FAMOUS PERSONS

AND

PLACES.

BY

N. PARKER WILLIS.

NEW YORK:

CHARLES SCRIBNER, 145 NASSAU STREET.

1854

Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1854, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER,

in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the

Southern District of New York.

TOBITT’S COMBINATION-TYPE,

185 William St.

PRINTED BY R. CRAIGHEAD

63 VESEY STREET, N. Y.

PREFACE.

For some remarks that should properly introduce much of the contents of the present volume, the reader is referred to the Preface published with a previous number of the Series, entitled “Pencillings by the Way.” A portion of the original “Pencillings” is here given, the size of the work having compelled an unequal division of it, and the remaining and smaller part serving to complete another volume, with some additional sketches of the same character.

The personal portrayings of distinguished contemporaries, of which this volume is mainly composed, will, (as has been abundantly proved in their previous shapes of publication,) ensure its readableness. It will have a value, from the same quality, that will increase with time, and be, also, independent, to a certain degree, of its literary merits. Sketches of the men of mark of any period are eagerly devoured—more eagerly as the subjects pass away, and are beyond farther seeing and describing—the public requiring less that they should be ably done than that they should be true to the life. Correctness, in such pencilling, is more important than grace in the art. And this I claim to have been proved for these sketches. In the years that they have been before the public, not a single incorrectness has ever been proved or even charged upon them. I sketched what I saw at the time, and, to the best of my ability, sketched truly. With the acrid and persevering warfare that has been waged upon them by the critics, their truth would have been invalidated long ago, if flaw or blemish in this shield of their chief merit could have been found. Expecting vague charges of incorrectness from the malice of criticism, however, I have accumulated testimonials that have never yet been called forth—no friend or acquaintance having ever been estranged or offended by the descriptions I have ventured to give, and subsequent intimacy or exchange of courtesies furnishing ample proof, that, to such sharing of my admiration and opportunities to see more nearly, the world was welcome.

I will add a few remarks, upon somewhat the same point, from a previous Preface:—

For the living portraitures of the book I have a word to say. That sketches of the whim of the hour, its manners, fashions, and those ephemeral trifles, which, slight as they are, constitute in a great measure its “form and pressure”—that these, and familiar traits of persons distinguished in our time, are popular and amusing, I have the most weighty reasons certainly to know. They sell. “Are they innocent?” is the next question. And to this I know no more discreet answer than that mine have offended nobody but the critics. It has been said that sketches of contemporary society require little talent, and belong to an inferior order of literature. Perhaps. Yet they must be well done to attract notice at all; and if true and graphic, they are not only excellent material for future biographers, but to all who live out of the magic circles of fashion and genius, they are more than amusing—they are instructive. To such persons, living authors, orators, and statesmen, are as much characters of history, and society in cities is as much a subject of philosophic curiosity, as if a century had intervened. The critic who finds these matters “stale and unprofitable,” lives in the circles described, and the pictures drawn at his elbow lack to his eye the effect of distance; but the same critic would delight in a familiar sketch of a supper with “my lord of Leicester” in Elizabeth’s time, of an evening with Raleigh and Spenser, or perhaps he would be amused with a description by an eye-witness of Mary Queen of Scots, riding home to Holyrood with her train of admiring nobles. I have not named in the same sentence the ever-deplored blank in our knowledge of Shakspere’s person and manners. What would not a trait by the most unskilful hand be worth now—if it were nothing but how he gave the good-morrow to Ben Jonson in Eastcheap?

How far sketches of the living are a breach of courtesy committed by the author toward the persons described, depends, of course, on the temper in which they are done. To select a subject for complimentary description is to pay the most undoubted tribute to celebrity, and, as far as I have observed, most distinguished persons sympathize with the public interest in them and their belongings, and are willing to have their portraits drawn, either with pen or pencil, by as many as offer them the compliment. It would be ungracious to the admiring world if they were not.

The outer man is a debtor for the homage paid to the soul which inhabits him, and he is bound, like a porter at the gate, to satisfy all reasonable curiosity as to the habits of the nobler and invisible tenant. He owes his peculiarities to the world.

For myself, I am free to confess that no age interests me like the present; that no pictures of society since the world began, are half so entertaining to me as those of English society in our day; and that, whatever comparison the living great men of England may sustain with those of other days, there is no doubt in my mind that English social life, at the present moment, is at a higher pitch of refinement and cultivation than it was ever here or elsewhere since the world began—consequently it, and all who form and figure in it, are dignified and legitimate subjects of curiosity and speculation. The Count Mirabel and Lady Bellair of D’Israeli’s last romance, are, to my mind, the cleverest portraits, as well as the most entertaining characters, of modern novel-writing; and D’Israeli, by the way, is the only English author who seems to have the power of enlarging his horizon, and getting a perspective view of the times he lives in. His novels are far more popular in America than in England, because the Atlantic is to us a century. We picture to ourselves England and Victoria as we picture to ourselves England and Elizabeth. We relish an anecdote of Sheridan Knowles as we should one of Ford or Marlowe. This immense ocean between us is like the distance of time; and while all that is minute and bewildering is lost to us, the greater lights of the age and the prominent features of society stand out apart, and we judge of them like posterity. Much as I have myself lived in England, I have never been able to remove this long perspective from between my eye and the great men of whom I read and thought on the other side of the Atlantic. When I find myself in the same room with the hero of Waterloo, my blood creeps as if I had seen Cromwell or Marlborough; and I sit down afterward to describe how he looked, with the eagerness with which I should communicate to my friends some disinterred description of these renowned heroes by a contemporary writer. If Cornelius Agrippa were redivivus, in short, and would show me his magic mirror, I should as soon call up Moore as Dryden—Wordsworth or Wilson as soon as Pope or Crichton.

* * * * * * *

CONTENTS.

FAMOUS PERSONS AND PLACES

LETTER I.

IMMENSITY OF LONDON—VOYAGE TO LEITH—SOCIETY OF THE STEAM PACKET—ANALOGY BETWEEN SCOTCH AND AMERICAN MANNERS—STRICT OBSERVANCE OF THE SABBATH ON BOARD—EDINBURGH—UNEXPECTED RECOGNITION.

Almost giddy with the many pleasures and occupations of London, I had outstayed the last fashionable lingerer; and, appearing again, after a fortnight’s confinement with the epidemic of the season, I found myself almost without an acquaintance, and was driven to follow the world. A preponderance of letters and friends determined my route toward Scotland.

One realizes the immensity of London when he is compelled to measure its length on a single errand. I took a cab at my lodgings at nine in the evening, and drove six miles through one succession of crowded and blazing streets to the East India Docks, and with the single misfortune of being robbed, on the way, of a valuable cloak, secured a berth in the Monarch steamer, bound presently for Edinburgh.

I found the drawing-room cabin quite crowded, cold supper on the two long tables, every body very busy with knife and fork, and whiskey-and-water and broad Scotch circulating merrily. All the world seemed acquainted, and each man talked to his neighbor, and it was as unlike a ship’s company of dumb English as could easily be conceived. I had dined too late to attack the solids, but imitating my neighbor’s potation of whiskey and hot water, I crowded in between two good-humored Scotchmen, and took the happy color of the spirits of the company. A small centre-table was occupied by a party who afforded considerable amusement. An excessively fat old woman, with a tall scraggy daughter and a stubby little old fellow, whom they called “pa;” and a singular man, a Major Somebody, who seemed showing them up, composed the quartette. Noisier women I never saw, nor more hideous. They bullied the waiter, were facetious with the steward, and talked down all the united buzz of the cabin. Opposite me sat a pale, severe-looking Scotchman, who had addressed one or two remarks to me; and, upon an uncommon burst of uproariousness, he laughed with the rest, and remarked that the ladies were excusable, for they were doubtless Americans, and knew no better.

“It strikes me,” said I, “that both in manners and accent they are particularly Scotch.”

“Sir!” said the pale gentleman.

“Sir!” said several of my neighbors on the right and left.

“Have you ever been in Scotland?” asked the pale gentleman, with rather a ferocious air.

“No, sir! Have you ever been in America?”

“No, sir! but I have read Mrs. Trollope.”

“And I have read Cyril Thornton; and the manners delineated in Mrs. Trollope, I must say, are rather elegant in comparison.”

I particularized the descriptions I alluded to, which will occur immediately to those who have read the novel I have named; and then confessing I was an American, and withdrawing my illiberal remark, which I had only made to show the gentleman the injustice and absurdity of his own, we called for another tass of whiskey, and became very good friends. Heaven knows I have no prejudice against the Scotch, or any other nation—but it is extraordinary how universal the feeling seems to be against America. A half hour incog. in any mixed company in England I should think would satisfy the most rose-colored doubter on the subject.

We got under way at eleven o’clock, and the passengers turned in. The next morning was Sunday. It was fortunately of a “Sabbath stillness;” and the open sea through which we were driving, with an easy south wind in our favor, graciously permitted us to do honor to as substantial a breakfast as ever was set before a traveller, even in America. (Why we should be ridiculed for our breakfasts I do not know.)

The “Monarch” is a superb boat, and, with the aid of sails and a wind right aft, we made twelve miles in the hour easily. I was pleased to see an observance of the Sabbath which had not crossed my path before in three years’ travel. Half the passengers at least took their Bibles after breakfast, and devoted an hour or two evidently to grave religious reading and reflection. With this exception, I have not seen a person with the Bible in his hand, in travelling over half the world.

The weather continued fine, and smooth water tempted us up to breakfast again on Monday. The wash-room was full of half-clad men, but the week-day manners of the passengers were perceptibly gayer. The captain honored us by taking the head of the table, which he had not done on the day previous, and his appearance was hailed by three general cheers. When the meats were removed, a gentleman rose, and, after a very long and parliamentary speech, proposed the health of the captain. The company stood up, ladies and all, and it was drank with a tremendous “hip-hip-hurrah,” in bumpers of whiskey. They don’t do that on the Mississippi, I reckon. If they did, the travellers would be down upon us, “I guess,” out-Hamiltoning Hamilton.

We rounded St. Abb’s head into the Forth, at five, in the afternoon, and soon dropped anchor off Leith. The view of Edinburgh, from the water, is, I think, second only to that of Constantinople. The singular resemblance, in one or two features, to the view of Athens, as you approach from the Piræus, seems to have struck other eyes than mine, and an imitation Acropolis is commenced on the Calton Hill, and has already, in its half finished state, much the effect of the Parthenon. Hymettus is rather loftier than the Pentland-hills, and Pentelicus farther off and grander than Arthur’s seat, but the old castle of Edinburgh is a noble and peculiar feature of its own, and soars up against the sky, with its pinnacle-placed turrets, superbly magnificent. The Forth has a high shore on either side, and, with the island of Inchkeith in its broad bosom, it looks more like a lake than an arm of the sea.

It is odd what strange links of acquaintance will develop between people thrown together in the most casual manner, and in the most out-of-the-way places. I have never entered a steamboat in my life without finding, if not an acquaintance, some one who should have been an acquaintance from mutual knowledge of friends. I thought, through the first day, that the Monarch would be an exception. On the second morning, however, a gentleman came up and called me by name. He was an American, and had seen me in Boston. Soon after, another gentleman addressed some remark to me, and, in a few minutes, we discovered that we were members of the same club in London, and bound to the same hospitable roof in Scotland. We went on, talking together, and I happened to mention having lately been in Greece, when one of a large party of ladies, overhearing the remark, turned, and asked me if I had met Lady —— in my travels. I had met her at Athens, and this was her sister. I found I had many interesting particulars of the delightful person in question, which were new to them, and, sequitur, a friendship struck up immediately between me and a party of six. You would have never dreamed, to have seen the adieux on the landing, that we had been unaware of each other’s existence forty-four hours previous.

Leith is a mile or more from the town, and we drove into the new side of Edinburgh—a splendid city of stone—and, with my English friend, I was soon installed in a comfortable parlor at Douglass’s—an hotel to which the Tremont, in Boston, is the only parallel. It is built of the same stone and is smaller, but it has a better situation than the Tremont, standing in a magnificent square, with a column and statue to Lord Melville in the centre, and a perspective of a noble street stretching through the city from the opposite side.

We dined upon grouse, to begin Scotland fairly, and nailed down our sherry with a tass of Glenlivet, and then we had still an hour of daylight for a ramble.

LETTER II.

EDINBURGH—A SCOTCH BREAKFAST—THE CASTLE—PALACE OF HOLYROOD—QUEEN MARY—RIZZIO—CHARLES THE TENTH.

It is an old place, Edinboro’. The old town and the new are separated by a broad and deep ravine, planted with trees and shrubbery; and across this, on a level with the streets on either side, stretches a bridge of a most giddy height, without which all communication would apparently be cut off. “Auld Reekie” itself looks built on the back-bone of a ridgy crag, and towers along on the opposite side of the ravine, running up its twelve-story houses to the sky in an ascending curve, till it terminates in the frowning and battlemented castle, whose base is literally on a mountain top in the midst of the city. At the foot of this ridge, in the lap of the valley, lies Holyrood-house; and between this and the castle runs a single street, part of which is the old Canongate. Princes street, the Broadway of the new town, is built along the opposite edge of the ravine facing the long, many-windowed walls of the Canongate, and from every part of Edinboro’ these singular features are conspicuously visible. A more striking contrast than exists between these two parts of the same city could hardly be imagined. On one side a succession of splendid squares, elegant granite houses, broad and well-paved streets, columns, statues, and clean sidewalks, thinly promenaded and by the well-dressed exclusively—a kind of wholly grand and half deserted city, which has been built too ambitiously for its population—and on the other, an antique wilderness of streets and “wynds,” so narrow and lofty as to shut out much of the light of heaven; a thronging, busy, and particularly dirty population, sidewalks almost impassable from children and other respected nuisances; and altogether, between the irregular and massive architecture, and the unintelligible jargon agonizing the air about you, a most outlandish and strange city. Paris is not more unlike Constantinople than one side of Edinboro’ is unlike the other. Nature has probably placed “a great gulf” between them.

