“At Barnet we stopped; and while we changed horses, I asked some questions at the maid who stood at the door, which she answered and went in. In a little time out comes a squinting, smart-like, black girl, and spoke to me, as I thought, in Irish; upon which I said, ‘Are you a Highlander?’ ‘No,’ said she, ‘I am Welch. Are not you Welch?’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘but I am Scots, and the Scots and Welch are near relations, and much better born than the English.’ She took me by the hand, and looked so kindly, that I suppose she thought me her relation because I was not English; which makes me think the English are a people one may perhaps esteem or admire, but they do not draw the affections of strangers, neither in their country nor out of it.”
The general appearance of the southern country is thus pleasantly
O’erlaid with black, staid wisdom’s hue:
“The villages to north of Trent are but indifferent, and the churches very thin sown; and, indeed, for a long time one would think the country of no religion at all, there being hardly either Christian church or heathen temple to be seen. The fields on both hands were mostly grass; and the greatest variety and plenty of fine cattle, all of various colours. I admired the cattle much more than the people; for they seem to have the least of what we call smartness of any folks I ever saw, and totally void of all sort of curiosity—which, perhaps, some may think a good quality.... As for the inclosing in England, it is of all the different methods, both good and bad, that can be imagined; and that such insufficient inclosures, as some are, keep in the cattle (which is so hard with us in Scotland) is entirely owing to the levelness of the grounds; so that an English cow does not see another spot than where she feeds, and has as little intelligence as the people.” Surely the cows are to be pitied, born incapable of taking comprehensive views of things in this flat and unprofitable land. If ever there arose a chance of wider views for the fair traveller, England rose not in her esteem on that account. “Sometimes,” she owns, “we had an extensive prospect, but not the least variety, so that we could say there was too much of it. No water, no distinction between a gentleman’s seat and his tenant’s house, but that he was a little more smothered up with trees.” The lady, when she reached London, found the same reason for contempt of Hyde Park as a place of resort; it was naught, because it was quite smothered with trees. She also surprised the crowded Londoners that she thought England on the whole less populous than Scotland, and there is a good deal of right observation in the sketch she gives of England extra-metropolitan a hundred years ago.
“In the first place, look from the road on each hand, and you see very few houses; towns there are, but at the distance of eight or ten miles. Then, who is it that lives in them? There are no manufactories carried on in them; they live by the travellers and the country about; that is, there are tradesmen of all kinds, perhaps two or three of each—smiths, wrights, shoemakers, &c.; and here is a squire of a small estate in the country near by; and here are Mrs. This, or That, old maids, and so many widow ladies with a parsonage house, a flourishing house. All the houses, built of brick, and very slight, and even some of timber, and two stories high, make them have a greater appearance than there is reality for; for I shall suppose you took out the squire and set him in his country house, and the old maids and widow ladies and place them with their relations, if they have any, in the country, or in a greater town, and take a stone house with a thatch roof of one storey instead of a brick one of two, and there are few country villages in Scotland where I will not muster out as many inhabitants as are in any of these post towns. Then I observed there were few folks to be met with on the road, and many times we could post an hour, which is seven miles, and not see as many houses and people put together on the road! Then on Sunday, we travelled from eight o’clock till we came to Newcastle, where the church was just going in; so that I may say we travelled fifteen miles to Newcastle; and the few people we met going to church upon the road surprised me much. The same as we went all day long; it had no appearance of the swarms of people we always see in Scotland going about on Sunday, even far from any considerable town. Then,” adds the Scotch lady, “the high price of labour is an evidence of the scarcity of people. I went into what we call a cottage, and there was a young woman with her child, sitting; it was very clean, and laid with coarse flags on the floor, but built with timber stoops, and what we call cat and clay walls. She took me into what she called her parlour, for the magnificent names they give things makes very fine till we see them; this parlour was just like to the other. I asked her what her husband was. She said, a labouring man, and got his shilling a day; that she did nothing but took care of her children, and now and then wrought a little plain work. So I found that, except it was in the manufacturing counties, the women do nothing; and if there were as many men in the country as one might suppose there would be, a man could be got for less wages than a shilling per day. Then the high wages at London shows the country cannot provide it with servants. It drains the country, and none return again who ever goes as chairmen, porters, hackney coachmen, or footmen; if they come to old age, seldom spend it in the country, but often in an almshouse, and often leave no posterity. Then the export they make of their victual is a presumption they have not inhabitants to consume it in the country, for, by the common calculation, there are seven millions and one half in England, and the ground in the kingdom is twenty-eight millions of acres, which is four acres to each person. Take into this the immense quantity of horses which are kept for no real use all over the kingdom, and it will be found, I think, that England could maintain many more people than are in it. Besides, let every nation pick out its own native subjects who are but in the first generation, the Irish, the Scots, the French, &c., and I am afraid the native English would appear much fewer than they imagine. On the other hand, Scotland must appear to be more populous for its extent and produce; first, by its bearing as many evacuations in proportion, both to the plantations, the fleet, and army, besides the numbers who go to England, and, indeed, breeding inhabitants to every country under the sun; and if, instead of following the wrong policy of supplying their deficiency of grain by importing it, they would cultivate their waste lands, it would do more than maintain all its inhabitants in plenty.” The lady presently becomes severe: “I do not think the soil near London is naturally rich, and neither the corns nor grass are extraordinary. I thought their crops of hay all very light, and but of an indifferent quality; they call it meadow hay, but we could call it tending pretty nearly to bog hay.”
