the too towering obelisk on Tomachastle challenged a thunderbolt to rebuke the vanity of mortal fame.
Soon appear on either side mantled crags and bristling ridges, and the mountain moors begin to close in upon fields and parks. Half-way between Crieff and Loch Earn, Comrie stands at the head of the rich strath which now begins to take on the features of a Highland glen, still tamed by mansions and plantations. On one side the Ruchill Water comes in from Glenartney, where the stag was startled from his midnight lair by Fitzjames’s hounds; on the other, by Dunira, the Lednock rushes down a wilder ravine over which stands out a monument to Dundas, Lord Melville, head of the Tory oligarchy that to its own satisfaction ruled Scotland in the days of Pitt. This satrap is not so much admired by later leaders of Scottish politics. He has another tall column at Edinburgh in a line with statues of George IV. and Pitt, a trio of monuments denounced as “Vice standing between Tyranny and Corruption” by the Radical orator, Bailie Jamieson, who went to prison for such speeches, as his more widely famous son did for certain doings in South Africa.
As I write, newspapers record the death of a Dundas of Dunira, whose name takes me back half a century to the morning when two of his brothers breakfasted at our house on their way from school, wearing scarlet flannel, then known as “Crimean,” shirts, which, to us unsophisticated provincials, not yet “in the movement,” seemed below the dignity of Harrow boys. Dr. Keate would have agreed with us, who, in the former generation, gave an Eton culprit two extra cuts for the vulgarity of having a “checked shirt” to turn up in disclosing circumstances. Times are changed; but it is not so clear about nos et mutamur: one can fancy the schoolmasters and schoolboys of to-day still cocking a critical eye at changes of custom and costume, which in a few years will seem matters of course.
The stranger who, to a panorama of celebrated scenes flitting before his strained eyes, prefers settling down and photographing on memory characteristically charming landscapes, could not do better than set up his tent at Comrie, where he may come in for the excitement of one of its slight earthquakes. Among the many excursions radiating hence, he must not neglect to follow up the Earn to its parent lake. The last time I took this lovely walk, it was in company with the late Dr. Andrew Melville, Clerk of the Free Church, a name well-known in Scotland as reviving that of his forbears, the Reformation champions. He made his summer home at Comrie, which, through another sojourner, the widow of Lord Chancellor Cairns, had come to be a resort of the English sect called Plymouth Brethren; and I recall his telling me on our walk how a party of sisters of that ilk, invited together to a house at Comrie, proved to be hardly on speaking terms after a rent in this exclusive communion. It is not only in Scotland that Seceders split up into Auld Lichts and New. And in Scotland, by the way, the Wee Free Church that lately made such a profitable contention for the faith as once delivered to Calvinistic saints, begins to generate a fissiparous ferment, having already mutinied against the lay champion who led it to victory and booty. At least sects are fewer in Scotland, which seldom welcomes exotic divinity, its taste being for home-made dissensions. A local writer has an amusing account of a Plymouth Brother, at Crieff, roaring down a Mormon missionary who promised mounts and marvels across the Atlantic; but the contest did not tend to conversion or edification.
Our way up the Earn has led us by several eddies and backwaters of Scottish Protestantism; but now we pass into the shadow of the hills where the cross itself was dipped in fire and blood. When I walked up to Loch Earn with that kindly kinsman of mine, the railway did not go beyond Comrie, as it does now, under outlying masses of Ben Voirlich, where wooded knolls huddle below slopes of turf and rock and fern dappled by patches of brown or purple heather. We are here fairly in the Highlands; and from St. Fillan’s Hill, shooting up over the river, we look down upon a true central Perthshire prospect of a long lake stretching below high mountains; but else, as a disappointed Cockney complained, one can’t see the view for the hills.
The smart village of St. Fillans, spreading out along the loch foot in villakins of rusticating townsfolk, is a modern settlement, but it may have had ancient memories to forget, for here, or hereabouts, stood Dundurn, capital of the Pictish land called Fortrenn, which seems to have taken in Angus, along with Strathearn and the lower basin of the Tay. The island in the foreground was in later times lair of a gang of robbers named Neish, who in an ill turn for themselves undertook to rob a servant of the Macnabs, bringing their Christmas fare from Crieff. The Macnab of that day had a round dozen of Samsonlike sons, to whom, at their bare board, he significantly spoke—“The night is the night, were the lads but the lads!” On this hint the twelve set out, dragged a boat across from Loch Tay to Loch Earn, surprised the revelling Neishes at dead of night, and slew all but one youth who managed to slip off. Next morning they greeted their father with the outlaws’ gory heads and the boast, “The lads were the lads!” Another account makes them exclaim on this occasion, “Dread nought!” which has remained the Macnabs’ motto.
It is nearly sixty years ago that I spent a summer at St. Fillans, as yet hardly known to the outside world. At times that sojourn comes back to me as a dream of childish delight; but I was too young to gather a faggot of impressions that would serve when—
As less the olden glow abides,
And less the chillier heart aspires,
With drift-wood beached in past spring tides
We light our sullen fires.
Perhaps the most prosaic English urchin stores up as warm memories of “days in the distance enchanted,” spent on the fattest claylands or the smoothest fen. Anyhow, one’s heart goes out to the bare-headed and bare-kneed youngsters, “hardy, bold, and wild,” who from the train are seen taking all chances of weather with frolic and glee on the banks of Loch Earn, heedless of the cloud of “Rudiments” and “Delectus” that will loom back upon them with the shortening autumn days.
Even less to be envied passengers have a good glimpse of this lake, as upon a shelf above the northern side they are whisked along a fine panorama, with Ben Voirlich’s rugged head for its background. Farther on, the shores grow tamer, where fields come down to the water edge; then, as by the scattering of houses at Lochearnhead the railway winds round its upper end, it overlooks a fine retrospect of the loch’s whole reach from St. Fillans. A few minutes more among bare green slopes, and we are at the Balquhidder Junction of the railway to Oban, standing lonely as if lost in the heart of the Highlands. The name seems misleading, for it is rather at the next halting-place southward, Kingshouse, that one turns off a couple of miles to Loch Voil and the Braes of Balquhidder, where Rob Roy rests at peace beneath a circle of chieftainly Bens, through which Glenfinlas would lead us to the Trossachs region.