We toiled up the castle to see the sunset. Oh, but it was beautiful! I have no idea of describing it; but Edinboro’, to me, will be a picture seen through an atmosphere of powdered gold, mellow as an eve on the Campagna. We looked down on the surging sea of architecture below us, and whether it was the wavy cloudiness of a myriad of reeking chimneys, or whether it was a fancy Glenlivet-born in my eye, the city seemed to me like a troop of war-horses, rearing into the air with their gallant riders. The singular boldness of the hills on which it is built, and of the crags and mountains which look down upon it, and the impressive lift of its towering architecture into the sky, gave it altogether a look of pride and war-likeness that answers peculiarly well to the chivalric history of Scotland. And so much for the first look at “Auld Reekie.”

My friend had determined to have what he called a “flare-up” of a Scotch breakfast, and we were set down, the morning after our arrival, at nine, to cold grouse, salmon, cold beef, marmalade, jellies, honey, five kinds of bread, oatmeal cakes, coffee, tea, and toast; and I am by no means sure that that is all. It is a fine country in which one gets so much by the simple order of “breakfast at nine.”

We parted after having achieved it, my companion going before me to Dumbartonshire; and, with a “wee callant” for a guide, I took my way to Holyrood.

At the very foot of Edinboro’ stands this most interesting of royal palaces—a fine old pile, though at the first view rather disappointing. It might have been in the sky, which was dun and cold, or it might have been in the melancholy story most prominent in its history, but it oppressed me with its gloom. A rosy cicerone in petticoats stepped out from the porter’s lodge, and rather brightened my mood with her smile and courtesy, and I followed on to the chapel royal, built, Heaven knows when, but in a beautiful state of gothic ruin. The girl went on with her knitting and her well-drilled recitation of the sights upon which those old fretted and stone traceries had let in the light; and I walked about feeding my eyes upon its hoar and touching beauty, listening little till she came to the high altar, and in the same broad Scotch monotony, and with her eyes still upon her work, hurried over something about Mary Queen of Scots. She was married to Darnley on the spot where I stood! The mechanical guide was accustomed evidently to an interruption here, and stood still a minute or two to give my surprise the usual grace. Poor, poor Mary! I had the common feeling, and made probably the same ejaculation that thousands have made on the spot, that I had never before realized the melancholy romance of her life half so nearly. It had been the sadness of an hour before—a feeling laid aside with the book that recorded it—now it was, as it were, a pity and a grief for the living, and I felt struck with it as if it had happened yesterday. If Rizzio’s harp had sounded from her chamber, it could not have seemed more tangibly a scene of living story.

“And through this door they dragged the murdered favorite; and here under this stone, he was buried!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Poor Rizzio!”

“I’m thinkin’ that’s a’, sir!”

It was a broad hint, but I took another turn down the nave of the old ruin, and another look at the scene of the murder, and the grave of the victim.

“And this door communicated with Mary’s apartments!”

“Yes—ye hae it a’ the noo!”

I paid my shilling, and exit.

On inquiry for the private apartments, I was directed to another Girzy, who took me up to a suite of rooms appropriated to the use of the Earl of Breadalbane, and furnished very much like lodgings for a guinea a week in London.

“And which was Queen Mary’s chamber?”

“Ech! sir! It’s t’ither side. I dinna show that.”

“And what am I brought here for?”

“Ye cam’ yoursell!”

With this wholesome truth, I paid my shilling again, and was handed over to another woman, who took me into a large hall containing portraits of Robert Bruce, Baliol, Macbeth, Queen Mary, and some forty other men and women famous in Scotch story; and nothing is clearer than that one patient person sat to the painter for the whole. After “doing” these, I was led with extreme deliberativeness through a suite of unfurnished rooms, twelve, I think, the only interest of which was their having been tenanted of late by the royal exile of France. As if anybody would give a shilling to see where Charles the Tenth slept and breakfasted!

I thanked Heaven that I stumbled next upon the right person, and was introduced into an ill-lighted room, with one deep window looking upon the court, and a fireplace like that of a country inn—the state chamber of the unfortunate Mary. Here was a chair she embroidered—there was a seat of tarnished velvet, where she sat in state with Darnley—the very grate in the chimney that she had sat before—the mirror in which her fairest face had been imaged—the table at which she had worked—the walls on which her eyes had rested in her gay and her melancholy hours—all, save the touch and mould of time, as she lived in it and left it. It was a place for a thousand thoughts.

The woman led on. We entered another room—her chamber. A small, low bed, with tattered hangings of red and figured silk, tall, ill-shapen posts, and altogether a paltry look, stood in a room of irregular shape; and here, in all her peerless beauty, she had slept. A small cabinet, a closet merely, opened on the right, and in this she was supping with Rizzio when he was plucked from her and murdered. We went back to the audience chamber to see the stain of his blood on the floor. She partitioned it off after his death, not bearing to look upon it. Again—“poor Mary!”

On the opposite side was a similar closet, which served as her dressing room, and the small mirror, scarce larger than your hand, which she used at her toilet. Oh for a magic wand, to wave back, upon that senseless surface, the visions of beauty it has reflected!

LETTER III.

DALHOUSIE CASTLE—THE EARL AND COUNTESS—ANTIQUITY OF THEIR FAMILY.

Edinboro’ has extended to “St. Leonard’s,” and the home of Jeanie Deans is now the commencement of the railway! How sadly is romance ridden over by the march of intellect!

With twenty-four persons and some climbers behind, I was drawn ten miles in the hour by a single horse upon the Dalkeith railroad, and landed within a mile of Dalhousie Castle. Two “wee callants” here undertook my portmanteau, and in ten minutes more I was at the rustic lodge in the park, the gate of which swung hospitably open with the welcome announcement that I was expected. An avenue of near three quarters of a mile of firs, cedars, laburnums, and larches, wound through the park to the castle; and dipping over the edge of a deep and wild dell, I found the venerable old pile below me, its round towers and battlemented turrets frowning among the trees, and forming with the river, which swept round its base, one of the finest specimens imaginable of the feudal picturesque.[^[1]] The nicely-gravelled terraces, as I approached, the plate-glass windows and rich curtains, diminished somewhat of the romance; but I am not free to say that the promise they gave of the luxury within did not offer a succedaneum.

I was met at the threshold by the castle’s noble and distinguished master, and as the light modern gothic door swung open on its noiseless hinges, I looked up at the rude armorial scutcheon above, and at the slits for the port-cullis chains and the rough hollows in the walls which had served for its rest, and it seemed to me that the kind and polished earl, in his velvet cap, and the modern door on its patent hinges, were pleasant substitutes even for a raised drawbridge and a helmeted knight. I beg pardon of the romantic, if this be treason against Della Crusca.

The gong had sounded its first summons to dinner, and I went immediately to my room to achieve my toilet. I found myself in the south wing, with a glorious view up the valley of the Esk, and comforts about me such as are only found in a private chamber in England. The nicely-fitted carpet, the heavy curtains, the well-appointed dressing-table, the patent grate and its blazing fire (for where is a fire not welcome in Scotland?) the tapestry, the books, the boundless bed, the bell that will ring, and the servants that anticipate the pull——oh, you should have pined for comfort in France and Italy to know what this catalogue is worth.

After dinner, Lady Dalhousie, who is much of an invalid, mounted a small poney to show me the grounds. We took a winding path away from the door, and descended at once into the romantic dell over which the castle towers. It is naturally a most wild and precipitous glen, through which the rapid Esk pursues its way almost in darkness; but, leaving only the steep and rocky shelves leaning over the river with their crown of pines, the successive lords of Dalhousie have cultivated the banks and hills around for a park and a paradise. The smooth gravel walks cross and interweave, the smoother lawns sink and swell with their green bosoms, the stream dashes on murmuring below, and the lofty trees shadow and overhang all. At one extremity of the grounds are a flower and a fruit garden, and beyond it the castle farm; at the other, a little village of the family dependants, with their rose-imbowered cottages; and, as far as you would ramble in a day, extend the woods and glades, and hares leap across your path, and pheasants and partridges whirr up as you approach, and you may fatigue yourself in a scene that is formed in every feature from the gentle-born and the refined. The labor and the taste of successive generations can alone create such an Eden. Primogeniture! I half forgive thee.

The various views of the castle from the bottom of the dell are perfectly beautiful. With all its internal refinement, it is still the warlike fortress at a little distance, and bartizan and battlement bring boldly back the days when Bruce was at Hawthornden (six miles distant,) and Lord Dalhousie’s ancestor, the knightly Sir Alexander Ramsay, defended the ford of the Esk, and made himself a man in Scottish story in the days of Wallace and the Douglasses. Dalhousie was besieged by Edward the first and by John of Gaunt, among others, and being the nearest of a chain of castles from the Esk to the Pentland Hills, it was the scene of some pretty fighting in most of the wars of Scotland.

Lord Dalhousie showed me a singular old bridle-bit, the history of which is thus told in Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather:

“Sir Alexander Ramsay having taken by storm the strong castle of Roxburgh, the king bestowed on him the office of sheriff of the county, which was before engaged by the knight of Liddesdale. As this was placing another person in his room, the knight of Liddesdale altogether forgot his old friendship for Ramsay, and resolved to put him to death. He came suddenly upon him with a strong party of men while he was administering justice at Harwick. Ramsay, having no suspicion of injury from the hands of his old comrade, and having few men with him, was easily overpowered; and, being wounded, was hurried away to the lonely castle of the Hermitage, which stands in the middle of the morasses of Liddesdale. Here he was thrown into a dungeon (with his horse) where he had no other sustenance than some grain which fell down from a granary above; and, after lingering awhile in that dreadful condition, the brave Sir Alexander Ramsay died. This was in 1412. Nearly four hundred and fifty years afterward, that is, about forty years ago, a mason, digging among the ruins of Hermitage Castle, broke into a dungeon, where lay a quantity of chaff, some human bones and a bridle-bit, which were supposed to mark the vault as the place of Ramsay’s death. The bridle-bit was given to grandpapa, who presented it to the present gallant earl of Dalhousie, a brave soldier, like his ancestor, Sir Alexander Ramsay, from whom he is lineally descended.”

There is another singular story connected with the family which escaped Sir Walter, and which has never appeared in print. Lady Dalhousie is of the ancient family of Coulston, one of the ancestors of which, Brown of Coulston, married the daughter of the famous Warlock of Gifford, described in Marmion. As they were proceeding to the church, the wizard lord stopped the bridal procession beneath a pear-tree, and plucking one of the pears, he gave it to his daughter, telling her that he had no dowry to give her, but that as long as she kept that gift, good fortune would never desert her or her descendants. This was in 1270, and the pear is still preserved in a silver box. About two centuries ago, a maiden lady of the family chose to try her teeth upon it, and very soon after two of the best farms of the estate were lost in some litigation—the only misfortune that has befallen the inheritance of the Coulstons in six centuries—thanks (perhaps) to the Warlock pear!

LETTER IV.

SPORTING AND ITS EQUIPMENTS—ROSLIN CASTLE AND CHAPEL.

The nominal attraction of Scotland, particularly at this season, is the shooting. Immediately on your arrival, you are asked whether you prefer a flint or a percussion lock, and (supposing that you do not travel with a gun, which all Englishmen do,) a double-barrelled Manton is appropriated to your use, the game-keeper fills your powder and shot-pouches, and waits with the dogs in a leash till you have done your breakfast; and the ladies leave the table, wishing you a good day’s sport, all as matters of course.

I would rather have gone to the library. An aversion to walking, except upon smooth flag stones, a poetical tenderness on the subject of “putting birds out of misery,” as the last office is elegantly called, and hands much more at home with a goose-quill than a gun, were some of my private objections to the “order of the day.” Between persuasion and a most truant sunshine, I was overruled, however; and, with a silent prayer that I might not destroy the hopes of my noble host, by shooting his only son, who was to be my companion and instructor, I shouldered the proffered Manton and joined the game-keeper in the park.

Lord Ramsay and his man looked at me with some astonishment as I approached, and I was equally surprised at the young nobleman’s metamorphosis. From the elegant Oxonian I had seen at breakfast, he was transformed to a figure something rougher than his highland dependant, in a woollen shooting-jacket, that might have been cut in Kentucky, pockets of any number and capacity, trousers of the coarsest plaid, hob-nailed shoes, and leather gaiters, and a manner of handling his gun that would have been respected on the Mississippi. My own appearance in high-heeled French boots and other corresponding geer for a tramp over stubble and marsh, amused them equally; but my wardrobe was exclusively metropolitan, and there was no alternative.

The dogs were loosed from their leash and bounded away, and crossing the Esk under the castle walls, we found our way out of the park, and took to the open fields. A large patch of stubble was our first ground, and with a “hie away!” from the gamekeeper, the beautiful setters darted on before, their tails busy with delight and their noses to the ground, first dividing, each for a wall side, and beating along till they met, and then scouring toward the centre, as regularly as if every step were guided by human reason. Suddenly they both dropped low into the stubble, and with heads eagerly bent forward and the intensest gaze upon a spot, a yard or more in advance, stood as motionless as stone. “A covey, my lord!” said the game-keeper, and, with our guns cocked, we advanced to the dogs, who had crouched, and lay as still, while we passed them, as if their lives depended upon our shot. Another step, and whirr! whirr! a dozen partridges started up from the furrow, and while Lord Ramsay cried “Now!” and reserved his fire to give me the opportunity, I stood stock still in my surprise, and the whole covey disappeared over the wall. My friend laughed, the game-keeper smiled, and the dogs hied on once more.

I mended my shooting in the course of the morning, but it was both exciting and hard work. A heavy shower soaked us through, without extracting the slightest notice from my companion; and on we trudged through peas, beans, turnips, and corn, mudded to the knees and smoking with moisture, excessively to the astonishment, I doubt not, of the productions of Monsieur Clerx, of the Rue Vivienne, which were reduced to the consistency of brown paper, and those of my London tailor, which were equally entitled to some surprise at the use they were put to. It was quite beautiful, however, to see the ardor and training of the dogs; their caution, their obedience, and their perfect understanding of every motion of their master. I found myself interested quite beyond fatigue, and it was only when we jumped the park paling and took it once more leisurely down the gravel walks, that I realized at what an expense of mud, water, and weariness, my day’s sport had been purchased. Mem. Never to come to Scotland again without hob-nailed shoes and a shooting-jacket.

