"tour" as a "ramble or roving journey." To | language that eminent patriot used,-in the this Webster adds "circuit," "excursion," speech of Agricola there is an allusion to "trip," and tells us that a tourist is one who fatiguing marches across fens, mountains, and makes a tour. This seems to be coming rivers, Cum vos paludes montesve et flumina something near the point, as indicating loco- fatigarent. It is a pity that we have not motion for the purposes of enjoyment, not of something more palpable and critical than business or duty. And as among by far the this, from some Roman pen, for the Romans greater portion of mankind no such enjoy- knew good scenery. They are said to have ment exists, or is capable of being conceived, even walked about for pleasure. In Strabo and even among ourselves it is a compara- mention is made how two Roman legionaries, tively recently discovered source of enjoy- found in Spain at a distance from their post, ment, the various phenomena indicating its who could give no better account of themorigin and progress onwards to its present selves than that they walked for enjoyment, vast influence as an institution of our country were deemed to be two lunatics who had and age, seem sufficiently important for a escaped from bondage, and were an object of little special attention. considerable anxiety to the good people who desired to see them safe back to their camp.* It would require very positive and distinct evidence, however, to prove that the Romans ever went so far from the indolent luxuriousness, in which alone they found true pleasure, as to seek it in the active and sometimes afflictive pursuits of the modern tourist. If Cicero or Atticus walked together in the shady avenues of Tusculum, while they discussed the difference between goodness and perfection, or Virgil enjoyed a saunter in his Mantuan farm, we may be assured that no citizen of the empire mounted his impedimenta on his shoulders to ramble about in Britain, even among such scenery within the walls as he could safely approach. Their sense of the noble in scenery advanced so far as to accept of the savage and terrible as worthy of enjoyment. This we see even in the selection of their villas; but they enjoyed it all in indolent eontemplation, not in active vagabondage.

We may trace its beginnings in something more subtle than by putting the finger on the name of the first man who actually made a journey for pleasure. Indications of the enjoyment of scenery and variety among those who moved about on duty or business are the germs of the tourist's passion. Our history gets far on before we have much of this. The first strangers from the civilized world who are recorded as visiting us-Julius Agricola and his followers-came on stern business. Tacitus, in his clear, rapid narrative of the transaction, sticks closely to that business, and permits not his pen to wander iuto devious paths. One would like to know what they thought of the scenery. There is a well-known tradition that as they marched northwards over the spur of the Ochils, and came to that nick called the Wicks of Beglie, and saw beneath them the broad strath of Tay, with its gleaming river and background of mountains, they exclaimed, "Behold the Tiber! behold the field of Mars!"-a comparison which Scott and many of his fellowcountrymen reprobate as a gross injustice to the northern river. It is necessary, however, to throw this story away as a modern invention. Indeed, from the invasion of Agricola to the present time, or even to the time of the first publishing of the exclamation, is far too long for tradition to live.

Just twice are there remarks in Tacitus which in any way connect themselves with the character of the scenery. When, as he describes it, the army marched northward, and the fleet sailed in sight of it, the land troops, when they recounted their adventures to their colleagues of the feet, told of the dense forests they had penetrated, and the rough mountains they had scrambled over. In the speech of Agricola, so accurately reported, and, by the way, Tacitus is quite impartial, and makes room for the spirited speech of Galgacus, the leader of the Caledonians, although it would have been a far more important service had he just told us what

The next set of notable visitors were the Irish monks, who came over to re-convert us after the inroads of strangers from Scandinavia had swept Christianity as well as Roman civilisation out of the land. We have ample narratives of the ways and pursuits of these monks. We know that they went about a good deal. St. Columba, for instance, paid a memorable visit to Brude the King of the Picts at his lodge on the banks of the Ness; and St. Cormac on his way from Ireland to Iona to visit his old friends there, went so far astray among the Hebrides, that some people

* "

· Τοὺς δὲ Ουέττωνας, ὅτε πρῶτον εἰς τὸ τῶν Ῥωμαίων παρήλθον στρατόπεδον, ἰδόντας τῶν ταξιαρχῶν τινας, ἀνακάμπτοντας ἐν ταῖς ὁδοῖς περιπάτου χάριν, μανίαν ὑπολαβόν τες, ἡγεῖσθαι τὴν ὁδὸν αὐτοῖς ἐπὶ τὰς σκηνὰς ὡς δέον ἢ μένειν καθ' ἡσυχίαν ιδρυθέντας, ἢ μάχεσθαι.”

