Well-known was all this country to young Walter Scott, when he spent long holidays at Cambusmore and other friendly mansions hereabout, his hosts as little thinking as himself how this idle callant was one day to increase the value of property in Menteith. Indeed, it is extraordinary how much at home he shows himself in most parts of Perthshire, so far from his native eyry. Through that heart of Scotland as we wandered together, the tales by which I have tried to cheer the reader’s way are mostly to be found transfused into his romances or tacked on them as illustrations in his lively introductions and notes. If I have forborne to repeat hackneyed epithets about the scenery of this region, it is because I take for granted that its features are familiar in Scott’s verse, which, let certain critics shut their ears as they will, still plays to general admiration the drum and trumpet part in the orchestra of British poets, not without interludes of sweeter strain that will be remembered long after more elaborate compositions have been whistled down the winds of fame.
We all know where to look for descriptions of Perthshire scenery; and I am the less bound to labour on word-painting, since in my case it may be hoped, after the words of another poet, that “the pictures for the page atone.” The artist here has done his part for both of us. The author modestly presents himself, rather, as a gossiping companion to the guide-book, which, in its up-to-date form, dwells more on details of useful information, and has less room for giving strangers some notion what life was in this region before its flush of romance had died away like an Alpine glow.
But soon now we are out of Perthshire, crossing the Forth into Stirling, whose citadel, “the bulwark of the North,” has been our beacon as we gossiped our way down the green Menteith Mesopotamia. The “Sons of the Rock” may receive me with a frown, declaring their county and not mine to be the true heart of Scotland, which I admit to have been for a time its central ganglion, whence the nerves of civilisation thrilled out through Highlands and Lowlands. We can both agree that the fat Lothians and the smoky Clyde were mere excrescences, which made a narrow escape of becoming no better than English borderlands. Stirling cannot at least complain that I failed to do it due honour in Bonnie Scotland. Now once more let us mount its castled rock to look back on such a prospect of Perthshire that nowhere could one have a nobler standpoint for bidding—
Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow!
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below!
Farewell to the forest and wild-hanging woods!
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods!
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.
HEART OF SCOTLAND
