There is a cathedral, that "aydifyce" of note, touched almost nothing by the spirit of "reform"; for the burghers of Glasgow, then as now, believing that their cathedral belonged to them, rose in their might and cast out the despoilers before they had done more than smash a few "idols." Therefore this shrine of St. Kentigern's is more pleasing than the reformed and restored shrine of St. Giles. The crypt is particularly impressive. And the very pillar behind which Rob Roy hid is all but labeled. Of course it is "authentic," for Scott chose it. What unrivaled literary sport had Scott in fitting history to geography!
There is a University, one of the first in the Kingdom; the city universities are gaining on the classic Oxford and St. Andrews.
But chiefly there are miles of houses of working men, more humble than they ought to be. If Glasgow is one of the best governed cities in the world, and has the best water supply in the world—except that of St. Paul—would that the Corporation of the City of Glasgow would scatter a little loveliness before the eyes of these patient and devoted workingmen.
But what a chorus their work raises. In shipyards what mighty work is wrought, even such tragically destined work, and manufactured beauty, as the Lusitania!
From Glasgow it is that the Scot has gone out to all the ends of the earth. If the "Darien scheme" of wresting commerce from England failed utterly, and Glasgow failed most of all, that undoing was the making of the town. It is not possible to down the Scot. The smallest drop of blood tells, and it never fails to be Scottish. Most romantic, most poetic, most reckless, most canny of people. The Highlander and the Lowlander that Mr. Morley found mixed in the character of Gladstone, and the explanation of his character, is the explanation of any Scot, and of Scotland.
Ayr
Always the West is the democratic corner of a country; or, let me say almost always, if you have data wherewith to dispute a wholesale assertion. Sparta was west of Athens, La Rochelle was west of Paris, Switzerland was west of Gesler; Norway is west of Sweden, the American West is west of the American East. And Galloway and Ayrshire are the west Lowlands of Scotland.
The West is newer always, freer, more open, more space and more lure for independence. The West is never feudal, until the West moves on and the East takes its place. Here men develop, not into lords and chiefs, but into men. Wallace may come out of the West, but it is after he has come out that he leads men, in the establishment of a kingdom, but more in a wider fight for freedom; while he is in the West he adventures as a man among men, on the Waters of Irvine, in Laglyne Wood, at Cumnock. And a Bruce, struggling with himself, and setting himself against a Comyn, may stagger out of a Greyfriars at Dumfries, and, bewildered, exclaim, "I doubt I have slain the Comyn!" When a follower makes "siccar," and all the religious and human affronts mass to sober The Bruce, a king may come out of Galloway, out of a brawl, if a church brawl, and establish the kingdom and the royal line forever.
If a Wallace, if a Bruce, can proceed out of these Lowlands—and a Paul Jones!—a poet must come also. And a poet who is as much the essence of that west country as chieftain or king. Everything was ready to produce Burns in 1759. William Burns had come from Dunnottar, a silent, hard-working, God-fearing Covenanter, into this covenanting corner of Scotland. It was filled with men and women who had grown accustomed to worshiping God according to their independent consciences, and in the shelter of these dales and hills, sometimes harried by that covenanter-hunting fox, Claverhouse—to his defeat; finally winning the right to unconcealed worship. Seven years gone, and William Burns having built the "auld clay biggan" at Alloway, he married a Carrick maid, Agnes Broun, a maid who had much of the Celt in her. And Robert Burns was born.
It is of course only after the event that we know how fortunate were the leading circumstances, how inevitable the advent of Robert Burns. Father and mother, time and place, conspired to him. And all Scotland, all that has been Scotland since, results from him. It is Scott who reconstructed Scotland, made the historic past live. But it is Burns who is Scotland, Scotland remains of his temper; homely, human, intense, impassioned; with a dash and more of the practical and frugal necessary for the making of a nation, but worse than superfluous for the making of a Burns.