"Et vettones, quo tempore primum in Romanorum venerunt castra, cum quosdam centuriones viderent, deambulandi causa viam hac illac flectere, opinatos insanire homines, duces se eis ad tabernaquiete sedendum, aut pugnandum esse."-GEOG. L cula præbuisse: putabant enim aut in tabernaculo in. cap. iv.

he to "Beautiful Buchanan, besieged with parted to this man's narrative a descriptive bogs and baracadoed with birch trees; the vigour and richness totally unintended on Highlander's landscape and the Lowlander's his part. Leaving Crawfordjohn, he says: prospect; whose boggy swamps incommode 'From this place I went over mighty hills, the traveller." The following fragmentary sometimes being amongst the clouds and passages will perhaps suffice as specimens of sometimes amongst bogs, I think without the trooper's manner:seeing a house, or anybody but a poor shepherd's boy, to Elvinfoot, a poor sorry place of two or three houses; and here is a rapid river that tumbles over a rocky bottom, though it is not deep. . . . I should not have travelled this day, being Sunday, but I was willing to get out of this country as soon as I could; oh, the curse that attended it! I was far

"Let us relinquish the suburbs of Leven, to trace the flourishing skirts of Calvin, whose smiling streams invite the angler to examine them; for here one would think the stones were steep'd in the oil of Oespres, to invite the fish to come ashore; where you may observe every bubling stream reflect a smile on the amorous banks, covered with green, and enamell'd

with flowers. Here also the sylvans upon shady bushes bathe themselves in silver streams; and where trouts, to sport and divert the angler, will leap on shore, though with the loss of their lives."

Then came the "turrets of sooty Glorret" or Glorat, near to which place

past Elvinfoot, and the road, or rather steep tracks-for since I left Douglass I hardly saw any other-were so obscure, I could hardly find a way, and the rocks were so thick and close that I had often much ado to get myself and horse between them. Now I were on a vast precipice of a high rock, with the river. roaring under me, and anon I was in a bog!' Poor man, this was far from the worst of it. Mist came on, good, sound Scotch mist. He had the folly to enter on that ground without a pocket-compass,-a folly no tourist should ever perpetrate.

"Glides the glittering Kaldar; a large and spacious rapid river, accommodated both with trout and salmon: but the access lies too open, more especially amongst her pleasant gliding streams, where the angler, if lord of his exercise, may expect incredible entertainments: whose foundations are laid in gravelly sand, and interchangably mixed with shining stones that look not unlike to golden granulaes: but were they such, I should fancy Tagus but a toy to it. Because to imprint in the angler's memory those remark-presently, and it grew so suddenly dark that able characters of shining rocks, glittering sands, and falls of water, which 'tis morally impossible

he should ever forget.

แ

"Not far from this dingy Castle of Glorret; stands delectable Kilsieth; in whose martial fields Marquess Montross defeated his countrymen. North-west from thence we must top those burdened mountains of Compsy, whose weeping rocks moisten the air, representing the spouts; and are a lively emblem of the cataracts of Nile. From whence we descend to the Kirk of Compsy; near to which kirk runs the metnorable Auderwick, a rapid river of strong and stiff streams; whose fertil banks refresh the borderer, and whose fords, if well examined, are arguments sufficient to convince the angler of trout; as are her deeps, when consuited, the noble race

and treasure of salmon; or remonstrate his ignorance in the art of angling."

Fifty years later a countryman of Franck's, much less genial and eloquent, had the misfortune to visit us. It was in the year 1704 that an Englishman, name unknown, penetrated a little way into Scotland, though, had he consulted his ease and safety, he had better have stayed in Lombard Street. There is an old Latin saying, that indignation makes one poetical; and the indignant expression of his fears and sufferings has actually im

*North of England and Scotland in 1704. Printed in 1818 from a MS. in possession of Mr. Johnson.

