Or, for Knox to pray—"Oh, Lord, if thy pleasure be, purge the heart of the Queen's Majestie from the venom of idolatry, and deliver her from the bondage and the thralldom of Satan."
Perth
Perth may be the Fair City, but it is scarce fair among cities, and is chiefly regarded even by itself as a point of departure, the Gate of the Highlands. The railway platform is at least a third of a mile long, and very bewildering to the unsuspecting visitor who thought he was merely coming to the ancient Celtic capital.
For, very far backward, this was the chief city of the kingdom, before Scotland had spread down to the Forth, and down to the Border. Even so recently (?) as the time of James the First it was held the fairest city in the kingdom. But the assassination of that monarch must have led the Jameses to seek a safer city in which to be fair.
There is a touch of antiquity about the town. One is shown the house of the Fair Maid; in truth that being the objective of the casual traveler signs in the street point the way. It may or may not be. But we agreed to let Scott decide these things and he, no doubt, chose this house. Curfew Street that runs by, looking like a vennel—vennel? I am certain—was inhabited rather by lively boys, and no fair head looked out from the high window that would have furnished an excellent framing for the fair face of Catherine Glover.
The North Inch I found to be not an island in the Tay, but a meadow, where every possible out-door activity takes place among the descendants of Clans Chattan and Quhele—there is race-course, golf links, cricket field, football, grazing, washing. I trust the clans are somewhat evener now in numbers, although there were left but one Chattan to level the Quheles. Coming from the Chattan tribe I must hope the centuries since that strifeful day have brought reëxpansion to the Chattans.
Farther up the Inch, onto the Whin, the eye looks across to Scone. The foot does not cross, for there is nothing left of the old Abbey, not even of the old palace where Charles II, last king crowned in Scotland, suffered coronation—and was instructed in the ways of well doing according to the Covenant. Even the stone of destiny was gone then, brought from Dunstaffnage, and taken to Westminster.
There is nothing, or only stones, left of the Blackfriar's Monastery in which James, the poet-king, suffered death. Surely he was born too soon. As last instead of first of the Jameses, what might he not have done in the ways of intelligence and beauty, as England's king as well as Scotland's? Very beautifully runs his picture of Lady Joanna Beaufort, seen from a window in Windsor—
"The fairest and the freshest flower,
That ever I saw before that hour,
The which o' the sudden made to start
The blood of my body to my heart ...
Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly creature,
Or heavenly thing in form of nature?"
