with satchel to a school,” and so well improved his opportunities of elementary education that in old age he was able “with an eye of scorn” to turn over the leaves of Voltaire in the original. He had a thorough Caledonian respect for the Sabbath, and for
Those godly men
Who swept from Scotland, in a flame of zeal,
Shrine, altar, image.
He even refused “wine and stouter cheer,” when offered by a fellow Atholman, who must have unlearned the native teetotalism while serving abroad—
Chaplain to a military troop
Cheered by the Highland bagpipe, as they marched
In plaided vest.
It may be more by good luck than good guidance that the poet does not try for a stroke of local colour in letting his abstinent hero sit down to a supper of “Atholl Brose.” The above hints of character, which will be recognised by patient Excursionists, go to show how Daddy Wordsworth, though he had the advantage of a visit to the Atholl Highlands, made the common English mistake about their inhabitants. John Bull will not understand how Scotland is inhabited by two different stocks, whose differences were much less blended in that Wanderer’s youth. It could then be said that the Sabbath had not yet got above the Pass of Killiecrankie; and it will be remembered how the Captain of Knockdunder proposed to deal with any “sincere professor” who scrupled to join in a unanimous call to whatever pastor pleased the duke and his deputy. Even in the poet’s day nobody seems to have rebuked him when he drove his poor beast along Highland roads on Sunday. An Atholl man’s clearest memory of Covenanters would be the check given to the victors of Killiecrankie when Cleland’s Cameronians held Dunkeld against those ex-oppressors of “godly” Whigs. The most “moderate” Presbyterian ministers had sometimes to be inducted by force in the Highlands, where still many of the people cling to the old faith. The Sandemanians sent missionaries into Atholl, who were received with indifference or ridicule; it was only two generations later that such evangelical gospellers as J. A. Haldane and Rowland Hill succeeded in blowing up, through the far North, a new flame of Calvinist enthusiasm, which in our time has turned this end of Scotland into a sanctuary for strict Sabbatarianism, much relaxed among city folk and even among the descendants of westland Whigs.
The Highlanders of the old dispensation had virtues of their own, but the poet was much left to himself when he conceived Glengarry as cradle for his idealised Scot, brought up among such a good Presbyterian family as would be more at home in the Cottar’s Saturday Night upon the Carrick border—a picture quoted in full by Gilpin as an illustration of Highland manners!
Pure livers were they all, austere and grave,
And fearing God, the very children taught
Stern self-respect, a reverence for God’s word,
And an habitual piety, maintained
With strictness scarcely known on English ground.
The plain truth is that Wordsworth here was for confusing oil and vinegar. He had heard at school of a Drummond Jacobite exile who took asylum among the Lakes; and there he must often have met Scottish pedlars; then he indiscriminately “combined his information,” perhaps led astray by Walter Scott’s glorification of the Highlands. Behind the Highland line, where a tourist with a knapsack has in our time been hailed as a pedlar, there went about of old such itinerant dealers, who seem to have borne a quasi-sacred character when some such safe-conduct was much needed; but they, like Bryce Snailsfoot, were more apt to be canny Lowlanders, and so little of teetotallers that, as Scott tells us, “the chapman’s drouth” was a sly proverb in Scotland, where a colporteur of tracts could praise the “continual mercy” of a dram at every farm. In England the pedlar’s trade was so much in the hands of Scots—at one time counted by thousands across the Border—that these two titles to somewhat qualified respect appear to have become almost synonymous at the time when Wordsworth’s pedlar was laying up his little fortune. Instances of this may be found in that curious novel, The Spiritual Quixote, showing how a young gentleman who took to Methodist preaching passed among Derbyshire countryfolk as a “Scotch pedlar,” or simply as “a travelling Scotchman”; while in chapbooks of the period a “rider” is the term for that more exalted emissary of commerce who came to be a “traveller” par excellence, or a “drummer” in the figurative language of America. “Traveller” would hardly suit such an one in Scotland, where to “travel” implies specially the use of Shanks’ Naigie. Both in England and Scotland those packmen were sometimes looked on with suspicion by the authorities, accused of being political agitators as well as newsmongers, and, later on, of diffusing irreligious publications. On the Continent, also, Scots sought their fortune as pedlars, when no longer in such demand as soldiers.
Every one does not know how the Scottish pedlar has left heirs of direct succession in our day of stores and bargain sales. Quiet houses in certain streets of London that look down on open shops, would be found to have their back rooms full of drapery goods for hawking about at area doors or to working-men’s wives, cajolable into making purchases on credit which may ruin domestic peace. These tempters of humble Eves are likely to be Scots of the baser sort, and I venture to guess them as Lowlanders; they are said to be chiefly recruited in Galloway. Their dubious business is popularly known as the Scotch trade; and this seems to be responsible for keeping asmoulder among the lower classes such prejudices against the Scot as were fanned by Wilkes and Johnson, unequally yoked together in one antipathy. In Scotland, where the law is less hard-hearted and customers are more hard-headed, the “Scotch trade” does not now flourish; it is one thing Scottish which we need not be proud of bringing into England. Of course, there was a time when the northern pedlar played a useful and grateful part, as he tramped about out-of-the-way countrysides with his burden of wares and gossip—