HUNTINGTON TOWER.
He came back from his enforced habitation in England accompanied by Lady Joanna as Queen, and determined "if God gives me but a dog's life, I will make the key keep the castle and the brachen bush the cow." It was a dog's death the gods gave. The nobles, the Grahams, would not keep the castle. So in Blackfriars the king was "mercilessly dirked to death," notwithstanding that Catherine Douglass—the Douglasses were with James then—made a bar across the door with her arm where the iron had been sinisterly removed. A dark scene, with "the fairest flower" looking on.
So, I think it not so ill, even though time delayed over a hundred years, that John Knox (May, 1559) should have preached such an incendiary sermon that in three days there was nothing left of Black or Gray friary but the broken stones.
Nor is there anything left of Gowrie house, where James VI was almost entrapped and almost slain—"I am murdered—treason—treason"; the jail stands on its site. Huntington Tower still stands down the Tay; and there also James very nearly came to his death, at the plotting of the son of that Ruthven who killed Rizzio and forced Mary to abdicate.
Kinnoul Hill overlooks the town, and furnishes a very fair view of the Fair City. No doubt it was from this height that the Roman looked down upon the Tay—
"Behold the Tiber! the vain Roman cried,
Viewing the ample Tay from Baiglie's side;
But where's the Scot that would the vaunt repay,
And hail the puny Tiber for the Tay?"
It is more wonderful to-day to know that salmon weighing seventy pounds are sometimes taken from this Tay. The river leads down through the rich Carse of Gowrie, toward Dundee and marmalade. Thither we shall not go; but it shall come to us.
Ruskin spent his childhood in Perth and did not like it. But Ruskin liked so little in the world, except—"that Scottish sheaves are more golden than are bound in other lands, and that no harvests elsewhere visible to human eye are so like the 'corn of heaven,' as those of Strath Tay and Strath Earn." That is the way for to admire, for to see; all, or nothing was Ruskin's way.
Ruskin married in Perth, one of its fairest maids, who lived on the slope of Kinnoul Hill; and then, unmarrying, the fair lady, looking very fair in the painted pictures, married a painter who once was very much about Perth.
Perth is also the "Muirton" of "The Bonnie Brier Bush." So some have found these environs bonny.