Rode over to Roslin castle. The country between Dalhousie castle and Roslin, including the village of Lasswade, is of uncommon loveliness. Lasswade itself clings to the two sides of a small valley, with its village church buried in trees, and the country seat of Lord Melvill looking down upon it, from its green woods; and away over the shoulder of the hill, swell the forests and rocks which imbosom Hawthornden (the residence of Drummond, the poet, in the days of Ben Jonson,) and the Pentland Hills, with their bold outline, form a background that completes the picture.

We left our horses at the neighboring inn, and walked first to Roslin chapel. This little gem of florid architecture is scarcely a ruin, so perfect are its arches and pillars, its fretted cornices and its painted windows. A whimsical booby undertook the cicerone, with a long cane-pole to point out the beauties. We entered the low side door, whose stone threshold the feet of Cromwell’s church stabled troopers assisted to wear, and walked at once to a singular column of twisted marble, most curiously carved, standing under the choir. Our friend with the cane-pole, who had condescended to familiar Scotch on the way, took his distance from the base, and drawing up his feet like a soldier on drill, assumed a most extraordinary elevation of voice, and recited its history in a declamation of which I could only comprehend the words “Awbraham and Isaac.” I saw by the direction of the pole that there was a bas relief of the Father of the Faithful, done on the capital—but for the rest I was indebted to Lord Ramsay, who did it into English as follows: “The master-mason of this chapel, meeting with some difficulties in the execution of his design, found it necessary to go to Rome for information, during which time his apprentice carried on the work, and even executed some parts concerning which his master had been most doubtful; particularly this fine fluted column, ornamented with wreaths of foliage and flowers twisting spirally round it. The master on his return, stung with envy at this proof of the superior abilities of his apprentice, slew him by a blow of his hammer.”

The whole interior of the chapel is excessively rich. The roof, capitals, key-stones, and architraves, are covered with sculptures. On the architrave joining the apprentice’s pillar to a smaller one, is graved the sententious inscription, “Forte est vinum, fortior est rex, fortiores sunt mulieres; super omnia vincit veritas.” It has been built about four hundred years, and is, I am told, the most perfect thing of its kind in Scotland.

The ruins of Roslin castle are a few minutes’ walk beyond. They stand on a kind of island rock, in the midst of one of the wildest glens of Scotland, separated from the hill nearest to the base by a drawbridge, swung over a tremendous chasm. I have seen nothing so absolutely picturesque in my travels. The North Esk runs its dark course, unseen, in the ravine below; the rocks on every side frown down upon it in black shadows, the woods are tangled and apparently pathless, and were it not for a most undeniable two-story farm house, built directly in the court of the old castle, you might convince yourself that foot had never approached it since the days of Wallace.

The fortress was built by William St. Clair, of whom Grose writes: “He kept a great court, and was royally served at his own table in vessels of gold and silver; Lord Dirleton being his master-household; Lord Borthwick his cup-bearer, and Lord Fleming his carver; in whose absence they had deputies to attend, viz: Stewart, Laird of Drumlanrig; Tweddie, Laird of Drumerline, and Sandilands, Laird of Calder. He had his halls and other apartments richly adorned with embroidered hangings. He flourished in the reigns of James the First and Second. His princess, Elizabeth Douglas, was served by seventy-five gentlewomen, whereof fifty-three were daughters of noblemen, all clothed in velvets and silks, with their chains of gold and other ornaments, and was attended by two hundred riding gentlemen in all her journeys; and, if it happened to be dark when she went to Edinburgh, where her lodgings were at the foot of the Black Fryar’s Wynd, eighty torches were carried before her.”

With a scrambling walk up the glen, which is, as says truly Mr. Grose, “inconceivably romantic,” we returned to our horses, and rode back to our dinner at Dalhousie, delighted with Roslin castle, and uncommonly hungry.

LETTER V.

“CHRISTOPHER NORTH”—MR. BLACKWOOD—THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD—LOCKHART—NOCTES AMBROSIANÆ—WORDSWORTH—SOUTHEY—CAPTAIN HAMILTON AND HIS BOOK ON AMERICA—PROFESSOR WILSON’S FAMILY, ETC.

One of my most valued letters to Scotland was an introduction to Professor Wilson—the “Christopher North” of Blackwood, and the well known poet. The acknowledgment of the reception of my note came with an invitation to breakfast the following morning, at the early hour of nine.

The professor’s family were at a summer residence in the country, and he was alone in his house in Gloucester-place, having come to town on the melancholy errand of a visit to poor Blackwood—(since dead.) I was punctual to my hour, and found the poet standing before the fire with his coat skirts expanded—a large, muscular man, something slovenly in his dress, but with a manner and face of high good humor, and remarkably frank and prepossessing address. While he was finding me a chair, and saying civil things of the noble friend who had been the medium of our acquaintance, I was trying to reconcile my idea of him, gathered from portraits and descriptions, with the person before me. I had imagined a thinner and more scholar-like looking man, with a much paler face, and a much more polished exterior. His head is exceedingly ample, his eye blue and restless, his mouth full of character, and his hair, of a very light sandy color, is brushed up to cover an incipient baldness, but takes very much its own way, and has the wildness of a highlander’s. He has the stamp upon him of a remarkable man to a degree seldom seen, and is, on the whole, fine-looking and certainly a gentleman in his appearance; but (I know not whether the impression is common) I expected in Christopher North, a finished and rather over-refined man of the world of the old school, and I was so far disappointed.

The tea was made, and the breakfast smoked upon the table, but the professor showed no signs of being aware of the fact, and talked away famously, getting up and sitting down, walking to the window and standing before the fire, and apparently carried quite away with his own too rapid process of thought. He talked of the American poets, praised Percival and Pierpont more particularly; expressed great pleasure at the criticisms of his own works that had appeared in the American papers and magazines—and still the toast was getting cold, and with every move he seemed less and less aware of the presence of breakfast. There were plates and cups but for two, so that he was not waiting for another guest,—and after half an hour had thus elapsed, I began to fear he thought he had already breakfasted. If I had wished to have reminded him of it, however, I should have had no opportunity, for the stream of his eloquence ran on without a break; and eloquence it certainly was. His accent is very broadly Scotch, but his words are singularly well chosen, and his illustrations more novel and poetical than those of any man I ever conversed with. He spoke of Blackwood, returning to the subject repeatedly, and always with a softened tone of voice and a more impressive manner, as if his feelings were entirely engrossed by the circumstances of his illness. “Poor Blackwood,” he said, setting his hands together and fixing his eyes on the wall, as if he were soliloquising with the picture of the sick man vividly before him, “there never was a more honest creature, or a better friend. I have known him intimately for years, and owe him much; and I could lose no friend that would affect me more nearly. There is something quite awful in the striking down thus of a familiar companion by your side—the passing away—the death—the end forever of a man you have been accustomed to meet as surely as the morning or evening, and have grown to consider a part of your existence almost. To have the share he took in your thoughts thrown back upon you—and his aid and counsel and company with you no more. His own mind is in a very singular state. He knows he is to die, and he has made every preparation in the most composed and sensible manner, and if the subject is alluded to directly, does not even express a hope of recovery; yet, the moment the theme is changed, he talks as if death were as far from him as ever, and looks forward, and mingles himself up in his remarks on the future, as if he were here to see this and the other thing completed, and share with you the advantages for years to come. What a strange thing it is—this balancing between death and life—standing on the edge of the grave, and turning, first to look into its approaching darkness, and then back on the familiar and pleasant world, yet with a certain downward progress, and no hope of life, beyond the day over your head!”

I asked if Blackwood was a man of refined literary taste.

“Yes,” he said. “I would trust his opinion of a book sooner than that of any man I know. He might not publish everything he approved, for it was his business to print only things that would sell; and, therefore, there are perhaps many authors who would complain of him; but, if his opinion had been against my own, and it had been my own book, I should believe he was right and give up my own judgment. He was a patron of literature, and it owes him much. He is a loss to the world.”

I spoke of the “Noctes.”

He smiled, as you would suppose Christopher North would do, with the twinkle proper of genuine hilarity in his eye, and said, “Yes, they have been very popular. Many people in Scotland believe them to be transcripts of real scenes, and wonder how a professor of moral philosophy can descend to such carousings, and poor Hogg comes in for his share of abuse, for they never doubt he was there and said everything that is put down for him.”

“How does the Shepherd take it?”

“Very good humoredly, with the exception of one or two occasions, when cockney scribblers have visited him in their tours, and tried to flatter him by convincing him he was treated disrespectfully. But five minutes’ conversation and two words of banter restore his good humor, and he is convinced, as he ought to be, that he owes half his reputation to the Noctes.”

“What do you think of his Life of Sir Walter, which Lockhart has so butchered in Frazer?”

“Did Lockhart write that?”

“I was assured so in London.”

“It was a barbarous and unjustifiable attack; and, oddly enough, I said so yesterday to Lockhart himself, who was here, and he differed from me entirely. Now you mention it, I think from his manner he must have written it.”

“Will Hogg forgive him?”

“Never! never! I do not think he knows yet who has done it, but I hear that he is dreadfully exasperated. Lockhart is quite wrong. To attack an old man, with gray hairs, like the Shepherd, and accuse him so flatly and unnecessarily of lie upon lie—oh, it was not right.”

“Do you think Hogg misrepresented facts willingly?”

“No, oh no! he is perfectly honest, no doubt, and quite revered Sir Walter. He has an unlucky inaccuracy of mind, however; and his own vanity, which is something quite ridiculous, has given a coloring to his conversations with Scott, which puts them in a very false light; and Sir Walter, who was the best natured of men, may have said the things ascribed to him in a variety of moods, such as no one can understand who does not know what a bore Hogg must sometimes have been at Abbottsford. Do you know Lockhart?”

“No, I do not. He is almost the only literary man in London I have not met; and I must say, as the editor of the Quarterly, and the most unfair and unprincipled critic of the day, I have no wish to know him. I never heard him well spoken of. I probably have met a hundred of his acquaintances, but I have not seen one who pretended to be his friend.”

“Yet there is a great deal of good in Lockhart. I allow all you say of his unfairness and severity; but if he were sitting there, opposite you, you would find him the mildest and most unpresuming of men, and so he appears in private life always.”

“Not always. A celebrated foreigner, who had been very intimate with him, called one morning to deprecate his severity upon Baron D’Haussez’s book in a forthcoming review. He did his errand in a friendly way, and, on taking his leave, Lockhart, with much ceremony, accompanied him down to his carriage. ‘Pray don’t give yourself the trouble to come down,’ said the polite Frenchman. ‘I make a point of doing it, sir,’ said Lockhart, with a very offensive manner, ‘for I understand from your friend’s book, that we are not considered a polite nation in France.’ Nothing certainly could be more ill-bred and insulting.”

“Still it is not his nature. I do believe that it is merely an unhappy talent that he has for sarcasm, with which his heart has nothing to do. When he sits down to review a book, he never thinks of the author or his feelings. He cuts it up with pleasure, because he does it with skill in the way of his profession, as a surgeon dissects a dead body. He would be the first to show the man a real kindness if he stood before him. I have known Lockhart long. He was in Edinboro’ a great while, and when he was writing ‘Valerius,’ we were in the habit of walking out together every morning, and when we reached a quiet spot in the country, he read to me the chapters as he wrote them. He finished it in three weeks. I heard it all thus by piecemeal as it went on, and had much difficulty in persuading him that it was worth publishing. He wrote it very rapidly, and thought nothing of it. We used to sup together with Blackwood, and that was the real origin of the ‘Noctes.’ ”

“At Ambrose’s?”

“At Ambrose’s.”

“But is there such a tavern, really?”

“Oh, certainly. Anybody will show it to you. It is a small house, kept in an out-of-the-way corner of the town, by Ambrose, who is an excellent fellow in his way, and had a great influx of custom in consequence of his celebrity in the Noctes. We were there one night very late, and had all been remarkably gay and agreeable. ‘What a pity,’ said Lockhart, ‘that some short hand writer had not been here to take down the good things that have been said at this supper.’ The next day he produced a paper called ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ,’ and that was the first. I continued them afterward.”

“Have you no idea of publishing them separately? I think a volume or two should be made of the more poetical and and critical parts, certainly. Leaving out the politics and the merely local topics of the day, no book could be more agreeable.”

“It was one of the things pending when poor Blackwood was taken ill. But will you have some breakfast?”

The breakfast had been cooling for an hour, and I most willingly acceded to his proposition. Without rising, he leaned back, with his chair still toward the fire, and seizing the tea-pot as if it were a sledge-hammer, he poured from one cup to the other without interrupting the stream, overrunning both cup and saucer, and partly overflooding the tea-tray. He then set the cream toward me with a carelessness which nearly overset it, and in trying to reach an egg from the centre of the table, broke two. He took no notice of his own awkwardness, but drank his cup of tea at a single draught, ate his egg in the same expeditious manner, and went on talking of the Noctes and Lockhart and Blackwood, as if eating his breakfast were rather a troublesome parenthesis in his conversation. After a while he digressed to Wordsworth and Southey, and asked me if I was going to return by the Lakes. I proposed doing so.

“I will give you letters to both, if you haven’t them. I lived a long time in that neighborhood, and know Wordsworth perhaps as well as any one. Many a day I have walked over the hills with him, and listened to his repetition of his own poetry, which of course filled my mind completely at the time, and perhaps started the poetical vein in me, though I cannot agree with the critics that my poetry is an imitation of Wordsworth’s.”

“Did Wordsworth repeat any other poetry than his own?”

“Never in a single instance, to my knowledge. He is remarkable for the manner in which he is wrapped up in his own poetical life. He thinks of nothing else. Everything is done with reference to it. He is all and only a poet.”

