There were, of course, noble trees scattered throughout the country. Gray describes “the four chestnuts of vast bulk and height in Lord Breadalbane’s park,”[180] and Pennant, “the venerable oaks, the vast chestnuts, the ash trees, and others of ancient growth, that gave solemnity to the scene at Finlarig Castle.”[181] A love of planting, which began about the time of the Union, was gradually extending. Defoe noticed the young groves round the gentlemen’s houses in the Lothians, and foretold, that in a few years Scotland would not need to send to Norway for timber and deal.[182] The reviewer of Pennant’s Tour in the Scots Magazine for January, 1772, rejoiced to find that the spirit of planting was so generally diffused, and looked forward to the advantages arising from it, which would be enjoyed by posterity.[183] Sir Walter Scott defended Johnson against the abuse which had unjustly been cast on him. The east coast, if the young plantations were excepted, was as destitute of wood as he had described it.[184] Nay, to his sarcasms he greatly ascribed that love of planting which had almost become a passion.[185] It was not for nothing, then, that Johnson had joked over the loss of his walking-stick in Mull, and had refused to believe that any man in that island who had got it would part with it. “Consider, Sir, the value of such a piece of timber there.”[186]
BACKWARDNESS OF FARMING.
The modern traveller who, as he passes through the Lothians or Aberdeenshire, looks with admiration on farming in its perfection, would learn with astonishment how backward Scotch agriculture was little more than one hundred years ago. While in England men of high rank and strong minds were ambitious of shining in the characters of farmers, in Scotland it was looked upon as a pursuit far beneath the attention of a gentleman. Neither by the learned had it been made a study.[187] There were those who attributed this general backwardness to the soil and climate; but it was due, said Lord Kames, “to the indolence of the landholders, the obstinate indocility of the peasantry, and the stupid attachment of both classes to ancient habits and practices.”[188] The liberal intercourse between the two countries, which was an unexpected result of the Rebellion of 1745, greatly quickened the rate of improvement.
“Before that time the people of Northumberland and the Merse, who spoke dialects of the same language, and were only separated by a river, had little more intercourse than those of Kent and Normandy. After the Rebellion a number of noblemen and gentlemen amused themselves with farming in the English style. The late Lord Eglinton spared no expense in getting English servants. He showed his countrymen what might be done by high cultivation. Mr. Drummond, of Blair, sent over one of his ploughmen to learn drill husbandry, and the culture of turnips from Lord Eglinton’s English servants. The very next year he raised a field of turnips, which were the first in the country. And they were as neatly dressed as any in Hertfordshire. A single horse ploughing the drills astonished the country people, who, till then, had never seen fewer than four yoked. About the year 1771 our tenants were well-disposed to the culture of turnips. They begin to have an idea of property in winter as well as in summer; nor is it any longer thought bad neighbourhood to drive off cattle that are trespassing upon their winter crops.”[189]
The young Laird of Col, just before Johnson’s visit, had gone to Hertfordshire to study farming, and had brought back “the culture of turnips. His intention is to provide food for his cattle in the winter. This innovation was considered by Mr. Macsweyn as the idle project of a young head heated with English fancies; but he has now found that turnips will grow, and that hungry sheep and cows will really eat them.”[190] Yet progress was not so rapid but that Adam Smith held that a better system could only be introduced “by a long course of frugality and industry; half a century or a century more perhaps must pass away before the old system which is wearing out gradually can be completely abolished.”[191]
The cultivation of vegetables for the table and of fruits was also taking a start, though much remained to be done. When Johnson was informed at Aberdeen that Cromwell’s soldiers had taught the Scotch to raise cabbages, he remarked, that “in the passage through villages it seems to him that surveys their gardens, that when they had not cabbage they had nothing.”[192] Pennant, however, the year before, in riding from Arbroath to Montrose, had passed by “extensive fields of potatoes—a novelty till within the last twenty years.”[193] It was not till Johnson had travelled beyond Elgin that he saw houses with fruit trees about them. “The improvements of the Scotch,” he remarks, “are for immediate profit; they do not yet think it quite worth their while to plant what will not produce something to be eaten or sold in a very little time.”[194] The Scotch historian of Edinburgh complained that “the apples which were brought to market from the neighbourhood were unfit for the table.”[195] “Good apples are not to be seen,” wrote Topham in his Letters from Edinburgh. “It was,” he said, “owing to the little variety of fruit that the inhabitants set anything on their tables after dinner that has the appearance of it, and I have often observed at the houses of principal people a plate of small turnips introduced in the dessert, and eaten with avidity.”[196] Smollett indirectly alludes to this reflection on his native country when, in his Humphry Clinker, he says that “turnips make their appearance, not as dessert, but by way of hors d’œuvres, or whets.”[197] Even in the present day, the English traveller far too often looks in vain for the orchards and the fruit tree with its branches trained over the house-wall. Yet great progress has been made. In Morayshire, in the present day, peaches and apricots are seen ripening on the garden walls. In the year 1852 an Elgin gardener carried off the first prize of the London Horticultural Society for ten varieties of the finest new dessert pears.[198] If Scotland can do such great things as this, surely justification is found for the reproaches cast by Johnson on Scottish ignorance and negligence.