Her admiration of things English seems indeed to have been confined pretty closely to its immense number of fine horses. “As for London, the first sight of it did not strike me with anything grand or magnificent.... Many authors and correspondents take up much time and pains to little purpose on descriptions. I never could understand anybody’s descriptions, and I suppose nobody will understand mine; so will only say London is a very large and extensive city. But I had time to see very little of it, and every street is so like another that, seeing part, you may easily suppose the whole.”
Then for the heads of London, your ill-meaning, politician lords, the lady Samson pulls their temple down over their heads. “You will think it very odd that I was a fortnight in London, and saw none of the royal family; but I got no clothes made till the day before I left, though I gave them to the making the day after I came. I cannot say my curiosity was great. I found, as I approached the court and the grandees, they sunk so miserably, and came so far short of the ideas I had conceived, that I was loth to lose the grand ideas I had of kings, princes, ministers of state, senators, &c., which, I suppose, I had gathered from romance in my youth. We used to laugh at the English for being so soon afraid when there was any danger in state affairs; but now I do excuse them. For we, at a distance, think the wisdom of our governors will prevent all those things; but those who know and see our ministers every day, see there is no wisdom in them, and that they are a parcel of old, ignorant, senseless bodies, who mind nothing but eating and drinking, and rolling about in their carriages in Hyde Park, and know no more of the country, or the situation of it, nor of the numbers, strength, and circumstances of it, than they never had been in it. And how should they, when London and twenty miles round it is the extent ever they saw of it?”
There were here some remarks not very inappropriate, considering that they were written when the Duke of Newcastle was fighting on his stumps, and the ferment concerning Admiral Byng was at its height.
There seems to have been some connection between the Calderwoods and Mr. George Stone Scott, sub-preceptor to the Prince of Wales, afterwards George the Third. Mrs. Calderwood says—“I had frequent opportunities of seeing George Scott, and asked him many questions about the Prince of Wales. He says he is a lad of very good principles, good-natured, extremely honest, has no heroic strain, but loves peace, and has no turn for extravagance; modest, and has no tendency to vice, and has as yet very virtuous principles; has the greatest temptations to gallant with the ladies, who lay themselves out in the most shameful manner to draw him in, but to no purpose. He says, if he were not what he is they would not mind him. Prince Edward is of a more amorous complexion; but no court is paid to him, because he has so little chance to be king.” Mrs. C.! Mrs. C.! how sweet a dish of scandal! We will next meet with her setting out in gracious humour, and will not be startled should a ripple come over the current of her thoughts.
“Any of the English folks I got acquainted with I liked very well. They seemed to be good-natured and humane; but still there is a sort of ignorance about them with regard to the rest of the world, and their conversation runs in a very narrow channel. They speak with a great relish of their public places, and say, with a sort of flutter, that they shall go to Vauxhall and Ranelagh, but do not seem to enjoy it when there. As for Vauxhall and Ranelagh, I wrote my opinion of them before. The first I think but a vulgar sort of entertainment, and could not think myself in genteel company whiles I heard a man calling ‘Take care of your watches and pockets!’ I saw the Countess of Coventry at Ranelagh. I think she is a pert, stinking-like hussy, going about with her face up to the sky, that she might see from under her hat, which she had pulled quite over nose, that nobody might see her face. She was in deshabille, and very shabby drest, but was painted over her very jawbones. I saw only three English peers, and I think you could not make a tolerable one out of them.... I saw very few, either men or women, tolerably handsome.”