“Was the story true that was told in the papers of his seeing, for the first time, in a large company some new novel of Scott’s, in which there was a motto taken from his works; and that he went immediately to the shelf and took down one of his own volumes and read the whole poem to the party, who were waiting for a reading of the new book?”

“Perfectly true. It happened in this very house. Wordsworth was very angry at the paragraph, and I believe accused me of giving it to the world. I was as much surprised as himself, however, to see it in print.”

“What is Southey’s manner of life?”

“Walter Scott said of him that he lived too much with women. He is secluded in the country, and surrounded by a circle of admiring friends who glorify every literary project he undertakes, and persuade him in spite of his natural modesty, that he can do nothing wrong or imperfectly. He has great genius and is a most estimable man.”

“Hamilton lives on the Lakes too—does he not?”

“Yes. How terribly he was annoyed by the review of his book in the North American. Who wrote it?”

“I have not heard positively, but I presume it was Everett. I know nobody else in the country who holds such a pen. He is the American Junius.”

“It was excessively clever but dreadfully severe, and Hamilton was frantic about it. I sent it to him myself, and could scarce have done him a more ungracious office. But what a strange thing it is that nobody can write a good book on America! The ridiculous part of it seems to me that men of common sense go there as travellers, and fill their books with scenes such as they may see every day within five minutes’ walk of their own doors, and call them American. Vulgar people are to be found all over the world, and I will match any scene in Hamilton or Mrs. Trollope, any day or night here in Edinburgh. I have always had an idea that I should be the best traveller in America myself. I have been so in the habit of associating with people of every class in my own country, that I am better fitted to draw the proper distinctions, I think, between what is universal over the world or peculiar to America.”

“I promise you a hearty welcome, if you should be inclined to try.”

“I have thought seriously of it. It is, after all, not more than a journey to Switzerland or Italy, of which we think nothing, and my vacation of five months would give me ample time, I suppose, to run through the principal cities. I shall do it, I think.”

I asked if he had written a poem of any length within the last few years.

“No, though I am always wishing to do it. Many things interfere with my poetry. In the first place I am obliged to give a lecture once a day for six months, and in the summer it is such a delight to be released, and get away into the country with my girls and boys, that I never put pen to paper till I am driven. Then Blackwood is a great care; and, greater objection still, I have been discouraged in various ways by criticism. It used to gall me to have my poems called imitations of Wordsworth and his school; a thing I could not see myself, but which was asserted even by those who praised me, and which modesty forbade I should disavow. I really can see no resemblance between the Isle of Palms and anything of Wordsworth’s. I think I have a style of my own, and as my ain barn, I think better of it than other people, and so pride prevents my writing. Until late years, too, I have been the subject of much political abuse, and for that I should not have cared if it were not disagreeable to have children and servants reading it in the morning papers, and a fear of giving them another handle in my poetry, was another inducement for not writing.”

I expressed my surprise at what he said, for, as far as I knew the periodicals, Wilson had been a singularly continued favorite.

“Yes, out of this immediate sphere, perhaps—but it requires a strong mind to suffer annoyance at one’s lips, and comfort oneself with the praise of a distant and outer circle of public opinion. I had a family growing up, of sons and daughters, who felt for me more than I should have felt for myself, and I was annoyed perpetually. Now, these very papers praise me, and I really can hardly believe my eyes when I open them and find the same type and imprint expressing such different opinions. It is absurd to mind such weathercocks; and, in truth, the only people worth heeding or writing for are the quiet readers in the country, who read for pleasure, and form sober opinions apart from political or personal prejudice. I would give more for the praise of one country clergyman and his family than I would for the admiration of a whole city. People in towns require a constant phantasmagoria, to keep up even the remembrance of your name. What books and authors, what battles and heroes, are forgotten in a day!”

My letter is getting too long, and I must make it shorter, as it is vastly less agreeable than the visit itself. Wilson went on to speak of his family, and his eyes kindled with pleasure in talking of his children. He invited me to stop and visit him at his place near Selkirk, in my way south, and promised me that I should see Hogg, who lived not far off. Such inducement was scarce necessary, and I made a half promise to do it and left him, after having passed several hours of the highest pleasure in his fascinating society.

LETTER VI.

LORD JEFFREY AND HIS FAMILY—LORD BROUGHAM—COUNT FLAHAULT—POLITICS—THE “GREY” BALL—ABERDEEN—GORDON CASTLE.

I was engaged to dine with Lord Jeffrey on the same day that I had breakfasted with Wilson, and the opportunity of contrasting so closely these two distinguished men, both editors of leading Reviews, yet of different politics, and no less different minds, persons, and manners, was highly gratifying.

At seven o’clock I drove to Moray-place, the Grosvenor-square of Edinburgh. I was not sorry to be early, for never having seen my host, nor his lady (who, as is well known, is an American,) I had some little advantage over the awkwardness of meeting a large party of strangers. After a few minutes’ conversation with Mrs. Jeffrey, the door was thrown quickly open, and the celebrated editor of the Edinburgh, the distinguished lawyer, the humane and learned judge, and the wit of the day, par excellence, entered with his daughter. A frank, almost merry smile, a perfectly unceremonious, hearty manner, and a most playful and graceful style of saying the half-apologetic, half-courteous things, incident to a first meeting after a letter of introduction, put me at once at my ease, and established a partiality for him, impromptu, in my feelings. Jeffrey is rather below the middle size, slight, rapid in his speech and motion, never still, and glances from one subject to another, with less abruptness and more quickness than any man I had ever seen. His head is small, but compact and well-shaped; and the expression of his face, when serious, is that of quick and discriminating earnestness. His voice is rather thin, but pleasing; and if I had met him incidentally, I should have described him, I think, as a most witty and well-bred gentleman of the school of Wilkes and Sheridan. Perhaps as distinguishing a mark as either his wit or his politeness, is an honest goodness of heart; which, however it makes itself apparent, no one could doubt, who had been with Jeffrey ten minutes.

To my great disappointment, Mrs. Jeffrey informed me that Lord Brougham, who was their guest at the time, was engaged to a dinner, given by the new lord advocate to Earl Grey. I had calculated much on seeing two such old friends and fellow-wits as Jeffrey and Brougham at the same table, and I could well believe what my neighbor told me at dinner, that it was more than a common misfortune to have missed it.

A large dinner-party began to assemble, some distinguished men in the law among them, and last of all was announced Lady Keith, rather a striking and very fashionable person, with her husband, Count Flahault, who, after being Napoleon’s aid-de-camp at the battle of Waterloo, offered his beauty and talents, both very much above the ordinary mark, to the above named noble heiress. I have seen few as striking-looking men as Count Flahault, and never a foreigner who spoke English so absolutely like a native of the country.

The great “Grey dinner” had been given the day before, and politics were the only subject at table. It had been my lot to be thrown principally among tories (conservatives is the new name,) since my arrival in England, and it was difficult to rid myself at once of the impressions of a fortnight just passed in the castle of a tory Earl. My sympathies in the “great and glorious” occasion were slower than those of the company, and much of their enthusiasm seemed to me overstrained. Then I had not even dined with the two thousand whigs under the pavilion, and as I was incautious enough to confess it, I was rallied upon having fallen into bad company, and altogether entered less into the spirit of the hour than I could have wished. Politics are seldom witty or amusing, and though I was charmed with the good sense and occasional eloquence of Lord Jeffrey, I was glad to get up stairs after dinner to chasse-café and the ladies.

We were all bound to the public ball that evening, and at eleven I accompanied my distinguished host to the assembly-room. Dancing was going on with great spirit when we entered; Lord Grey’s statesman-like head was bowing industriously on the platform; Lady Grey and her daughters sat looking on from the same elevated position, and Lord Brougham’s ugliest and shrewdest of human faces, flitted about through the crowd, good fellow to everybody, and followed by all eyes but those of the young. One or two of the Scotch nobility were there, but whigism is not popular among les hautes volailles, and the ball, though crowded, was but thinly sprinkled with “porcelain.” I danced till three o’clock, without finding my partners better or worse for their politics, and having aggravated a temporary lameness by my exertions, went home with a leg like an elephant to repent my abandonment of tory quiet.

Two or three days under the hands of the doctor, with the society of a Highland crone, of whose ceaseless garrulity over my poultices and plasters I could not understand two consecutive words, fairly finished my patience, and abandoning with no little regret a charming land route to the north of Scotland, I had myself taken, “this side up,” on board the steamer for Aberdeen. The loss of a wedding in Perthshire by the way, of a week’s deer-shooting in the forest of Athol, and a week’s fishing with a noble friend at Kinrara, (long-standing engagements all,) I lay at the door of the whigs. Add to this Loch Leven, Cairn-Gorm, the pass of Killicrankie, other sights lost on that side of Scotland, and I paid dearly for “the Grey ball.”

We steamed the hundred and twenty miles in twelve hours, paying about three dollars for our passage. I mention it for the curiosity of a cheap thing in this country.

I lay at Aberdeen four days, getting out but once, and then for a drive to the “Marichal College,” the Alma Mater of Dugald Dalgetty. It is a curious and rather picturesque old place, half in ruins, and is about being pulled down. A Scotch gentleman, who was a fellow-passenger in the steamer, and who lived in the town, called on me kindly twice a day, brought me books and papers, offered me the use of his carriage, and did everything for my comfort that could have been suggested by the warmest friendship. Considering that it was a casual acquaintance of a day, it speaks well, certainly, for the “Good Samaritanism” of Scotland.

I took two places in the coach at last (one for my leg,) and bowled away seventy miles across the country, with the delightful speed of these admirable contrivances, for Gordon Castle. I arrived at Lochabers, a small town on the estate of the Duke of Gordon, at three in the afternoon, and immediately took a post-chaise for the castle, the gate of which was a stone’s throw from the inn.

The immense iron gate surmounted by the Gordon arms, the handsome and spacious stone lodges on either side, the canonically fat porter in white stockings and gay livery, lifting his hat as he swung open the massive portal, all bespoke the entrance to a noble residence. The road within was edged with velvet sward, and rolled to the smoothness of a terrace walk, the winding avenue lengthened away before, with trees of every variety of foliage; light carriages passed me driven by ladies or gentlemen bound on their afternoon airing; a groom led up and down two beautiful blood horses, prancing along, with side-saddles and morocco stirrups, and keepers with hounds and terriers; gentlemen on foot, idling along the walks, and servants in different liveries, hurrying to and fro, betokened a scene of busy gayety before me. I had hardly noted these various circumstances, before a sudden curve in the road brought the castle into view, a vast stone pile with castellated wings, and in another moment I was at the door, where a dozen lounging and powdered menials were waiting on a party of ladies and gentlemen to their several carriages. It was the moment for the afternoon drive.

LETTER VII.

GORDON CASTLE—COMPANY THERE—THE PARK—DUKE OF GORDON—PERSONAL BEAUTY OF THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY.

The last phæton dashed away, and my chaise advanced to the door. A handsome boy, in a kind of page’s dress, immediately came to the window, addressed me by name, and informed me that His Grace was out deer-shooting, but that my room was prepared, and he was ordered to wait on me. I followed him through a hall lined with statues, deers’ horns, and armor, and was ushered into a large chamber, looking out on a park, extending with its lawns and woods to the edge of the horizon. A more lovely view never feasted human eye.

“Who is at the castle?” I asked, as the boy busied himself in unstrapping my portmanteau.

“Oh, a great many, sir.” He stopped in his occupation, and began counting on his fingers. “There’s Lord Aberdeen, and Lord Claud Hamilton and Lady Harriette Hamilton (them’s his lordship’s two step children, you know, sir,) and the Dutchess of Richmond and Lady Sophia Lennox, and Lady Keith, and Lord Mandeville and Lord Aboyne, and Lord Stormont and Lady Stormont, and Lord Morton and Lady Morton, and Lady Alicia, and—and—and—twenty more, sir.”

“Twenty more lords and ladies?”

“No, sir! that’s all the nobility.”

“And you can’t remember the names of the others?”

“No, sir.”

He was a proper page. He could not trouble his memory with the names of commoners.

“And how many sit down to dinner?”

“Above thirty, besides the Duke and Dutchess.”

“That will do.” And off tripped my slender gentleman with his laced jacket, giving the fire a terrible stir-up in his way out, and turning back to inform me that the dinner hour was seven precisely.

It was a mild, bright afternoon, quite warm for the end of an English September, and with a fire in the room, and a soft sunshine pouring in at the windows, a seat by the open casement was far from disagreeable. I passed the time till the sun set, looking out on the park. Hill and valley lay between my eye and the horizon; sheep fed in picturesque flocks, and small fallow deer grazed near them; the trees were planted, and the distant forest shaped by the hand of taste; and broad and beautiful as was the expanse taken in by the eye, it was evidently one princely possession. A mile from the castle wall, the shaven sward extended in a carpet of velvet softness, as bright as emerald, studded by clumps of shrubbery, like flowers wrought elegantly on tapestry; and across it bounded occasionally a hare, and the pheasants feel undisturbed near the thickets, or a lady with flowing riding-dress and flaunting feather, dashed into sight upon her fleet blood palfrey, and was lost the next moment, in the woods, or a boy put his pony to its mettle up the ascent, or a gamekeeper idled into sight with his gun in the hollow of his arm, and his hounds at his heels—and all this little world of enjoyment and luxury, and beauty, lay in the hand of one man, and was created by his wealth in these northern wilds of Scotland, a day’s journey almost from the possession of another human being. I never realized so forcibly the splendid result of wealth and primogeniture.

The sun set in a blaze of fire among the pointed firs crowning the hills, and by the occasional prance of a horse’s feet on the gravel, and the roll of rapid wheels, and now and then a gay laugh and merry voices, the different parties were returning to the castle. Soon after a loud gong sounded through the gallery, the signal to dress, and I left my musing occupation unwillingly to make my toilet for an appearance in a formidable circle of titled aristocrats, not one of whom I had ever seen, the Duke himself a stranger to me, except through the kind letter of introduction lying upon the table.

