The Coolin.
All this shows us, how the attitude of people towards the wilds of the Highlands has become completely changed in one century, for Johnson was not in any way peculiar in his ideas. Look where we will in the literature of that time, we find the same sentiments. Pennant, who visited Skye the year before Dr. Johnson, describes the Coolin as 'a savage series of rude mountains,' whilst Blaven, 'affects him with astonishment.' Thirty years later the only natural objects in the island that interested Forsyth, at least so far as one can judge from what he writes in The Beauties of Scotland, were 'an obelisk of uncommon magnitude' in the parish of Snizort, (probably the Storr Rock,) and a waterfall and sea cave near Portree.
But a new school was growing up, and Sir Walter Scott was one of the first to insist, that a visit to the Highlands would reveal objects more interesting than cows, waterfalls, and sea caves. People were beginning to find in the torrents, mountains, lochs, and pine woods, beauties they had not seen before. No longer were the hills chaotic masses of rock, ready at any moment to fall and overwhelm the valleys, nor were the moors and glens expanses of uniform barrenness or gloomy mountain fastnesses. Robson, at the beginning of last century (1815), writing of one of the most remote and wild regions of the Highlands, namely the head of Glen Tilt, says: 'Of all the romantic scenes which are presented to those who explore the recesses of the Grampians, none will be found to possess a more picturesque combination of wild and characteristic beauty than this'; and in the preface to his accurate and delightful volume on the scenery of the Grampian mountains, he writes: 'With the man of taste few districts in this kingdom have equal claim to admiration.'
Robson was not a Scotchman, but a London artist; yet one has only to look at his sketches, and read the letterpress of his book to see how well he appreciated mountain form, and how he understood, in no uncertain manner, that which now delights us nearly a century later in the Highlands. His water-colour picture of Loch Coruisk[M] is an honest attempt to accurately reproduce the wonderful colour and savage beauty of the grandest of all Scotch lochs, and one is only sorry that he has introduced into the foreground a fully dressed Highlander—a legacy, no doubt, of that old feeling that made Dr. Johnson crave for cows, and that even now survives at the present time in the pretty sketches of Scotch hills, where the foreground is animated by Highland cattle.
Since Robson's time, many people have been to the Highlands and to Skye and the Coolin. Turner visited them, and the impression produced may be seen from his drawing of Loch Coriskin. This drawing is described by Ruskin in Modern Painters as 'a perfect expression of the Inferior Mountains,' yet any one who had really seen the Coolin would hardly be justified in asserting that Turner's drawing (Fig. 69, vol. iv., Modern Painters) was the perfect expression of the hills round Sgurr Dubh, even though it may be the perfect expression of an inferior mountain.
Fortunately the Coolin are never inferior mountains, unless we measure them by the number of feet they rise above the sea. 'Comparative bulk and height,' says the late Sheriff Nicolson, 'are of course important elements in mountain grandeur, but outline and features are, as with human beings, even more important.' Clachlet at Easter, covered with snow and seen across the moor of Rannoch at a distance of a few miles, towers up into the heavens just as grandly as a peak five times its altitude does in the Himalaya, when that peak is seen from a point thirty miles away.