Loch Leven is celebrated for its breed of trout, and for that grey tower half hidden by trees on an islet, which was poor Mary Stuart’s prison. The dourest Scotsman’s heart has three soft spots, the memory of Robert Burns, the romance of Prince Charlie, and the misfortunes that seem to wash out the errors of that girl queen. This is dubious ground, into which tons of paper and barrels of ink have been thrown without filling up a quaking bog of controversy. I myself have heard a distinguished scholar hissed off the most philosophic platform in Scotland for throwing a doubt on Queen Mary’s innocence, so I will say no more than that her harshest historian, if shut up with her in Loch Leven as page or squire, might have been tempted to steal the keys and take an oar in the boat that bore her over those dark waters to brief freedom and safety. Had Charles Edward only had the luck to get his head cut off in solemn state, how much more gloriously dear might now be his memory!
As Scott points out, Fife was noted for a thick crop of gentry, who were apt to be found on the side of the Queen Marys and Prince Charlies, whereas its sturdy common folk rather favoured Whig principles. Not far from Kinross, the grey homespun of Scottish life is proclaimed by one of those ugly obelisks that have so much commended themselves for the expression of Protestant sentiment. At Gairney Bridge, on the Fife and Kinross border, in 1733, four suspended ministers formed themselves into the first Presbytery of the Original Secession Church, a most fissiparous body which brought forth a brood of sects not yet altogether swallowed up in the recent union of the Free and United Presbyterian churches. I am bound to special interest in that foundation, for as a forebear of mine appears riding away from the shores of Loch Leven in Queen Mary’s train, so one of those four seceders was my great-great-great-great (or thereabouts) grandfather, Moncrieff of Culfargie, himself grandson of a still remembered Covenanter. His spiritual descendants make a point of the fact that being a small laird, he yet testified against the unpopular system of patronage, and thus is taken to have been before his time. But Plato amicus, etc., or as Sterne translates, “Dinah is my aunt, but truth is my sister,” and a closer examination reveals among the heads of my forefather’s testimony against the Church of Scotland a conscientious protest in favour of executing witches and persecuting Roman Catholics, so perhaps the less said about his views the better. A few years before, a poor old wife, rubbing her hands in crazy delight at the blaze, had been burned as a witch for the last time in Scotland; and the “moderate” ministers were now content to ignore an imaginary crime which a few years later became wiped out of the statute-book.
The ancestral shade should know how filial piety urged me, perhaps alone in this generation, to perform the rite of reading his works, which indeed want such “go” and “snap” as are admired by congregations who “have lost the art of listening to two hours’ sermons.” He was truly a painful and earnest preacher, in one volume of whose discourses I note this mark of wide-mindedness, that it is entitled “England’s Alarm,” whereas other old Scottish divines seem rather to treat the neighbour country as beyond hope of alarming. His brother-in-law, Clerk of Penicuik, characterises Culfargie as “a very sober, good man, except he should carry his very religious whims so far as to be very uneasy to everybody about him.” It is recorded of him that he prayed from his pulpit for the Hanoverian King in face of the Pretender’s bristling soldiery, like that other stout Whig divine whose petition ran, “As for this young man who has come among us seeking an earthly crown, may it please Thee to bestow upon him a heavenly one!”
Loyalty to the same line was less frankly shown by a very different member of our clan, Margaret Moncrieff, a name little renowned on this side the Atlantic, while she figures in more than one American book as the “Beautiful Spy.” Being shut up among rebels in New York, when the besieging Engineers were commanded by her father Colonel Moncrieff, she got leave to send him little presents, among them flower-paintings on velvet, beneath which were traced plans of the American works. The device being discovered, it might have gone hard with her but for Yankee chivalry, that expelled that artful hussy unhurt, in the end to bring no honour upon her name, if all tales of her be true.
The ancestral worthy whose memory has led me into a digression, lived and laboured in Strathearn, to which from Kinross we pass by Glenfarg, no Highland glen but a fine gulf of greenery with stream, road, and railway winding side by side through its banks and knolls, that called forth Queen Victoria’s warm admiration on her first visit to Scotland. At the other end of this Ochil gorge we are welcomed to Perthshire by the wooded crags of Moncrieff Hill, round which the Earn bends to the Tay; then some dozen miles behind, rises the edge of the true Highlands, where “to the north-west a sea of mountains rolls away to Cape Wrath in wave after wave of gneiss, schist, quartzite, granite, and other crystalline masses.”
CHAPTER V
THE FAIR CITY
PERTH, the central city of Scotland, whose name has been so flourishingly transplanted to the antipodes, is a very ancient place. Not to insist on fond derivation from a Roman Bertha, there seems to have been a Roman station on the Tay, probably at the confluence of the Almond; and curious antiquarians have found cause for confessing to Pontius Pilate as perhaps born in the county, a reproach softened by the consideration of his father being little better than a Roman exciseman. The alias of St. Johnston Perth got from its patron saint, who came to be so scurvily handled at the Reformation. At this date it was the only walled city of Scotland. Before this, it had been intermittently the Stuart capital in such a sense as the residence of its Negus is for Abyssinia; and farther back Tayside was the seat of the Alpine kingdom that succeeded a Pictish power. Now sunk in relative importance, Perth makes the central knot of Scottish railway travelling; so on the Eve of St. Grouse its palatial station becomes one of the busiest spots in the kingdom, though the main platform is a third of a mile long. To the stay-at-home public it may perhaps be best known by an industry that