I was sitting by the fire imagining forms and faces for the different persons who had been named to me, when there was a knock at the door, and a tall, white-haired gentleman, of noble physiognomy, but singularly cordial address, entered, with the broad red riband of a duke across his breast, and welcomed me most heartily to the castle. The gong sounded at the next moment, and, in our way down, he named over his other guests, and prepared me in a measure for the introductions which followed. The drawing-room was crowded like a soirée. The Dutchess, a very tall and very handsome woman, with a smile of the most winning sweetness, received me at the door, and I was presented successively to every person present. Dinner was announced immediately, and the difficult question of precedence being sooner settled than I had ever seen it before in so large a party, we passed through files of servants to the dining room.

It was a large and very lofty hall, supported at the ends by marble columns, within which was stationed a band of music, playing delightfully. The walls were lined with full length family pictures, from old knights in armor to the modern dukes in kilt of the Gordon plaid; and on the sideboards stood services of gold plate, the most gorgeously massive, and the most beautiful in workmanship I have ever seen. There were, among the vases, several large coursing-cups, won by the duke’s hounds, of exquisite shape and ornament.

I fell into my place between a gentleman and a very beautiful woman, of perhaps twenty-two, neither of whose names I remembered, though I had but just been introduced. The Duke probably anticipated as much, and as I took my seat he called out to me, from the top of the table, that I had upon my right, Lady ——, “the most agreeable woman in Scotland.” It was unnecessary to say that she was the most lovely.

I have been struck everywhere in England with the beauty of the higher classes, and as I looked around me upon the aristocratic company at the table, I thought I never had seen “heaven’s image double-stamped as man and noble” so unequivocally clear. There were two young men and four or five young ladies of rank—and five or six people of more decided personal attractions could scarcely be found; the style of form and face at the same time being of that cast of superiority which goes by the expressive name of “thorough-bred.” There is a striking difference in this respect between England and the countries on the continent—the paysans of France and the bontadini of Italy being physically far superior to their degenerate masters; while the gentry and nobility of England differ from the peasantry in limb and feature as the racer differs from the dray-horse, or the greyhound from the cur. The contrast between the manners of English and French gentlemen is quite as striking. The empressment, the warmth, the shrug and gesture of the Parisian, and the working eyebrow, dilating or contracting eye, and conspirator-like action of the Italian in the most common conversation, are the antipodes of English high breeding. I should say a North American Indian, in his more dignified phase, approached nearer to the manner of an English nobleman than any other person. The calm repose of person and feature, the self-possession under all circumstances, that incapability of surprise or dérèglement, and that decision about the slightest circumstance, and the apparent certainty that he is acting absolutely comme il faut, is equally “gentlemanlike” and Indianlike. You cannot astonish an English gentleman. If a man goes into a fit at his side, or a servant drops a dish upon his shoulder, or he hears that the house is on fire, he sets down his wine-glass with the same deliberation. He has made up his mind what to do in all possible cases, and he does it. He is cold at a first introduction, and may bow stiffly, (which he always does) in drinking wine with you, but it is his manner; and he would think an Englishman out of his senses who should bow down to his very plate and smile as a Frenchman does on a similar occasion. Rather chilled by this, you are a little astonished when the ladies have left the table, and he closes his chair up to you, to receive an invitation to pass a month with him at his country house, and to discover that at the very moment he bowed so coldly, he was thinking how he should contrive to facilitate your plans for getting to him or seeing the country to advantage on the way.

The band ceased playing when the ladies left the table, the gentlemen closed up, conversation assumed a merrier cast, coffee and chasse-café were brought in when the wines began to be circulated more slowly; and at eleven, there was a general move to the drawing-room. Cards, tea, and music, filled up the time till twelve, and then the ladies took their departure, and the gentlemen sat down to supper. I got to bed somewhere about two o’clock; and thus ended an evening which I had anticipated as stiff and embarrassing, but which is marked in my tablets as one of the most social and kindly I have had the good fortune to record on my travels. I have described it, and shall describe others minutely—and I hope there is no necessity of my reminding any one that my apology for thus disclosing scenes of private life has been already made. Their interest as sketches by an American of the society that most interests Americans, and the distance at which they are published, justify them, I would hope, from any charge of indelicacy.

LETTER VIII.

ENGLISH BREAKFASTS—SALMON FISHERY—LORD ABERDEEN—MR. McLANE—SPORTING ESTABLISHMENT OF GORDON CASTLE.

I arose late on the first morning after my arrival at Gordon Castle, and found the large party already assembled about the breakfast table. I was struck on entering with the different air of the room. The deep windows, opening out upon the park, had the effect of sombre landscapes in oaken frames; the troops of liveried servants, the glitter of plate, the music, that had contributed to the splendor of the night before, were gone; the Duke sat laughing at the head of the table, with a newspaper in his hand, dressed in a coarse shooting-jacket and colored cravat; the Dutchess was in a plain morning-dress and cap of the simplest character; and the high-born women about the table, whom I had left glittering with jewels, and dressed in all the attractions of fashion, appeared with the simplest coiffure and a toilet of studied plainness. The ten or twelve noblemen present were engrossed with their letters or newspapers over tea and toast; and in them, perhaps, the transformation was still greater. The soigné man of fashion of the night before, faultless in costume and distinguished in his appearance, in the full force of the term, was enveloped now in a coat of fustian, with a coarse waistcoat of plaid, a gingham cravat, and hob-nailed shoes, (for shooting,) and in place of the gay hilarity of the supper-table, wore a face of calm indifference, and ate his breakfast and read the paper in a rarely broken silence. I wondered, as I looked about me, what would be the impression of many people in my own country, could they look in upon that plain party, aware that it was composed of the proudest nobility and the highest fashion of England.

Breakfast in England is a confidential and unceremonious hour, and servants are generally dispensed with. This is to me, I confess, an advantage over every other meal. I detest eating with twenty tall fellows standing opposite, whose business it is to watch me. The coffee and tea were on the table, with toast, muffins, oat-cakes, marmalade, jellies, fish, and all the paraphernalia of a Scotch breakfast; and on the sideboard stood cold meats for those who liked them, and they were expected to go to it and help themselves. Nothing could be more easy, unceremonious, and affable, than the whole tone of the meal. One after another rose and fell into groups in the windows, or walked up and down the long room—and, with one or two others, I joined the Duke at the head of the table, who gave us some interesting particulars of the salmon fisheries of the Spey. The privilege of fishing the river within his lands, is bought of him at the pretty sum of eight thousand pounds a year! A salmon was brought in for me to see, as of remarkable size, which was not more than half the weight of our common American salmon.

The ladies went off unaccompanied to their walks in the park and other avocations, those bound for the covers joined the gamekeepers, who were waiting with their dogs in the leash at the stables; some paired off to the billiard-room, and I was left with Lord Aberdeen in the breakfast room alone. The tory ex-minister made many inquiries, with great apparent interest, about America. When secretary for foreign affairs, in the Wellington cabinet, he had known Mr. McLane intimately. He said he seldom had been so impressed with a man’s honesty and straight-forwardness, and never did public business with any one with more pleasure. He admired Mr. McLane, and hoped he enjoyed his friendship. He wished he might return as our minister to England. One such honorable, uncompromising man, he said, was worth a score of practised diplomatists. He spoke of Gallatin and Rush in the same flattering manner, but recurred continually to Mr. McLane, of whom he could scarcely say enough. His politics would naturally lead him to approve of the administration of General Jackson, but he seemed to admire the President very much as a man.

Lord Aberdeen has the name of being the proudest and coldest aristocrat of England. It is amusing to see the person who bears such a character. He is of the middle height, rather clumsily made, with an address more of sober dignity than of pride or reserve. With a black coat much worn, and always too large for him, a pair of coarse check trousers very ill made, a waistcoat buttoned up to his throat, and a cravat of the most primitive négligé, his aristocracy is certainly not in his dress. His manners are of absolute simplicity, amounting almost to want of style. He crosses his hands behind him, and balances on his heels; in conversation his voice is low and cold, and he seldom smiles. Yet there is a certain benignity in his countenance, and an indefinable superiority and high breeding in his simple address, that would betray his rank after a few minutes’ conversation to any shrewd observer. It is only in his manner toward the ladies of the party that he would be immediately distinguishable from men of lower rank in society.

Still suffering from lameness, I declined all invitations to the shooting parties, who started across the park, with the dogs leaping about them in a phrensy of delight, and accepted the Dutchess’s kind offer of a pony phæton to drive down to the kennels. The Duke’s breed, both of setters and hounds, is celebrated throughout the kingdom. They occupy a spacious building in the centre of a wood, a quadrangle enclosing a court, and large enough for a respectable poor-house. The chief huntsman and his family, and perhaps a gamekeeper or two, lodge on the premises, and the dogs are divided by palings across the court. I was rather startled to be introduced into the small enclosure with a dozen gigantic blood-hounds, as high as my breast, the keeper’s whip in my hand the only defence. I was not easier for the man’s assertion that, without it, they would “hae the life oot o’ me in a crack.” They came around me very quietly, and one immense fellow, with a chest like a horse, and a head of the finest expression, stood up and laid his paws on my shoulders, with the deliberation of a friend about to favor me with some grave advice. One can scarce believe these noble creatures have not reason like ourselves. Those slender, thorough-bred heads, large, speaking eyes, and beautiful limbs and graceful action, should be gifted with more than mere animal instinct. The greyhounds were the beauties of the kennel, however. I never had seen such perfect creatures. “Dinna tak’ pains to caress ’em, sir,” said the huntsman, “they’ll only be hangit for it!” I asked for an explanation, and the man, with an air as if I was uncommonly ignorant, told me that a hound was hung the moment he betrayed attachment to any one, or in any way showed signs of superior sagacity. In coursing the hare, for instance, if the dog abandoned the scent to cut across and intercept the poor animal, he was considered as spoiling the sport. Greyhounds are valuable only as they obey their mere natural instinct, and if they leave the track of the hare, either in their own sagacity, or to follow their master, in intercepting it, they spoil the pack, and are hung without mercy. It is an object, of course, to preserve them what they usually are, the greatest fools as well as the handsomest of the canine species—and on the first sign of attachment to their master, their death warrant is signed. They are too sensible to live. The Dutchess told me afterward that she had the greatest difficulty in saving the life of the finest hound in the pack, who had committed the sin of showing pleasure once or twice when she appeared.

The setters were in the next division, and really they were quite lovely. The rare tan and black dog of this race, with his silky, floss hair, intelligent muzzle, good-humored face and caressing fondness (lucky dog! that affection is permitted in his family!) quite excited my admiration. There were thirty or forty of these, old and young; and a friend of the Duke’s would as soon ask him for a church living as for the present of one of them. The former would be by much the smaller favor. Then there were terriers of four or five breeds, of one family of which (long-haired, long-bodied, short-legged, and perfectly white little wretches) the keeper seemed particularly proud. I evidently sunk in his opinion for not admiring them.

I passed the remainder of the morning in threading the lovely alleys and avenues of the park, miles after miles of gravel walk, extending away in every direction, with every variety of turn and shade, now a deep wood, now a sunny opening upon a glade, here along the bank of a stream, and there around the borders of a small lagoon, the little ponies flying on over the smoothly-rolled paths, and tossing their mimicking heads, as if they too enjoyed the beauty of the princely domain. This, I thought to myself, as I sped on through light and shadow, is very like what is called happiness; and this (if to be a duke were to enjoy it as I do with this fresh feeling of novelty and delight) is a condition of life it is not quite irrational to envy. And giving my little steeds the rein, I repeated to myself Scott’s graphic description, which seems written for the park of Gordon castle, and thanked Heaven for one more day of unalloyed happiness.

“And there soft swept in velvet green,

The plain with many a glade between

Whose tangled alleys far invade

The depths of the brown forest shade;

And the tall fern obscured the lawn,

Fair shelter for the sportive fawn.

There, tufted close with copse-wood green,

Was many a swelling hillock seen,

And all around was verdure meet

For pressure of the fairies’ feet.

The glossy valley loved the park,

The yew tree lent its shadows dark,

And many an old oak worn and bare,

With all its shivered boughs was there.”

LETTER IX.

SCOTCH HOSPITALITY—IMMENSE POSSESSIONS OF THE NOBILITY—DUTCHESS’ INFANT SCHOOL—MANNERS OF HIGH LIFE—THE TONE OF CONVERSATION IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA CONTRASTED.

The aim of Scotch hospitality seems to be, to convince you that the house and all that is in it is your own, and you are at liberty to enjoy it as if you were, in the French sense of the French phrase, chez vous. The routine of Gordon castle was what each one chose to make it. Between breakfast and lunch the ladies were generally invisible, and the gentlemen rode or shot, or played billiards, or kept their rooms. At two o’clock, a dish or two of hot game and a profusion of cold meats were set on the small tables in the dining room, and every body came in for a kind of lounging half-meal, which occupied perhaps an hour. Thence all adjourned to the drawing-room, under the windows of which were drawn up carriages of all descriptions, with grooms, outriders, footmen, and saddle horses for gentlemen and ladies. Parties were then made up for driving or riding, and from a pony-chaise to a phæton and four, there was no class of vehicle which was not at your disposal. In ten minutes the carriages were usually all filled, and away they flew, some to the banks of the Spey or the sea-side, some to the drives in the park, and with the delightful consciousness that, speed where you would, the horizon scarce limited the possession of your host, and you were everywhere at home. The ornamental gates flying open at your approach, miles distant from the castle; the herds of red deer trooping away from the sound of wheels in the silent park; the stately pheasants feeding tamely in the immense preserves; the hares scarce troubling themselves to get out of the length of the whip; the stalking gamekeepers lifting their hats in the dark recesses of the forest—there was something in this perpetual reminding of your privileges, which, as a novelty, was far from disagreeable. I could not at the time bring myself to feel, what perhaps would be more poetical and republican, that a ride in the wild and unfenced forest of my own country would have been more to my taste.

