, with the free world before one.

Johnson's coming among us was a great event. It was considered, on the principle of every dog having his day, that Scotland had at last got a turn on the wheel of fortune, and the book that was to come of the strange excursion was waited on with intense anxiety. The author of it could scarcely use his

pen without setting down something remarkable and worth reading, and yet his qualifications were as uncongenial to his work as they could well be. He knew a deal of what is told in books, but his knowledge of mankind was limited to "The Town;" and of the world beyond it, he was as ignorant as his own "Rasselas" of everything outside the happy valley. He was, in fact, just a noble specimen of the Cockney. He seems to have expected, when he crossed the Tweed, to see something as foreign and strange as if he had gone to Cashmere or Morocco for it. He did find a few patrician courtiers, the insides of whose dwellings-and that was the only side he cared about was just the same as those of the English Howard's and Wilmot's. In the next step of the social scale he found a difference, but not such as he expected or desired, though, had he remembered the political condition of Scotland, and the foreign tendencies of the gentry, he might have expected it. In that range of country life, where at home he could only find October ale-drinking, fox-hunting boors, he met with polished gentlemen and accomplished scholars, who had studied at Leyden, Ratisbon, or Douay. The unfortunate politics, and the presence of actual civil war, raised their social position, since their thoughts and their conversation ran on dynasties and foreign alliances, instead of parochial bickerings and disputes about rights of way and swing-gates. In another grade he found, just as at home, pompous pig-headed professors and frousy country clergymen of the epicurean or the ascetic cast, like the Trullibers and Parson Adamses he had left behind. Most unpleasant of all, there were men whom he did or night meet, whose literary fame was so considerable that it has since eclipsed his own.

The scientific traveller was then becoming common, but Johnson had no science, and when he touched on it he wrote nonsense. He came to the country to condemn it, and he did condemn it. One of his foregone conclusions was that it was a barren treeless tract, and in this he managed somehow to make out his point. It is curious to observe how skilfully he evaded the finest scenery of Scotland. Going northwards, he hugged the sea, as sailors sometimes say of the shore, and thus kept on that bleak coast, swept by east winds, which a Kentucky man is said to have commended as "an almighty clever clearing." When at Aberdeen, if he had chosen to turn the hill, and get into the nearest shelter, he would have found scattered clumps of trees, which, thickening as he went up the Dee, would scarce have deserted him till he found himself in the great forest of Glen Tanner, which, down to recent times, not only sufficed for the shipping in the north-east coast, but gave the port of Aberdeen an export trade in ship-timber. Glen Tanner would have

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