“Oh for a plump fat leg of mutton,
Veal, lamb, capon, pig, and cony,
None is happy but a glutton,
None an ass but who wants money.”
So sang the servant of Diogenes, with an exceptionable morality, which, nevertheless, it is difficult to get out of one’s head at Stirling, if one has not already breakfasted.
I limped up the long street leading to the castle, stopping on the way to look at a group of natives who were gaping at an advertisement just stuck to the wall, offering to take emigrants to New York on terms “ridiculously trifling.” Remembering the “bannocks o’ barley meal” I had eaten for breakfast, the haddocks and marmalade, the cold grouse and porridge, I longed to pull Sawney by the coat, and tell him he was just as well where he was. Yet the temptation of the Greenock trader, “cheap and nasty” though it were, was not uninviting to me!
I was met on the drawbridge of the castle by a trim corporal, who offered to show me the lions for a consideration. I put myself under his guidance, and he took me to Queen Mary’s apartments, used at present for a mess-room, to the chamber where Earl Douglas was murdered, etc. etc. etc., in particulars which are accurately treated of in the guide-books. The pipers were playing in the court, and a company or two of a Highland regiment, in their tartans and feathers, were under parade. This was attractive metal to me, and I sat down on a parapet, where I soon struck up a friendship with a curly-headed varlet, some four years old, who shouldered my stick without the ceremony of “by-your-leave,” and commenced the drill upon an unwashed regiment of his equals in a sunshiny corner below. It was delightful to see their gravity, and the military air with which they cocked their bonnets and stuck out their little round stomachs at the word of command. My little Captain Cockchafer returned my stick like a knight of honor, and familiarly climbed upon my knee to repose after his campaign, very much to the surprise of his mother, who was hanging out to dry, what looked like his father’s inexpressibles, from a window above, and who came down and apologized in the most unmitigated Scotch for the liberty the “babby” had taken with “his honor.” For the child of a camp-follower, it was a gallant boy, and I remember him better than the drill-sergeant or the piper.
On the north side of Stirling Castle the view is bounded by the Grampians and laced by the winding Teith; and just under the battlements lies a green hollow called the “King’s Knot,” where the gay tournaments were held, and the “Ladies’ Hill,” where sat the gay and lovely spectators of the chivalry of Scotland. Heading Hill is near it, where James executed Albany and his sons, and the scenes and events of history and poetry are thickly sown at your feet. Once recapitulated, however—the Bruce and the Douglas, Mary and the “Gudeman of Ballengiech,” once honored in memory—the surpassing beauty of the prospect from Stirling towers, engross the fancy and fill the eye. It was a day of predominant sunshine, with here and there the shadow of a cloud darkening a field of stubble or a bend of the river, and I wandered round from bastion to bastion, never sated with gazing, and returning continually to the points from which the corporal had hurried me on. There lay the Forth—here Bannockburn and Falkirk, and all bathed and flooded with beauty. Let him who thinks the earth ill-looking, peep at it through the embrasures of Stirling Castle.
My friend, the corporal, got but sixteen pence a day, and had a wife and children—but much as I should dislike all three as disconnected items, I envied him his lot altogether. A garrison life at Stirling, and plenty of leisure, would reconcile one almost to wife and children and a couple of pistareens per diem.