The second afternoon of my arrival, I took a seat in the carriage with Lord Aberdeen and his daughter, and we followed the Dutchess, who drove herself in a pony-chaise, to visit a school on the estate. Attached to a small gothic chapel, a few minutes’ drive from the castle, stood a building in the same style, appropriated to the instruction of the children of the Duke’s tenantry. There were a hundred and thirty little creatures, from two years to five or six, and, like all infant schools in these days of improved education, it was an interesting and affecting sight. The last one I had been in was at Athens, and though I missed here the dark eyes and Grecian faces of the Ægean, I saw health and beauty of a kind which stirred up more images of home, and promised, perhaps, more for the future. They went through their evolutions, and answered their questions, with an intelligence and cheerfulness that were quite delightful, and I was sorry to leave them even for a drive in the loveliest sun-set of a lingering day of summer.

People in Europe are more curious about the comparison of the natural productions of America with those of England than about our social and political differences. A man who does not care to know whether the president has destroyed the bank, or the bank the president, or whether Mrs. Trollope has flattered the Americans or not, will be very much interested to know if the pine tree in his park is comparable to the same tree in America, if the same cattle are found there, or the woods stocked with the same game as his own. I would recommend a little study of trees particularly, and of vegetation generally, as valuable knowledge for an American coming abroad. I think there is nothing on which I have been so often questioned. The Dutchess led the way to a plantation of American trees, at some distance from the castle, and stopping beneath some really noble firs, asked if our forest trees were often larger, with an air as if she believed they were not. They were shrubs, however, compared to the gigantic productions of the West. Whatever else we may see abroad, we must return home to find the magnificence of nature.

The number at the dinner-table of Gordon castle was seldom less than thirty, but the company was continually varied by departures and arrivals. No sensation was made by either one or the other. A travelling carriage dashed up to the door, was disburdened of its load, and drove round to the stables, and the question was seldom asked, “Who is arrived?” You were sure to see at dinner—and an addition of half a dozen to the party made no perceptible difference in anything. Leave-takings were managed in the same quiet way. Adieus were made to the Duke and Dutchess, and to no one else, except he happened to encounter the parting guest upon the staircase, or were more than a common acquaintance. In short, in every way the gêne of life seemed weeded out, and if unhappiness or ennui found its way into the castle, it was introduced in the sufferer’s own bosom. For me, I gave myself up to enjoyment with an abandon I could not resist. With kindness and courtesy in every look, the luxuries and comforts of a regal establishment at my freest disposal; solitude when I pleased, company when I pleased, the whole visible horizon fenced in for the enjoyment of a household, of which I was a temporary portion, and no enemy except time and the gout, I felt as if I had been spirited into some castle of felicity, and had not come by the royal mail-coach at all.

The great spell of high life in this country seems to be repose. All violent sensations are avoided as out of taste. In conversation, nothing is so “odd” (a word, by the way, that in England means everything disagreeable) as emphasis or startling epithet, or gesture, and in common intercourse nothing so vulgar as any approach to “a scene.” The high-bred Englishman studies to express himself in the plainest words that will convey his meaning, and is just as simple and calm in describing the death of his friend, and just as technical, so to speak, as in discussing the weather. For all extraordinary admiration the word “capital” suffices; for all ordinary praise the word “nice!” for all condemnation in morals, manners, or religion, the word “odd!” To express yourself out of this simple vocabulary is to raise the eyebrows of the whole company at once, and stamp yourself under-bred, or a foreigner.

This sounds ridiculous, but it is the exponent not only of good breeding, but of the true philosophy of social life. The general happiness of a party consists in giving every individual an equal chance, and in wounding no one’s self-love. What is called an “overpowering person,” is immediately shunned, for he talks too much, and excites too much attention. In any other country he would be called “amusing.” He is considered here as a mere monopolizer of the general interest—and his laurels, talk he never so well, shadow the rest of the company. You meet your most intimate friend in society after a long separation, and he gives you his hand as if you had parted at breakfast. If he had expressed all he felt, it would have been “a scene,” and the repose of the company would have been disturbed. You invite a clever man to dine with you, and he enriches his descriptions with new epithets and original words. He is offensive. He eclipses the language of your other guests, and is out of keeping with the received and subdued tone to which the most common intellect rises with ease. Society on this footing is delightful to all, and the diffident man, or the dull man, or the quiet man, enjoys it as much as another. For violent sensations you must go elsewhere. Your escape-valve is not at your neighbor’s ear.

There is a great advantage in this in another respect. Your tongue never gets you into mischief. The “unsafeness of Americans” in society (I quote a phrase I have heard used a thousand times) arises wholly from the American habit of applying high-wrought language to trifles. I can tell one of my countrymen abroad by his first remark. Ten to one his first sentence contains a superlative that would make an Englishman imagine he had lost his senses. The natural consequence is continual misapprehension, offence is given where none was intended, words that have no meaning are the ground of quarrel, and gentlemen are shy of us. A good-natured young nobleman, whom I sat next to at dinner on my first arrival at Gordon castle, told me he was hunting with Lord Abercorn when two very gentleman-like young men rode up and requested leave to follow the hounds, but in such extraordinary language that they were not at first understood. The hunt continued for some days, and at last the strangers, who rode well, and were seen continually, were invited to dine with the principal nobleman of the neighborhood. They turned out to be Americans, and were every way well-bred and agreeable, but their extraordinary mode of expressing themselves kept the company in continual astonishment. They were treated with politeness, of course, while they remained, but no little fun was made of their phraseology after their departure, and the impression on the mind of my informant was very much against the purity of the English language, as spoken by the Americans. I mention it for the benefit of those whom it may concern.

LETTER X.

DEPARTURE FROM GORDON CASTLE—THE PRETENDER—SCOTCH CHARACTER MISAPPREHENDED—OBSERVANCE OF SUNDAY—HIGHLAND CHIEFTAINS.

The days had gone by like the “Days of Thalaba,” and I took my leave of Gordon castle. It seemed to me, as I looked back upon it, as if I had passed a separate life there—so beautiful had been every object on which I had looked in that time, and so free from every mixture of ennui had been the hours from the first to the last, I have set them apart in my memory, those days, as a bright ellipse in the usual procession of joys and sorrows. It is a little world, walled in from rudeness and vexation, in which I have lived a life.

I took the coach from Elgin, and visited the fine old ruins of the cathedral, and then kept on to Inverness, passing over the “Blasted Heath,” the tryst of Macbeth and the witches. We passed within sight of Culloden Moor, at sunset, and the driver pointed out to me a lonely castle where the Pretender slept the night before the battle. The interest with which I had read the romantic history of Prince Charlie, in my boyhood, was fully awakened, for his name is still a watch-word of aristocracy in Scotland; and the jacobite songs, with their half-warlike, half-melancholy music, were favorites of the Dutchess of Gordon, who sung them in their original Scotch, with an enthusiasm and sweetness that stirred my blood like the sound of a trumpet. There certainly never was a cause so indebted to music and poetry as that which was lost at Culloden.

The hotel at Inverness was crowded with livery-servants, and the door inaccessible for carriages. I had arrived on the last day of a county meeting, and all the chieftains and lairds of the north and west of Scotland were together. The last ball was to be given that evening, and I was strongly tempted to go, by four or five acquaintances whom I found in the hotel—but the gout was peremptory. My shoe would not go on, and I went to bed.

I was limping about in the morning with a kind old baronet whom I had met at Gordon Castle, when I was warmly accosted by a gentleman whom I did not immediately remember. On his reminding me that we had parted last on Lake Leman, however, I recollected a gentlemanlike Scotchman, who had offered me his glass opposite Copet to look at the house of Madame de Stael, and whom I had left afterward at Lausanne, without even knowing his name. He invited me immediately to dine, and in about an hour or two after, called in his carriage, and drove me to a charming country house, a few miles down the shore of Loch Ness, where he presented me to his family, and treated me in every respect as if I had been the oldest of his friends. I mention the circumstance for the sake of a comment on what seems to me a universal error with regard to the Scotch character. Instead of a calculating and cold people, as they are always described by the English, they seem to me more a nation of impulse and warm feeling than any other I have seen. Their history certainly goes to prove a most chivalrous character in days gone by, and as far as I know Scotchmen, they preserve it still with even less of the modification of the times than any other nations. The instance I have mentioned above, is one of many that have come under my own observation, and in many inquiries since, I have never found an Englishman, who had been in Scotland, who did not confirm my impression. I have not traded with them, it is true, and I have seen only the wealthier class, but still I think my judgment a fair one. The Scotch in England are, in a manner, what the Yankees are in the Southern States, and their advantages of superior quickness and education have given them a success which is ascribed to meaner causes. I think (common prejudice contradicente) that neither the Scotch nor the English are a cold or an unfriendly people, but the Scotch certainly the farther remove from coldness of the two.

Inverness is the only place I have ever been in where no medicine could be procured on a Sunday. I did not want indeed for other mementoes of the sacredness of the day. In the crowd of the public room of the hotel, half the persons at least, had either bible or prayer-book, and there was a hush through the house, and a gravity in the faces of the people passing in the street, that reminded me more of New England than anything I have seen. I had wanted some linen washed on Saturday. “Impossible!” said the waiter, “no one does up linen on Sunday.” Toward evening I wished for a carriage to drive over to my hospitable friend. Mine host stared, and I found it was indecorous to drive out on Sunday. I must add, however, that the apothecary’s shop was opened after the second service, and that I was allowed a carriage on pleading my lameness.

Inverness is a romantic looking town, charmingly situated between Loch Ness and the Murray Firth, with the bright river Ness running through it, parallel to its principal street, and the most picturesque eminences in its neighborhood. There is a very singular elevation on the other side of the Ness, shaped like a ship, keel up, and rising from the centre of the plain, covered with beautiful trees. It is called, in Gaelic, Tonnaheuric, or the Hill of the Fairies.

It has been in one respect like getting abroad again, to come to Scotland. Nothing seemed more odd to me on my first arrival in England, than having suddenly ceased to be a “foreigner.” I was as little at home myself, as in France or Turkey, (much less than in Italy,) yet there was that in the manner of every person who approached me which conveyed the presumption that I was as familiar with every thing about me as himself. In Scotland, however, the Englishman is the “Sassenach,” and a stranger; and, as I was always taken for one, I found myself once more invested with that agreeable consequence which accompanies it, my supposed prejudices consulted, my opinion about another country asked, and comparisons referred to me as an ex parte judge. I found here, as abroad, too, that the Englishman was expected to pay more for trifling services than a native, and that he would be much more difficult about his accommodations, and more particular in his chance company. I was amused at the hotel with an instance of the want of honor shown “the prophet in his own country.” I went down to the coffee room for my breakfast about noon, and found a remarkably fashionable, pale, “Werter-like man,” excessively dressed, but with all the air of a gentleman, sitting with a newspaper on one side of the fire. He offered me the newspaper after a few minutes, but with the cold, half-supercilious politeness which marks the dandy tribe, and strolled off to the window. The landlord entered presently, and asked me if I had any objection to breakfasting with that gentleman, as it would be a convenience in serving it up. “None in the world,” I said, “but you had better ask the other gentleman first.” “Hoot!” said Boniface, throwing up his chin with an incredulous expression,—“it’s honor for the like o’ him. He’s joost a laddie born and brought up i’ the toon. I kenn’d him weel.” And so enter breakfast for two. I found my companion a well-bred man; rather surprised, however, if not vexed, to discover that I knew he was of Inverness. He had been in the civil services of the East India Company for some years (hence his paleness,) and had returned to Scotland for his health. He was not the least aware that he was known, apparently and he certainly had not the slightest trace of his Scotch birth. The landlord told me afterward that his parents were poor, and he had raised himself by his own cleverness alone, and yet it was “honor for the like o’ him” to sit at table with a common stranger! The world is really very much the same all over.

In the three days I passed at Inverness, I made the acquaintance of several of the warm-hearted Highland chiefs, and found great difficulty in refusing to go home with them. One of the “Lords of the Isles” was among the number—a handsome, high-spirited youth, who would have been the chivalrous Lord Ronald of a century ago, but was now only the best shot, the best rider, the most elegant man, and the most “capital fellow” in the west of Scotland. He had lost every thing but his “Isle” in his London campaigns, and was beginning to look out for a wife to mend his fortune and his morals. There was a peculiar style about all these young men, something very like the manner of our high bred Virginians—a free, gallant, self-possessed bearing, fiery and prompt, yet full of courtesy. I was pleased with them altogether.

I had formed an agreeable acquaintance, on my passage from London to Edinburgh in the steamer, with a gentleman bound to the Highlands for the shooting season. He was engaged to pay a visit to Lord Lumley, with whom I had myself promised to pass a week, and we parted at Edinboro’ in the hope of meeting at Kinrara. On my return from Dalhousie, a fortnight after, we met by chance at the hotel in Edinboro’, he having arrived the same day, and having taken a passage like myself for Aberdeen. We made another agreeable passage together, and he left me at the gate of Gordon castle, proceeding north on another visit. I was sitting in the coffee room at Inverness, pondering how I should reach Kinrara, when, enter again my friend, to my great surprise, who informed me that Lord Lumley had returned to England. Disappointed alike in our visit, we took a passage together once more in the steamer from Inverness to Fort William for the following morning. It was a singular train of coincidences, but I was indebted to it for one of the most agreeable chance acquaintances I have yet made.

LETTER XI.

CALEDONIAN CANAL—DOGS—ENGLISH EXCLUSIVENESS—ENGLISH INSENSIBILITY OF FINE SCENERY—FLORA MACDONALD AND THE PRETENDER—HIGHLAND TRAVELLING.

We embarked early in the morning in the steamer which goes across Scotland from sea to sea, by the half-natural, half-artificial passage of the Caledonian canal. One long glen, as the reader knows, extends quite through this mountainous country, and in its bosom lies a chain of the loveliest lakes, whose extremities so nearly meet, that it seems as if a blow of a spade should have run them together. Their different elevations, however, made it an expensive work in the locks, and the canal altogether cost ten times the original calculation.