A dark cloud, he tells us, came between him and the sun, "and out of this cloud fell such a shower of rain, that I was wet through

I could scarcely see my hands. I got down and groped with my hands for a path, but quickly found the sheep-tracks had misled me. I began to sink in half way up the leg, and my horse more, and now and then I tumbled over a bank, but what sort of one I could not tell; and now I came so near the river that I heard it roar dismally, and did not know but every step I went I might tumble down a steep cliff, or fall into the river Annan." After waiting for some time he fell to "holloring," but in vain, and he feared going up the hill, not knowing what company he might find there. Night came on him, and he tried to sleep in his saddle and horse-cloth, but he had to shift them over and over, as whenever he lay down he found himself sinking in the bog. "As the day," he continues, began to dawn, I hoped it fair, but feared a fog. Sometimes I thought I saw a bush at discerned that if I had gone lower down the a distance, and sometimes a house; but plainly hill, I had gone into a deep bog by the river

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side.

again, and a mile the other, but could see I went a mile one way, and then back neither house or road." He came at last to a village. Belated travellers are proverbially unscrupulous in giving trouble, but this one's method of proceeding was quite original. My patience had served me almost all it would, and I threatened to break their win

dows, but could not find a pane of glass in the town. I then fell to unthatching a house, and pulled off some of the turf, at which a fellow came angrily out, but when he saw me was very humble, and directed me over the small river Annan, and in the way to Moffat, for which I rewarded him; and on this 17th of April 1704, I got to Moffat. This is a small straggling town among high hills, and is the town of their wells, in summer time people coming here to drink of their waters; but what sort of people they are, or where they get lodgings, I can't tell, for I did not like their lodgings well enough to go to bed." Such was a stranger's introduction, about a century and a half ago, to this which is now the most charming watering-place in the

British dominions.

Everybody is, or ought to be acquainted with the Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to his friend in London, commonly attributed to Captain Burt, an engineer officer who helped General Wade to make his famous roads. It is a pity that more is not known of him. He is mentioned

in the little book called the Olio of William

was,

shows the horror he felt of Highland scenery. Thus :—

"In passing to the heart of the Highlands we proceed from bad to worse, which makes the worst of all the less surprising; but I have often heard it said by my countrymen, that they verily believed if an inhabitant of the south of England were to be brought blindfold into some narrow

rocky hollow, enclosed with these horrid prospects, and then to have his bandage taken off, he would be ready to die with fear, as thinking it impossible he should ever get out to return to his native country.'

An English officer quartered at Fort Augustus immediately after the 'Forty-Five, gave forth his sorrows in similar strains:—

black skies and rusty looking rocky mountains, "It is a rarity to see the sun, but constantly attended with wintry rains and cutting winds, with violent streams of water rolling down from every part of the mountains after hard rains, and so filling the rivers surprisingly soon."†

*Letters from a Gentleman, ii. 13.

Journey through England and Scotland along with the Army under the command of H.R.H. the Duke of Cumberland, p. 95.

Almost alongside of Burt's homely book came a performance of a different order, from the pen of a higher artist. Whenever there is found bearing date somewhere in the first Davis, who says he was a pompous man, and quarter of the eighteenth century a book on tells a story about his pomposity being snub- any matter of everyday life, full of vivacity, wit, humour, exactness of description, and bed. Rebuking an Aberdeen boy for not worldly sagacity, it is attributed to Daniel tendering him due respect, he said: "Don't Defoe. In many instances the judgment is you know, sirrah, that I'm the representa- dubious, or absolutely a mistake, but the betive of His Majesty;" to which the answer lief that he is the author of A Tour through "Representative o' His Maujesty! I've the whole Island of Great Britain stands on seen a better representative o' His Majesty circumstantial evidence, which would be inon a bawbee," that is to say, on a halfpenny. controvertible, if the internal evidence of the The anecdote is in keeping with the remark-style and substance did not at once satisfy able absence of the faculty of veneration the reader that no other man could have common to the youth of Aberdeen, but it written such a book. A portion of the certainly exemplifies a logical confusion, which is not among their defects. In those districts where it would now be an outrage on one of the most sacred laws of fashion to abuse anything, Burt abused right and left. He was a thorough John Bull; made his own country the standard of everything, and found things elsewhere to be right or wrong just as they conformed with or diverged from his standard. But for all that his descriptions are accurate and valuable. The engravings in the old editions of the book are very curious. They give us the genuine costume of Highlanders in the period between the two rebellions. There we see the original belted plaid in its latter days, and just before the genius of one of Wade's army tailors invented the philabeg, for such is the ignoble origin of the costume which the advertisements of Highland drapers, appealing to the Cockney mind, call the "ancient garb of Old Gaul." Burt sighed for Richmond Hill and its gentle beauties, and a sentence taken almost anywhere from his book

