frown of the hills rising in the distance. Here was the heart-shaped rock of Dumbarton, with the castle where Wallace had lain a prisoner. There were the crowded roofs of Greenock, clustered under its own storm-cloud, hanging over the city churchyard where Highland Mary was laid to rest. Yonder ran the Tail of the Bank, by which fleets have ridden at anchor, where Colin’s solitary ship was seen through the morning mists by the sharp eyes of the loving gude-wife, so fain to tell that her man was ‘come to town.’ This was the entrance to the loch by whose shore the race of Macallum More slept soundly. Across the river the warning white finger of the Cloch Lighthouse bade belated crafts beware. Roseneath was fair as when Jeanie Deans landed under the guardianship of the Duke’s man. At Toward Point the tenderest of Highland tragedies lingered with the memory of the old clan Lamont. At last the twin islands of Bute and Arran came full in sight, and Goatfell rose, brown and grey and russet—not purple as yet—unrivalled from the sea, and held up a rugged face to the fleecy clouds.”
Reversing this route, and shortening it by train from Greenock, we come to St. Mungo’s City, by Liverpool’s leave, the second in Britain, yet none of your mushroom Chicagos, but a good old Lanark borough that has spread itself far over two counties, since the days when its Broomielaw harboured a few small craft, and its Fair was confined to the Green, on which the Earl of Moray encamped before crushing Queen Mary’s cause in half an hour, at the battle of Langside, its field now within the extended municipal bounds. In her time Glasgow was already known as the Market of the West, showing the rudiments of a varied fabrication in its plaiding, and in such a “Glasgow buckler” as the adventurous Queen would fain have carried when she wished she were a man to “lie all night in the fields,” and swagger mail-clad along the crown of the causeway.
Max O’Rell and other moderns have said very unkind things of Glasgow; but all the early travellers extol the prettiness, pleasantness, and cleanness of this city on a once limpid river, qualities not so apparent nowadays. Along with too many most squalid slums, Glasgow has fine features in her ancient Cathedral, in her lofty Necropolis, in her picturesque Trongate, in her noble University Buildings elevated above the West End Park, and in her central square with its forest of illustrious effigies, “an open-air Madame Tussaud’s.” But these monuments are not so remarkable as the wealth and manifold industry of which signs abound on every hand, drowning the rustic charms noted by Defoe and Burt. In the Commonwealth days Richard Franck had dubbed Glasgow the “non-such of Scotland”—“famous and flourishing”—on whose “beautiful palaces” and warehouses “stuft with merchandise” he expatiates in his conceited style. Even the crabbed Matthew Bramble was “in raptures with Glasgow.” Pennant twice calls this “the best built of any second-rate city I ever saw,” and tells how Glasgow had been “tantalised with its river,” soon to be deepened into such a highway of traffic.
By the middle of the eighteenth century Glasgow had not 20,000 inhabitants, but she began to make her fortune fast while the rest of Scotland rather sullenly prepared to exchange thistly patriotism for more profitable crops. Rum and tobacco were the foundation of a prosperity that came to be checked by the American Revolution; then the long-headed worthies of the Saltmarket took up cotton, and cotton was weighed down by iron, and iron was set afloat as well as wood; and a host of other trades sprang up, among them that Turkey-red dyeing that is for Glasgow what its purple was for Tyre.
On Glasgow Green, we are told, James Watt thought of the steam condenser that was the great practical step towards starting such merry-go-roundabouts here at Fair time, and so many wheels on which the progress of the world has spun with such acceleration “down the ringing grooves of change.” If the first model of a steamship was made in Edinburgh, the first passenger paddle-boat that plied in Britain was that between Greenock and Glasgow in 1812. Glasgow, not quite so large as Edinburgh in James Watt’s lifetime, had then begun to give the capital the go-by, even before she became environed by a wilderness of “pits and blast furnaces that honeycomb and blacken the earth, and burn with a red glare throughout the night for many a mile around,” where another writer describes daylight showing “patches of sour-looking grass surrounded by damp stone walls; gaunt buildings soot-begrimed and gloomy; and an ever-increasing blue-grey mist pierced by tall chimneys.” St. Kentigern, whose petit nom was Mungo, could hardly now identify the site of his hermitage among noisy Clyde ship-yards and busy streets, noted by jealous neighbours as too familiar with
The merchant rain that carries on
Rich commerce ’twixt the earth and sun.
The relations between the two chief cities of Scotland have been a little stiff since Glasgow rose so high in the world, as how should a laird of old pedigree, crippled by forfeitures and mortgages, not look askance from his castellated turrets on the spick and span buildings of an upstart millionaire neighbour, the one standing on his name and title, the other on his shrewdness, honesty, and strict attention to business rather than the graces of life. One suspects Sarah Tytler to be no west-countrywoman, from her kindly hits at Glasgow cotton lords and iron lords, with more money than they always knew what to do with, a generation ago; yet she loudly extols their generosity and public spirit; and in our time Bailie Jarvie’s successors have distinguished themselves, like their rivals at Manchester and Liverpool, by a liberal patronage of art, proof of which may be seen in the new Corporation Gallery that is a legacy of the last Exhibition. Edinburgh wits are not so scornful now towards Glasgow cits, as in the days when Kit North—himself a Paisley body—joked his coarsest at the expense of the “Glasgow Gander,” and Aytoun told scandalous tales of the Glenmutchkin Railway and the Dreepdaily Burghs.
In spirit and sentiment, the two cities have not always seen eye to eye. Auld Reekie often showed herself a bit of a Tory, the ladies of the family having even a tenderness for Jacobitism and philabegry, since Rob Roy lived not so close to their gates, and they knew the Dougal Cratur only as a red-nosed porter or town-guard of bygone days: thus the Red Indian, beneath whose war-paint the western settler could see no good unless mark for a bullet, might be hailed as a noble savage in Boston or New York. But Glasgow has always been