outbreak, feel something genial in it. It thus drew attention when the taste for scenery was in an extremely chaotic condition. Of those who looked upon the cataract with a touch of feeling higher than the brutal love of the phenomena of disorder, some would naturally extend their allegiance to the other and calmer portions of the stream that had caught their attention by impetuously dashing itself over the rock. If they did so, their thoughts would come into communion with other and deeper sensations tending to consecrate rivers in the love and almost the devotion of the people. There has long been a reverence for the chief rivers in Scotland. There are traces of the same feeling in other countries, and it has its causes, like every other phenomenon; but this is not the occasion for investigating them. That the feeling has in Scotland come under the eye of the very highest authority in such matters, is shown when we recall Frank Osbaldistone approaching the upper reaches of the Forth in that weary ride with the Bailie and Andrew Fairservice. "That's the Forth,' said the Bailie with an air of reverence, which I have observed the Scotch usually pay to their distinguished rivers. The Clyde, the Tweed, the Forth, the Spey, are usually named by those who dwell on their banks with a sort of respect and pride, and I have known duels occasioned by any word of disparagement." There is scarcely a river of any note in Scotland that cannot Even so modest a boast some considerable poetic tribute. stream as the Don has been solemnized once in Latin hexameters, and twice at least in vernacular verse. Collectors in this department of Scottish topography are acquainted with a thin quarto volume called Donaides, professing to be the produce of the genius and scholarship of Joannes Ker, Professor of Greek in King's College, Aberdeen. The professor, however, influences the tenor of this effort more than the pastoral poet. There is little in it either about the river or the scenery, and it concentrates on the university to which its author belonged-standing near the mouth of the river-and a Mæcenas of the establishment, whose munificence probably influenced the author's income. The river nymphs, of course, bear trophies and tribute to him, among the items of which are myrtles, laurels, and other vegetables, which do not naturally grow on the banks of the Don. There is a very small scrap in the vernacular called "A Poem in imitation of Donaides, by David Malloch, A.M." This is the same man who afterwards earned celebrity in England as David Mallet-the same who was hired by the Duchess of Marlborough to write the history of the great duke, and managed so successfully in his talk about what was gone over in this division and that chapter, that he got paid for the completion 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 Deve. 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 1 "The Muses Threnodie, or Mirthful Mournings on the Death of Mr. Gall, containing a variety of pleasant poetical descriptions, moral instructions, historical narrations, and divine observations, with the most remarkable antiquities of Scotland, especially of Perth, by Mr. H. Adamson. Printed at Edinburgh, in King James's College, 1638." 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, 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 Conil's well, The which Thessalian Tempe doth excell, Whose name and matchless fame for to declare, In this most doleful dittay must I spare; Yet thus dar say, that in the world again No place more sweet for muses to remain For shadowing walks, where silver brooks do spring, To these most pleasant banks scarce can compare. с Into those banks chiefly did we repair, 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 apple-trees 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." Around are the Argyleshire mountains and the peaks of Arran. The author has manfully done his poetic duty on streams, cataracts, bridges, lawns, forests, gardens, sheep pastures, fish and fishers, shepherds, shepherdesses, and all the old accepted elements of poetry. He has even gone out of the old routine to give poetic dignity to coal mines, manufactories, shipyards, salt-works, and various other institutions with which the real has much more to do than the ideal. He seems, however, to be entirely at a stand for inspiration when he gets into that grand group of mountain scenery which it is difficult for us now to imagine any one looking at without feeling the impulses of poetic thought throbbing within him. Having bestowed his homage on Bute and the Cumbraes in due proportion, he could not evade Arran. He seems to have been sore perplexed how to deal with those vast porphyry rocks, but with a poetic ingenuity that does him credit, he evades the difficulty by getting immediately to the top of Goatfell; turning his back on the grand mountain masses on the other side, he keeps his eye steadily on Ayrshire, where he receives the favourite themes of his muse: "Far look thy mountains, Arran, o'er the main, If we professed to give anything beyond a mere sketch of superficial phenomena, and were to aspire at philosophy, we might endeavour to explain how the eye's enjoyment of a river would naturally extend to the immediate landscape around it, and so travel onwards. But we have the fact that, physically, rivers open up scenery. They do so not merely in fishing and navigable traffic. Their alluvial banks are, as we have seen, the readiest fertile ground, and they at the same time afford natural levels for inland transit. These two causes will be sufficient to account for the houses of the gentry having been placed on the river's edge wherever such a site was available. It will be hard to find an instance of a laird in possession of a margin of river building out of sight of it. Probably, in most instances, the mansions were built on principles of pure utilitarian convenience, long before the owners discovered that the prospect commanded by them was beautiful. It is a remark, partaking of a truism, that accessibility promotes the popularity of scenery. What nature in this respect owes to science is well exemplified in the district we are now speaking of the Highlands accessible from the Clyde. It is almost impossible to estimate the blessing which this pleasure-ground is to Glasgow. It raises one of the densest, dirtiest, and most immoral conglomerates of humanity to a stage above many of the finest cities of the empire, as a place of residence for one who must live in a city. There is a sort of compensating spirit in that steam which, having made the mills, created also the delightful place of refuge from their dust and din. No wonder that James Watt is a sort of deity here. How, even with the luxuries of the Saut-Market, Glasgow could have been endurable without this refuge, it is difficult to |