I went on board with my London friend, who, from our meeting so frequently, had now become my constant companion. The boat was crowded, yet more with dogs than people; for every man, I think, had his brace of terriers or his pointers, and every lady her hound or poodle, and they were chained to every leg of a sofa, chair, portmanteau, and fixture in the vessel. It was like a floating kennel, and every passenger was fully occupied in keeping the peace between his own dog and his neighbor’s. The same thing would have been a much greater annoyance in any other country; but in Scotland the dogs are all of beautiful and thorough-bred races, and it is a pleasure to see them. Half as many French pugs would have been insufferable.

We opened into Loch Ness immediately, and the scenery was superb. The waters were like a mirror; and the hills draped in mist, and rising one or two thousand feet directly from the shore, and nothing to break the wildness of the crags but the ruins of the constantly occurring castles, perched like eyries upon their summits. You might have had the same natural scenery in America, but the ruins and the thousand associations would have been wanting; and it is this, much more than the mere beauty of hill and lake, which makes the pleasure of travel. We ran close in to a green cleft in the mountains on the southern shore, in which stands one of the few old castles, still inhabited by the chief of his clan—that of Fraser of Lovat, so well known in Scottish story. Our object was to visit the Fall of Foyers, in sight of which it stands, and the boat came off to the point, and gave us an hour for the excursion. It was a pretty stroll up through the woods, and we found a cascade very like the Turtmann in Switzerland, but with no remarkable feature which would make it interesting in description.

I was amused after breakfast with what has always struck me on board English steamers—the gradual division of the company into parties of congenial rank or consequence. Not for conversation—for fellow travellers of a day seldom become acquainted—but, as if it was a process of crystallization, the well-bred and the half-bred, and the vulgar, each separating to his natural neighbor, apparently from a mere fitness of propinquity. This takes place sometimes, but rarely and in a much less degree, on board an American steamer. There are, of course, in England, as with us, those who are presuming and impertinent, but an instance of it has seldom fallen under my observation. The English seem to have an instinct of each other’s position in life. A gentleman enters a crowd, looks about him, makes up his mind at once from whom an advance of civility would be agreeable or the contrary, gets near the best set without seeming to notice them, and if any chance accident brings on conversation with his neighbor, you may be certain he is sure of his man.

We had about a hundred persons on board, (Miss Inverarity, the singer, among others,) and I could see no one who seemed to notice or enjoy the lovely scenery we were passing through. I made the remark to my companion, who was an old stager in London fashion, fifty, but still a beau, and he was compelled to allow it, though piqued for the taste of his countrymen. A baronet with his wife and sister sat in the corner opposite us, and neither saw a feature of the scenery except by an accidental glance in changing her position. Yet it was more beautiful than most things I have seen that are celebrated, and the ladies, as my friend said, looked like “nice persons.”

I had taken up a book while we were passing the locks at the junction of Loch Ness and Loch Oich, and was reading aloud to my friend the interesting description of Flora Macdonald’s heroic devotion to Prince Charles Edward. A very lady-like girl, who sat next me, turned around as I laid down the book, and informed me, with a look of pleased pride, that the heroine was her grandmother. She was returning from the first visit she had ever made to the Isle (I think of Skye,) of which the Macdonalds were the hereditary lords, and in which the fugitive prince was concealed. Her brother, an officer, just returned from India, had accompanied her in her pilgrimage, and as he sat on the other side of his sister he joined in the conversation, and entered into the details of Flora’s history with great enthusiasm. The book belonged to the boat, and my friend had brought it from below, and the coincidence was certainly singular. The present chief of the Macdonalds was on board, accompanying his relatives back to their home in Sussex; and on arriving at Fort William, where the boat stopped for the night, the young lady invited us to take tea with her at the inn; and for so improvised an acquaintance, I have rarely made three friends more to my taste.

We had decided to leave the steamer at Fort William, and cross through the heart of Scotland to Loch Lomond. My companion was very fond of London hours, and slept late, knowing that the cart—the only conveyance to be had in that country—would wait our time. I was lounging about the inn, and amusing myself with listening to the Gaelic spoken by everybody who belonged to the place, when the pleasant family with whom we had passed the evening, drove out of the yard, (having brought their horses down in the boat,) intending to proceed by land to Glasgow. We renewed our adieus, on my part with the sincerest regret, and I strolled down the road and watched them till they were out of sight, feeling that (selfish world as it is,) there are some things that look at least like impulse and kindness—so like, that I can make out of them a very passable happiness.

We mounted our cart at eleven o’clock, and with a bright sun, a clear, vital air, a handsome and good-humored callant for a driver, and the most renowned of Scottish scenery before us, the day looked very auspicious. I could not help smiling at the appearance of my fashionable friend sitting, with his well-poised hat and nicely-adjusted curls, upon the springless cross-board of a most undisguised and unscrupulous market-cart, yet in the highest good humor with himself and the world. The boy sat on the shafts, and talked Gaelic to his horse; the mountains and the lake, spread out before us, looked as if human eye had never profaned their solitary beauty, and I enjoyed it all the more, perhaps, that our conversation was of London and its delights; and the racy scandal of the distinguished people of that great Babel amused me in the midst of that which is most unlike it—pure and lovely nature. Everything is seen so much better by contrast!

We crossed the head of Loch Linnhe, and kept down its eastern bank, skirting the water by a winding road directly under the wall of the mountains. We were to dine at Ballyhulish, and just before reaching it we passed the opening of a glen on the opposite side of the lake, in which lay, in a green paradise shut in by the loftiest rocks, one of the most enviable habitations I have ever seen. I found on inquiry that it was the house of a Highland chief, to whom Lord Dalhousie had kindly given me a letter, but my lameness and the presence of my companion induced me to abandon the visit; and, hailing a fishing-boat, I dispatched my letters, which were sealed, across the loch, and we kept on to the inn. We dined here; and I just mention, for the information of scenery-hunters, that the mountain opposite Ballyhulish sweeps down to the lake with a curve which is even more exquisitely graceful than that of Vesuvius in its far-famed descent to Portici. That same inn of Ballyhulish, by the way, stands in the midst of a scene, altogether, that does not pass easily from the memory—a lonely and serene spot that would recur to one in a moment of violent love or hate, when the heart shrinks from the intercourse and observation of men.

We found the travellers’ book, at the inn, full of records of admiration, expressed in all degrees of doggerel. People on the road write very bad poetry. I found the names of one or two Americans, whom I knew, and it was a pleasure to feel that my enjoyment would be sympathized in. Our host had been a nobleman’s travelling valet, and he amused us with his descriptions of our friends, every one of whom he perfectly remembered. He had learned to use his eyes, at least, and had made very shrewd guesses at the condition and tempers of his visiters. His life, in that lonely inn, must be in sufficient contrast with his former vocation.

We had jolted sixteen miles behind our Highland horse, but he came out fresh for the remaining twenty of our day’s journey, and with cushions of dried and fragrant fern, gathered and put in by our considerate landlord, we crossed the ferry and turned eastward into the far-famed and much boasted valley of Glencoe. The description of it must lie over till my next letter.

LETTER XII.

INVARENDEN—TARBOT—COCKNEY TOURISTS—LOCH LOMOND—INVERSNADE—ROB ROY’S CAVE—DISCOMFITURE—THE BIRTHPLACE OF HELEN M’GREGOR.

We passed the head of the valley near Tyndrum, where M’Dougal of Lorn defeated the Bruce, and were half way up the wild pass that makes its southern outlet, when our Highland driver, with a shout of delight, pointed out to us a red deer, standing on the very summit of the highest mountain above us. It was an incredible distance to see any living thing, but he stood clear against the sky, in a relief as strong as if he had been suspended in the air, and with his head up, and his chest toward us, seemed the true monarch of the wild.

At Invarenden, Donald M’Phee begged for the discharge of himself and his horse and cart from our service. He had come with us eighty miles, and was afraid to venture farther on his travels, having never before been twenty miles from the Highland village where he lived. It was amusing to see the curiosity with which he looked about him, and the caution with which he suffered the hostler at the inn to take the black mare out of his sight. The responsibility of the horse and cart weighed heavily on his mind, and he expressed his hope to “get her back safe,” with an apprehensive resolution that would have become a knight-errant guiding himself for his most perilous encounter. Poor Donald! how little he knew how wide is the world, and how very like one part of it is to another!

Our host of Invarenden supplied us with another cart to take us down to Tarbot, and having dined with a waterfall-looking inn at each of our two opposite windows, (the inn stands in a valley between two mountains,) we were committed to the care of his eldest boy, and jolted off for the head of Loch Lomond.

I have never happened to see a traveller who had seen Loch Lomond in perfectly good weather. My companion had been there every summer for several years, and believed it always rained under Ben Lomond. As we came in sight of the lake, however, the water looked like one sheet of gold leaf, trembling, as if by the motion of fish below, but unruffled by wind; and if paradise were made so fair, and had such waters in its midst, I could better conceive than before, the unhappiness of Adam when driven forth. The sun was just setting, and the road descended immediately to the shore, and kept close under precipitous rocks, and slopes of alternate cultivation and heather, to the place of our destination. And a lovely place it is! Send me to Tarbot when I would retreat from the world. It is an inn buried in a grove at the foot of the hills, and set in a bend of the lake shore, like a diamond upon an “orbed brow;” and the light in its kitchen, as we approached in the twilight, was as interesting as a ray of the “first water” from the same. We had now reached the route of the cockney tourists, and while we perceived it agreeably in the excellence of the hotel, we perceived it disagreeably in the price of the wines, and the presence of what my friend called “unmitigated vulgarisms” in the coffee room. That is the worst of England. The people are vulgar, but not vulgar enough. One dances with the lazzaroni at Naples, when he would scarce think of handing the newspaper to the “person” on a tour at Tarbot. Condescension is the only agreeable virtue, I have made up my mind.

Well—it was moonlight. The wind was south and affectionate, and the road in front of the hotel “fleck’d with silver,” and my friend’s wife, and the corresponding object of interest to myself, being on the other side of Ben Lomond and the Tweed, we had nothing for it after supper but to walk up and down with one another, and talk of the past. In the course of our ramble, we walked through an open gate, and ascending a gravel walk, found a beautiful cottage, built between two mountain streams, and ornamented with every device of taste and contrivance. The mild pure torrents were led over falls, and brought to the thresholds of bowers; and seats, and bridges, and winding paths, were distributed up the steep channels, in a way that might make it a haunt for Titania. It is the property, we found afterward, of a Scotch gentleman, and a great summer retreat of the celebrated Jeffrey, his friend. It was one more place to which my heart clung in parting.

Loch Lomond sat still for its picture in the morning, and after an early breakfast, we took a row-boat, with a couple of Highlanders, for Inversnade, and pulled across the lake with a kind of drowsy delightfulness in the scene and air which I have never before found out of Italy. We overshot our destination a little to look into Rob Roy’s Cave, a dark den in the face of the rock, which has the look of his vocation; and then pulling back along the shore, we were landed, in the spray of a waterfall, at a cottage occupied by the boatmen of this Highland ferry. From this point across to Loch Katrine, is some five miles, and the scene of Scott’s novel of Rob Roy. It has been “done” so often by tourists, that I leave all particular description of the localities and scenery to the well-hammered remembrance of readers of magazines, and confine myself to my own private adventures.

The distance between the lakes is usually performed by ladies on donkeys, and by gentlemen on foot, but being myself rather tender-toed with the gout, my companion started off alone, and I lay down on the grass at Inversnade to wait the return of the long-eared troop, who were gone across with an earlier party. The waterfall and the cottage just above the edge of the lake, a sharp hill behind, closely wooded with birch and fir, and, on a greensward platform in the rear of the house, two Highland lasses and a laddie, treading down a stack of new hay, were not bad circumstances in which to be left alone with the witcheries of the great enchanter.

I must narrate here an adventure in which my own part was rather a discomfiture, but which will show somewhat the manners of the people. My companion had been gone half an hour, and I was lying at the foot of a tree, listening to the waterfall and looking off on the lake, and watching, by fits, the lad and lasses I have spoken of, who were building a haystack between them, and chattering away most unceasingly in Gaelic. The eldest of the girls was a tall, ill-favored damsel, merry as an Oread, but as ugly as Donald Bean; and, after a while, I began to suspect, by the looks of the boy below, that I had furnished her with a new theme. She addressed some remark to me presently, and a skirmish of banter ensued, which ended in a challenge to me to climb upon the stack. It was about ten feet high, and shelving outward from the bottom, and my Armida had drawn up the ladder. The stack was built, however, under a high tree, and I was soon up the trunk, and, swinging off from a long branch, dropped into the middle of the stack. In the same instant I was raised in a grasp to which I could offer no resistance, and, with a fling to which I should have believed the strength of few men equal, thrown clear of the stack to the ground. I alighted on my back, with a fall of, perhaps, twelve feet, and felt seriously hurt. The next moment, however, my gentle friend had me in her arms (I am six feet high in my stockings) and I was carried into the cottage, and laid on a flock bed, before I could well decide whether my back was broken or no. Whiskey was applied externally and internally, and the old crone, who was the only inhabitant of the hovel, commenced a lecture in Gaelic, as I stood once more sound upon my legs, which seemed to take effect upon the penitent, though her victim was no wiser for it. I took the opportunity to look at the frame which had proved itself of such vigorous power; but, except arms of extraordinary length, she was like any other equally ugly, middle-sized woman. In the remaining half hour, before the donkeys arrived, we became the best of friends, and she set me off for Loch Katrine, with a caution to the ass-driver to take care of me, which that sandy-haired Highlander took as an excellent joke. And no wonder!

The long mountain glen between these two lakes was the home of Rob Roy, and the Highlanders point out various localities, all commemorated in Scott’s incomparable story. The house where Helen M’Gregor was born lies a stone’s throw off the road to the left, and Rob Roy’s gun is shown by an old woman who lives near by. He must have been rich in arms by the same token; for, beside the well-authenticated one at Abbotsford, I have seen some dozen guns, and twice as many daggers and shot-pouches, which lay claim to the same honor. I paid my shilling to the old woman not the less. She owed it to the pleasure I had received from Sir Walter’s novel.

