towards the farther end of which a newer Museum contains a remarkable natural history collection. At its corner of South Street are the County Buildings, adorned with portraits of local worthies, and at the end of High Street, the City Buildings with windows illustrating Perth’s history. Perth has now two bridges and everything handsome about it—besides the Dundee railway bridge with its footway from the South Inch. The central bridge is only three or four years old, but here stood one washed away in 1621, since when the citizens had long to depend on what is now the old bridge below the North Inch.
This bridge leads over into the transpontine suburb, above which, on the slopes of Kinnoul Hill, the rank and fashion of the city have inclined to seek “eligible building sites,” Scotticè, “feuing plots.” The banks of the river, too, on this side have long been bordered by villas and cottages of gentility; but about “Bridge End” there is still a fragment of the humbler suburb that has had more than one famous sojourner in our time. Here, in a house now distinguished by a tablet, and afterwards in Rose Terrace opposite, John Ruskin spent bits of his childhood with an aunt, wife of the tanner whose unsavoury business had the credit of keeping the cholera away from Bridge End. That amateur of beauty, for his part, has nothing but good to say of Perth: he remembers with pleasure the precipices of Kinnoul, the swirling pools of the “Goddess-river,” even the humble “Lead,” in which other less gifted children have found “a treasure of flowing diamond,” now covered up to belie his vision of its defilement; and his lifelong impression was that “Scottish sheaves are more golden than are bound in other lands, and that no harvests elsewhere visible to human eyes are so like the ‘corn of heaven’ as those of Strath Tay and Strath-Earn.” Yet youthful gladness turned to pain, when through his connection with Perth Ruskin came to make that ill-matched marriage with its fairest maid, afterwards known as Lady Millais. Their brief union he passes over in silence in his else most communicative reminiscences; and the writer were indiscreet indeed who should revive rumours spun round a case of hopeless incompatibility. One misty legend, probably untrue, declares him, for certain reasons, to have vowed never to enter the house in which her family lived, that Bowerswell mansion, a little up the hill, where a crystal spring had often arrested his childish attention. He did enter the house once, to be married, according to the custom of the bride’s Presbyterian Church: hinc illae lacrimae, according to the legend.
Like that great prose-poet, the reader’s humble servant, without being able to boast himself a native of Perth, spent part of his youth here and has pleasant memories that tempt him, too, to be garrulous. I have no recollection of seeing Ruskin at Perth, but I well remember Millais in the prime of manly beauty. In the early days of his fame he lived much with his wife’s family at Bowerswell; and several of the children he then painted so charmingly were playmates of mine, who would come to our Christmas parties in the picturesque costumes he had been putting on canvas. For some reason or other, he never proposed to immortalise my features; but I have boyish memories of him that seem to hint at the two sides of his art. My sister sat for one of his most famous pictures, on which, in the capacity of escort to his child model, I had the unappreciated privilege of seeing him at work. What struck a little Philistine like me was how the painter paid no attention to a call to lunch, working away in such a furor of industry as I could sympathise with only if mischief were in question. Someone brought him a plate of soup and a glass of wine, which he hastily swallowed on his knees, and again flung himself into his absorbing task. My internal reflection was that in thus despising his meals this man showed such sense as Macfarlane’s geese who, as Scott records, loved their play better than their meat. But a quite different behaviour on another occasion excited stronger disapproval of the future P.R.A. in my schoolboy mind. When out shooting with my father one hot day, I took him to a little moorland farm where the people would offer us a glass of milk. Millais rather scornfully asked if they had no cream. They brought him a tumblerful, the whole yield for the day probably, and he tossed if off with a “Das ist kleine Gabe!” air that set me criticising the artistic temperament. It was a fixed notion with young Scots that all English people were greedy: “Set roasted beef and pudding on the opposite side o’ the pit o’ Tophet, and an Englishman will make a spang at it!” exclaimed the goodwife of Aberfoyle. Thus we give back the southron’s sneer for our frugal poverty. Our old Adam might welcome the good things of life that fairly came our way; but we schooled each other in a Spartan point of honour that forbade too frank enjoyment. Millais was born very far south; and there are those who say that he might have been a still greater painter, had he shown less taste for the cream of life.
From Bowerswell, an artist had not far to go for scenes of beauty. The road past the house, winding up to a Roman Catholic monastery built since those days, leads on into the woods of Kinnoul Hill, which is to Perth what Arthur’s Seat is to Edinburgh. No tourist should, as many do, neglect to take the shady climb through those woods, suggesting the scenes of a tamed German “Wald.” At the farther side one comes out on the edge of a grand crag, the view from which has been compared to the Rhine valley, and to carry out this similitude, a mock ruin crowns the adjacent cliff. We have here turned our backs on the Grampians so finely seen from the Perth slope of the hill, and are looking down upon the Tay as it bends eastward between this spur of the Sidlaws and the wooded outposts of the Ochils opposite, then, swollen by the Earn, opens out into its Firth in the Carse of Gowrie, dotted with snug villages and noble seats such as the Castle of Kinfauns among the woods at our feet, a scene most lovely when
The sun was setting on the Tay,
The blue hills melting into grey;
The mavis and the blackbird’s lay
Were sweetly heard in Gowrie.
The Gowrie earldom, once so powerful in Perth, has disappeared from its life; but the title is still familiar as covering one of those districts of a Scottish county that bear enduring by-names, like the Devonshire South Hams or the Welsh Vale of Glamorgan. To a native ear, the scene is half suggested by the word Carse,