It is, of course, the prowess of our Highland regiments that has made their dress as dear in Scotland as once over half of it this was hated and despised. The tartans are dyed by the blood of a hundred battlefields, as by memories of green braes and purple moors. Crude and criant may be some of their colourings, but not more so than is the tricolour or the Union Jack. Even if the kilt in its present form were more or less a modern invention, it is at least older than the Stars and Stripes, and we know what passionate loyalty that gaudy pattern can call forth. The other day, I forgathered with a Lowland Seaforth Highlander, fresh from South Africa, to whom I communicated a report that the War Office thought of putting him into trousers. “They daren’t!” he cried, his eye ablaze with all the fire of Killiecrankie, where his progenitor might have chosen for the nonce to be equipped in the lightest running costume.
Strange how the Celtic leaven rises in the stodgy composition of British nature! What is this infectious quality it has? We are Saxons in business, and well for us it is so; but in hours of ease and sentiment we hark back to the race older on our mother earth. English settlers in Ireland notoriously become Hibernis Hiberniores ipsis. English workmen in Welsh quarries, it is said,
learn to speak Welsh rather than their comrades English. In the long run the stolid Teuton grows to be proud of his lighter strain. I who write can trace my descent with unusual clearness back to a Norman adventurer whose progeny appears to have settled for a time in the Breadalbane Highlands, but long ago came down to opener straths—
The mountain sheep were sweeter,
But the valley sheep were fatter.
The alliances of my kin were for generations with the English-speaking Lowlands, where their neighbours had cause to look on the wild Highlandmen as an American backwoodsman looked on Mohawk or Shawnee warrior. My forebears “had no use for” kilts, if some perhaps for dirks and claymores. I know of only one recent strain of Highland blood, and that at second hand through England, to make me a Celtic quadroon, so to speak. Yet there is many a Scot, with no more claim to Highland lineage than mine, who cannot see the tartan even in a Princes Street shop-window, or hear the pibroch wailing over forgotten graves of his father’s foes, without a certain stir of spirit which a biological philosopher might explain as waves of molecular disturbance propagated through the nerve centres by vague emotional combinations organised in the earlier experiences of the race. Boswell confessed to the same weakness, and what had he to do with the Highlands?