The touch of genius has made the name of Macbeth immortal. He is known wherever the English language is read or spoken. How different is the fate of those humbler folk, who lie in the ooze of the past, unrecalled by poet or dramatist! In not a few places in Scotland, one meets the pathetic sight of old tombs and graveyards that are, in some instances, hardly visible for the greenery that covers them. Here “the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,” but even the hamlet is gone, the church is in ruins, and the descendants of those who once lived and loved and died are now on various continents. They have found other homes, and most of them, children of the new lands, only vaguely remember, or most probably are ignorant of, the place in which their forefathers dwelt and whence their parents or grandparents came.
Occasionally one meets an old man or woman in the great cities, like Glasgow or Dundee, who will tell of the joys remembered or glories passed away, naming the village, perhaps in the glens or on the carses, which one cannot find on the map, or may discover only by consulting some old gazetteer in the libraries.
To me, an American, these white-haired old folks I saluted on the moors and in the glens, recalled the words of our own Holmes, and especially that stanza which President Lincoln thought the most pathetic in the English language:—
“The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom;
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.”
Yet who—unless a Mark Twain, who could drop a tear over Father Adam’s grave—will weep over the long departed Picts? More often, while reading the books, rather than when rambling among the country folk in Scotland, do we hear of these shadowy figures, who live in ethnology rather than in local tradition.