ENGLISH IGNORANCE OF SCOTLAND.
So closely have the two countries in late years been drawn together by the wonderful facilities of intercourse afforded by modern inventions, that it is scarcely possible for us to understand the feelings of our adventurous forefathers as they crossed the Borders. At the first step they seemed to be in a foreign country. “The first town we come to,” wrote Defoe, “is as perfectly Scots as if you were one hundred miles north of Edinburgh; nor is there the least appearance of anything English either in customs, habits, usages of the people, or in their way of living, eating, dress, or behaviour.”[199] “The English,” Smollett complained, “knew as little of Scotland as of Japan.”[200] There is no reason to think that he was guilty of extravagance, when in his Humphry Clinker he makes Miss Tabitha Bramble, the sister of the Gloucestershire squire, imagine that “she could not go to Scotland but by sea.”[201] It is amazing to how late a day ignorance almost as gross as this came down. It was in the year in which George II. came to the throne that Defoe, in his preface to his Tour through Great Britain wrote:—“Scotland has been supposed by some to be so contemptible a place as that it would not bear a description.”[202] Eleven years later, in 1738, we find it described much as if it were some lately discovered island in the South Seas.
“The people in general,” we read, “are naturally inclined to civility, especially to strangers. They are divided into Highlanders who call themselves the antient Scots, and into Lowlanders who are a mixture of antient Scots, Picts, Britons, French, English, Danes, Germans, Hungarians, and others. Buchanan describes the customs of the Highlanders graphically thus:—‘In their diet, apparel, and household furniture they follow the parsimony of the antients; they provide their diet by fishing and hunting, and boil their flesh in the paunch or skin of a beast; while they hunt they eat it raw, after having squeezed out the blood.’... The Western Islands (the author goes on to add) lie in the Deucaledonian Sea.... The natives of Mull when the season is moist take a large dose of aqua-vitæ for a corrective, and chew a piece of charmel root when they intend to be merry to prevent drunkenness. The natives of Skye have a peculiar way of curing the distempers they are incident to by simples of their own product, in which they are successful to a miracle.”[203]
Into so strange and wild a country it required a stout heart to enter. A volunteer with the English army at the time of the Rebellion of 1745 wrote from Berwick:—“Now we are going into Scotland, but with heavy hearts. They tell us here what terrible living we shall have there, which I soon after found too true.”[204] How few were the Englishmen who crossed the Tweed even so late as 1772 is shown by the hope expressed in the Scots Magazine for that year, that the publication of Pennant’s Tour would excite others to follow in his steps.[205] Two years later Topham wrote from Edinburgh that “the common people were astonished to find himself and his companion become stationary in their town for a whole winter.... ‘What were we come for?’ was the first question. ‘They presumed to study physic.’ ‘No.’ ‘To study law?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then it must be divinity.’ ‘No.’ ‘Very odd,’ they said, ‘that we should come to Edinburgh without one of these reasons.’”[206] How ignorant the English were of Scotland is shown by the publication of Humphry Clinker. The ordinary reader, as he laughs over the pages of this most humorous of stories, never suspects that the author in writing it had any political object in view. Yet there is not a little truth in Horace Walpole’s bitter assertion that it is “a party novel, written by the profligate hireling Smollett, to vindicate the Scots, and cry down juries.”[207] It was not so much a party as a patriotic novel. Lord Bute’s brief tenure of ignoble office as Prime Minister and King’s Friend, the mischief which he had done to the whole country, and the favour which he had shown to his North Britons, a few years earlier had raised a storm against the Scotch which had not yet subsided. “All the windows of all the inns northwards,” wrote Smollett, “are scrawled with doggrel rhymes in abuse of the Scotch nation.”[208] With great art he takes that fine old humorist, Matthew Bramble, from his squire’s house in Gloucestershire on a tour to the southern part of Scotland, and makes him and his family send to their various correspondents lively and pleasant descriptions of all that they saw. At the very time that he was writing his Humphry Clinker a child was born in one of the narrow Wynds of Edinburgh who was to take up the work which he had begun, and as the mighty Wizard of the North, as if by an enchanter’s wand, to lift up the mist which had long hung over the land which he loved so well, and to throw over Highlands and Lowlands alike the beauty of romance and the kindliness of feeling which springs from the associations given by poetry and fiction.