The view of Loch Lomond back from the highest point of the pass is incomparably fine; at least, when I saw it; for sunshine and temperature, and the effect of the light vapors on the hills, were at their loveliest and most favorable. It looks more like the haunt of a robber and his caterans, probably, in its more common garb of Scotch mist; but, to my eye, it was a scene of the most Arcadian peace and serenity. I dawdled along the five miles upon my donkey, with something of an ache in my back, but a very healthful and sunny freedom from pain and impatience at my heart. And so did not Baillie Nicol Jarvey make the same memorable journey.

LETTER XIII.

HIGHLAND HUT, ITS FURNITURE AND INMATES—HIGHLAND AMUSEMENT AND DINNER—“ROB ROY,” AND SCENERY OF THE “LADY OF THE LAKE.”

The cottage-inn at the head of Loch Katrine, was tenanted by a woman who might have been a horse-guardsman in petticoats, and who kept her smiles for other cattle than the Sassenach. We bought her whiskey and milk, praised her butter, and were civil to the little Highlandman at her breast; but neither mother nor child were to be mollified. The rocks were bare around, we were too tired for a pull in the boat, and three mortal hours lay between us and the nearest event in our history. I first penetrated, in the absence of our Hecate, to the inner room of the shieling. On the wall hung a broadsword, two guns, a trophy or two of deers’ horns, and a Sunday suit of plaid, philibeg and short red coat, surmounted by a gallant bonnet and feather. Four cribs, like the berths in a ship, occupied the farther side of the chamber, each large enough to contain two persons; a snow-white table stood between the windows; a sixpenny glass, with an eagle’s feather stuck in the frame, hung at such a height that, “though tall of my hands,” I could just see my nose; and just under the ceiling on the left was a broad and capacious shelf, on which reposed apparently the old clothes of a century—a sort of place where the gude-wife would have hidden Prince Charlie, or might rummage for her grandmother’s baby-linen.

The heavy steps of the dame came over the threshold, and I began to doubt, from the look in her eyes, whether I should get a blow of her hairy arm or a “persuader” from the butt of a gun for my intrusion. “What are ye wantin’ here?” she speered at me, with a Helen M’Gregor-to-Baillie-Nicol-Jarvie-sort of an expression.

“I was looking for a potato to roast, my good woman.”

“Is that a’? Ye’ll find it ayont, then!” and pointing to a bag in the corner, she stood while I subtracted the largest, and then followed me to the general kitchen and receiving-room, where I buried my improvista dinner in the remains of the peat fire, and congratulated myself on my ready apology.

What to do while the potato was roasting! My English friend had already cleaned his gun for amusement, and I had looked on. We had stoned the pony till he had got beyond us in the morass, (small thanks to us, if the dame knew it.) We had tried to make a chicken swim ashore from the boat, we had fired away all my friend’s percussion caps, and there was nothing for it but to converse à rigueur. We lay on our backs till the dame brought us the hot potato on a shovel, with oat-cake and butter, and, with this Highland dinner, the last hour came decently to its death.

An Englishman, with his wife and lady’s maid, came over the hills with a boat’s crew; and a lassie, who was not very pretty, but who lived on the lake and had found the means to get “Captain Rob” and his men pretty well under her thumb. We were all embarked, the lassie in the stern-sheets with the captain; and ourselves, though we “paid the Scot,” of no more consideration than our portmanteaus. I was amused, for it was the first instance I had seen in any country (my own not excepted) of thorough emancipation from the distinction of superiors. Luckily the girl was bent on showing the captain to advantage, and by ingenious prompting and catechism she induced him to do what probably was his custom when he could not better amuse himself—point out the localities as the boat sped on, and quote the Lady of the Lake with an accent which made it a piece of good fortune to have “crammed” the poem before hand.

The shores of the lake are flat and uninteresting at the head, but, toward the scene of Scott’s romance, they rise into bold precipices, and gradually become worthy of their celebrity. The Trosachs are a cluster of small, green mountains, strewn, or rather piled, with shrubs and mossy verdure, and from a distance you would think only a bird, or Ranald of the Mist, could penetrate their labyrinthine recesses. Captain Rob showed us successively the Braes of Balquidder, Rob Roy’s birth and burial place, Benledi, and the crag from which hung, by the well woven skirts of braidcloth, the worthy baillie of Glasgow; and, beneath a precipice of remarkable wildness, the half intoxicated steersman raised his arm, and began to repeat, in the most unmitigated gutterals:—

“High o’er the south huge Benvenue

Down to the lake his masses threw,

Crags, knowls, and mounds confusedly hurl’d

The fragments of an earlier wurruld!” etc.

I have underlined it according to the captain’s judicious emphasis, and in the last word have endeavored to spell after his remarkable pronunciation. Probably to a Frenchman, however, it would have seemed all very fine—for Captain Rob (I must do him justice, though he broke the strap of my portmanteau) was as good-looking a ruffian as you would sketch on a summer’s tour.

Some of the loveliest water I have ever seen in my life (and I am rather an amateur of that element—to look at,) lies deep down at the bases of these divine Trosachs. The usual approaches from lake to mountain (beach or sloping shore,) are here dispensed with; and, straight up from the deep water, rise the green precipices and bold and ragged rocks, over-shadowing the glassy mirror below with teints like a cool corner in a landscape of Ruysdael’s. It is something—(indeed on a second thought, exceedingly) like—Lake George; only that the islands in this extremity of Loch Katrine lie closer together, and permit the sun no entrance except by a ray almost perpendicular. A painter will easily understand the effect of this—the loss of all that makes a surface to the water, and the consequent far depth to the eye, as if the boat in which you shot over it brought with it its own water and sent its ripple through the transparent air. I write currente calamo, and have no time to clear up my meaning, but it will be evident to all lovers of nature.

Captain Rob put up his helm for a little fairy green island, lying like a lapfull of green moss on the water, and, rounding a point, we ran suddenly into a cove sheltered by a tree, and in a moment the boat grated on the pebbles of a natural beach perhaps ten feet in length. A flight of winding steps, made roughly of roots and stones, ascended from the water’s edge.

“Gentlemen and ladies!” said the captain, with a hiccup, “this is Ellen’s Isle. This is the gnarled oak,” (catching at a branch of the tree as the boat swung astern,) “and —— you’ll please to go up them steps, and I’ll tell ye the rest in Ellen’s bower.”

The Highland lassie sprang on shore, and we followed up the steep ascent, arriving breathless at last at the door of a fanciful bower, built by Lord Willoughby D’Eresby, the owner of the island, exactly after the description in the Lady of the Lake. The chairs were made of crooked branches of trees and covered with deer-skins, the tables were laden with armor and every variety of weapon, and the rough beams of the building were hung with antlers and other spoils of the chase.

“Here’s where she lived!” said the captain, with the gravity of a cicerone at the Forum, “and noo, if ye’ll come out, I’ll show you the echo!”

We followed to the highest point of the island, and the Highlandman gave a scream that showed considerable practice, but I thought he would have burst his throat in the effort. The awful echo went round, “as mentioned in the bill of performance,” every separate mountain screaming back the discord till you would have thought the Trosachs a crew of mocking giants. It was a wonderful echo, but, like most wonders, I could have been content to have had less for my money.

There was a “small silver beach” on the mainland opposite, and above it a high mass of mountain.

“There,” said the captain, “gentlemen and ladies, is where Fitz-James blow’d his bugle, and waited for the ‘light shallop’ of Ellen Douglas; and here, where you landed and came up them steps, is where she brought him to the bower, and the very tree’s still there—as you see’d me tak’ hold of it—and over the hill, yonder, is where the gallant gray giv’ out, and breathed his last, and (will you turn round, if you please, them that likes) yonder’s where Fitz-James met Red Murdoch that killed Blanche of Devon, and right across this water swum young Greme that disdained the regular boat, and I s’pose on that lower step set the old Harper and Ellen many a time a-watching for Douglas—and now, if you’d like to hear the echo once more—”

“Heaven forbid!” was the universal cry; and, in fear of our ears, we put the bower between us and Captain Rob’s lungs, and followed the Highland girl back to the boat.

From Ellen’s Isle to the head of the small creek, so beautifully described in the Lady of the Lake, the scenery has the same air of lavish and graceful vegetation, and the same features of mingled boldness and beauty. It is a spot altogether that one is sure to live much in with memory. I see it as clearly now as then.

The whiskey had circulated pretty freely among the crew, and all were more or less intoxicated. Captain Rob’s first feat on his legs was to drop my friend’s gun case and break it to pieces, for which he instantly got a cuff between the eyes from the boxing dandy, that would have done the business for a softer head. The Scot was a powerful fellow, and I anticipated a row; but the tremendous power of the blow and the skill with which it was planted, quite subdued him. He rose from the grass as white as a sheet, but quietly shouldered the portmanteau with which he had fallen, and trudged on with sobered steps to the inn.

We took a post-chaise immediately for Callender, and it was not till we were five miles from the foot of the lake that I lost my apprehensions of an apparition of the Highlander from the darkening woods. We arrived at Callender at nine, and the next morning at sunrise were on our way to breakfast at Stirling.

LETTER XIV.

SCOTTISH STAGES—THOROUGH-BRED SETTER—SCENERY—FEMALE PEASANTRY—MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS, STIRLING CASTLE.

The lakes of Scotland are without the limits of stage-coach and post-horse civilization, and to arrive at these pleasant conveniences is to be consoled for the corresponding change in the character of the scenery. From Callander there is a coach to Stirling, and it was on the top of the “Highlander,” (a brilliant red coach, with a picture of Rob Roy on the panels,) that, with my friend and his dog, I was on the road, bright and early, for the banks of the Teith. I have scarce done justice, by the way, to my last mentioned companion, (a superb, thorough-bred setter, who answered to the derogatory appellation of Flirt,) for he had accompanied me in most of my wanderings for a couple of months, and his society had been preferred to that of many a reasoning animal on the road, in the frequent dearth of amusement. Flirt’s pedigree had been taken on trust by my friend, the dog-fancier, of whom he was bought, only knowing that he came of a famous race, belonging to a gentleman living somewhere between Stirling and Callander; and to determine his birthplace and get another of the same breed, was a greater object with his master than to see all the lakes and mountains of Caledonia. Poor Flirt was elevated to the highest seat on the coach, little aware that his reputation for birth and breeding depended on his recognising the scenes of his puppyhood—for if his former master had told truly, these were the fields where his young ideas had been taught a dog’s share in shooting, and his unconscious tail and ears were now under watchful surveillance for a betrayal of his presumed reminiscences.

The coach rolled on over the dew-damp road, crossing continually those bright and sparkling rivulets, which gladden the favored neighborhood of mountains; and the fields and farm houses took gradually the look of thrift and care, which indicates an approach to a thickly settled country. The castle of Doune, a lovely hunting seat of the Queen of Scots, appeared in the distance, with its gray towers half-buried in trees, when Flirt began to look before and behind, and take less notice of the shabby gentleman on his left, who, from sharing with him a volant breakfast of bread and bacon, had hitherto received the most of his attention. We kept on at a pretty pace, and Flirt’s tail shifted sides once or twice with a very decided whisk, and his intelligent head gradually grew more erect upon his neck of white-and-tan. It was evident he had travelled the road before. Still on, and as the pellucid Teith began to reflect in her eddying mirror the towers of Castle Doune—a scene worthy of its tender and chivalrous associations—a suppressed whine and a fixed look over the fields to the right, satisfied us that the soul of the setter was stirring up with the recognition of the past. The coach was stopped and Flirt loosed from his chain, and, with a promise to join me at Stirling at dinner, my friend “hied away” the delighted dog over the hedge, and followed himself on foot, to visit, by canine guidance, the birthplace of this accomplished family. It was quite beautiful to see the fine creature beat the field over and over in his impatience, returning to his slower-footed master, as if to hurry him onward, and leaping about him with an extravagance eloquent of such unusual joy. I lost sight of them by a turning in the road, and reverted for consolation to that loveliest river, on whose bank I could have lain (had I breakfasted) and dreamed till the sunset of the unfortunate queen, for whose soft eyes and loving heart it perhaps flowed no more brightly in the days of Rizzio, than now for mine and those of the early marketers to Stirling.

The road was thronged with carts, and peasants in their best attire. The gentleman who had provided against the enemy with a brown paper of bread and bacon, informed me that it was market day. A very great proportion of the country people were women and girls, walking all of them barefoot, but with shoes in their hands, and gowns and bonnets that would have eclipsed in finery the bevy of noble ladies at Gordon Castle. Leghorn straw-hats and dresses of silk, with ribands of any quantity and brilliancy, were the commonest articles. Feet excepted, however, (for they had no triflers of pedestals, and stumped along the road with a sovereign independence of pools and pebbles) they were a wholesome-looking and rather pretty class of females; and, with the exception of here and there a prim lassie who dropped her dress over her feet while the coach passed, and hid her shoes under her handkerchief, they seemed perfectly satisfied with their own mode of conveyance, and gave us a smile in passing, which said very distinctly, “You’ll be there before us, but it’s only seven miles, and we’ll foot it in time.” How various are the joys of life! I went on with the coach, wondering whether I ever could be reduced to find pleasure in walking ten miles barefoot to a fair—and back again!

I thought again of Mary, as the turrets of the proud castle where she was crowned became more distinct in the approach—but it is difficult in entering a crowded town, with a real breakfast in prospect and live Scotchmen about me, to remember with any continuous enthusiasm even the most brilliant events in history.

“Can history cut my hay or get my corn in?

Or can philosophy vend it in the market?”

says somebody in the play, and with a similar thought I looked up at the lofty towers of the home of Scotland’s kings, as the “Highlander” bowled round its rocky base to the inn. The landlord appeared with his white apron, “boots” with his ladder, the coachman and guards with their hints to your memory; and, having ordered breakfast of the first, descended the “convenience” of the second, and received a tip of the hat for a shilling to the remaining two, I was at liberty to walk up stairs and while away a melancholy half hour in humming such charitable stanzas as would come uncalled to my aid.

“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.