Lie sere and leafless now in summer’s beam,
With sooty exhalations covered o’er;
And for the daisied green-sward, down thy stream
Unsightly brick-lanes smoke, and clanking engines gleam.
The banks of the Clyde have not grown more Arcadian since Campbell’s day, so the traveller does well to hurry by rail over the windings of the smoky river, embarking at Greenock or Helensburgh, where it broadens out into a firth deep enough to drown the offences of man. Here launch forth a fleet of steamboats, whose admirals, almost alone in Britain, rival the luxurious arks of the Hudson and the Mississippi; and here begins a “delectable voyage,” too often spoiled by rain, else warmly praised by a hundred pens, for instance in Colonel Lockhart’s Fair to See, one of the most amusing of Highland novels, as readers might not guess from this opening passage:
The mountain panorama which greets you as you start, noble though it be, is but the noble promise of still better things; for it cannot show you the exquisite variety, the contrasts, the combinations, the marvellous chiaroscuro, the subtle harmonies, the sublime discords, that meet you and thrill you at every turn, passing through the inner penetralia of all that is most glorious in the land of mountain and of flood. Gliding through those strange sounds and estuaries, with their infinite sinuosities, traced about peninsula and cape and island—traced as it were with a design of delighting the eye with sudden presentments of scenic surprises, as it were with a design of furnishing not one, but twenty points of view, wherefrom to consider each salient wonder and beauty round which they seem to conduct you proudly on their glittering paths—there must be something far wrong with you if you find no delight in all this. For here indeed you have a succession of the noblest pictures,—no mere iteration of rugged mountains, monotonous in their grim severity and sublime desolation,—no mere sleepy tracts of unbroken forest, nor blank heaths losing themselves vaguely in the horizon, nor undulating expanses of lawn-like pasture-land, but with something of all these features blending in each of the splendid series; every feature in turn claiming its predominance, when all the others seem to pose themselves about the one central object, sinking for the moment their own individualities that it may be glorified.
For the first stage of this voyage, indeed, the shore is too much masked by a long line of bathing and boating resorts, to which Glasgow folk love to escape even from the comforts of the Saltmarket. On the right-hand side stands Dunoon, whose fragment of ruined fortress looks stranded above a flood of hotels, shops, and villas, in which several villages have run together into a town. Farther down, on the Isle of Bute, Rothesay makes the focus of Clyde pleasure trips, no mushroom resort, but seat of an ancient royal castle that titled the heir of Scotland. The Stuarts still flourish here in the person of the Marquis of Bute, who is as great a man in the Principality of Wales as in the Dukedom of Rothesay. The old town has expanded into a couple of miles of esplanade, curving below green hills upon a land-locked bay, its surface lively with yachts, pleasure boats, and steamers that in the summer season turn out myriads of excursionists to sack the joys of the place. I was about to belittle Rothesay by calling it the Southend of Glasgow; but in view of its hydros, its mineral spring, and its background of dwarf Highland scenery, its character may better be expressed in terms of chemical analysis:
| Torquay | 21.00 | |
| Douglas | 13.45 | |
| Cowes | 16.00 | |
| Weston-super-Mare | 14.10 | |
| Scarborough | 14.00 | |
| Clacton | 6.25 | |
| Blackpool | 12.07 | |
| Residuum of Local Peculiarities | 3.13 | |
| 100.00 | ||
In winter, when “Wee Macgreegors” and the like desert its waters, Rothesay becomes the Ventnor of Scotland, recommended by a sheltered western mildness, which indeed its own guide-book advocate has to qualify as “rather humid.” Even in ordinary winters it may bear comparison with South Devon or the Isle of Wight, while sometimes a whim of Nature has set the thermometer standing higher here than at Mentone. This mildness is attested by exotic plants in Lord Bute’s park, whose late owner, Disraeli’s “Lothair,” for a time maintained colonies of kangaroos, beavers, and other outlandish creatures. Whatever harsh things may be said of Eastern Scotland’s climate, the West Highland skies are more apt to be “soft,” and to snow only “whiles.” Some patriotic Scots go so far as to claim that their country is on the whole warmer than England, no part of the former being over forty miles from the Gulf Stream that so muggily wraps the islands of our far north.
For the rest, Bute makes a miniature of the Highlands, once rich in chapels and hermitages, as in monuments of a dimmer faith, too many of which have been destroyed, like that monastic ruin carted away to baser uses by a thrifty farmer, who thought to gain his lord’s approval for “clearing” a beautiful spot. A modern memorial, not to be pointed out to French visitors, is the woods of Southhall, planted by a veteran owner as plan of the battle of Waterloo. The boss of the island, Barone Hill, rises over 500 feet, from which, or from the park above Rothesay, fond local eyes have tried to count a dozen counties, and half a dozen are certainly in view. “Why don’t you pretend to see to America, while you are about it?” quoth a rude Southron to some local prospect-monger; and the dry answer was, “Ye can see farther than that—as far as the moon!”