The following is the title in full::- "A Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, divided into Circuits or Journies. Giving a Particular and Diverting Account of Whatever is Curious, and worth Observation, Viz. I. A Description of the principal Cities and Towns, their Situation, Magnitude, Government, and Commerce. II. The Customs, Manners, Speech, as also the Exercises, The Produce and Improvement of the Lands, the Diversions, and Employment of the People. III. Trade and Manufactures. IV. The Sea-Ports and Fortifications, the Course of Rivers, and the Inland Navigation. V. The Publick Edifices, Seats, and Palaces of the Nobility and Gentry. With Useful Observations upon the Whole. Particularly fitted for the reading of such as desire to Travel over the Island. Vol. III. Which completes this Work, and contains a Tour thro' Scotland, &c. With a Map of Scotland by Mr. Moll. By a Gentleman. London, Printed: And sold by G. Strahan, in Cornhill. W. Mears, at the Lamb without Temple-Bar. And J. Stagg, in Westminster-Hall. DOO XXVII."

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third volume, published in 1727, is given to | water-course; and next time he goes that Scotland. Defoe lived some time among us, way, the Clyde in flood is rushing through and his estimate of Scotland, standing where the streets on either side, and threatening to it does in the midst of literature as full of carry the bridge before it. Then at Drumgross abuse as it is destitute of knowledge lanrig, along with a Derbyshire man at the concerning us, is alike a proof of the sound- request of the Duke of Queensberry, he goes ness of his judgment and the breadth of his poking among the hills for lead ore, and sympathies. Those," he says, "who fancy here we were surprised with a sight which is there but wild men and ragged mountains, not now so frequent in Scotland as it has been storms, snows, poverty, and barrenness, are formerly-I mean one of their field-meetings, much mistaken: it being a noble country, of where one Mr. John Hepburn, an old Camea fruitful soil and healthy air, well seated for ronian, preached to an auditory of near 7000 trade, full of manufactures by land, and a people, all sitting in rows on the steep side of treasure great as the Indies at their door by a green hill, and the preacher on a little pulsea. The poverty of Scotland and the fruit-pit made under a tent at the foot of the hill. fulness of England, or rather the difference between them, is owing not to mere difference of climate, or the nature of the soil, but to the errors of time and their different constitutions."*

A critical question has arisen, whether his narrative is not so far fictitious, that whereas it is enlivened by a reference to immediate events, and has all the air of a set of adventures put on paper just after their occurrence, -yet it is believed that he had not been in Scotland for twenty years before he wrote the book. He says he made five different tours here, and there is not much reason to doubt this. He seems to have liked the people. He says to his countrymen in another place, "If the Scots want money, I must tell you they do not want manners; and one piece of humanity they are masters of, which you, with all your boasted improvements, are without: and that is, courtesy to strangers, in which they outdo even the French themselves."

There probably never was a man better endowed with the power of making out an alibi; of taking the reader with him to Dumfries or Inverness while he was all the while in his own study at Cripplegate. But he goes into the particularities of travel with a profuseness which would lay him open to detection even at the present day, and must have put him in the power of a multitude of contemporary readers, if he sat at home and shammed the traveller. He had not the advantage of an unpeopled island like Selkirk's Juan Fernandez. So we find him enjoying the hospitalities of Lauder, the minister of Mordinton, who writes on the Cyprianic age. He tells us that Lord Tweeddale's pictures are at Pinkey, because the mansion of Yester is not finished. On one journey a very remarkable phenomenon enables him to walk through the Clyde dry-shod above Glasgow Bridge, which he laughs at, with its great skeleton-looking arches striding over an empty

He held his auditory, with not above an intermission of half an hour, almost seven hours; and many of the poor people had come above fifteen or sixteen miles to hear him, and had all the way to go home again on foot."*

He is here close to the deep chasm called the Enterkin, which he describes not only in his book of travels, but also in his Memoirs of the Church of Scotland, as the scene of an affair between Covenanters and dragoons. He describes it as terrible, for it would have been too bad at that time to have introduced such a scene to good society like an orange grove or a shaven lawn; but there is a fascination in its horror which makes him eloquent and descriptive. It is a curious testimony to the enduring freshness of these descriptions, that Dr. John Brown has cited both of them in one of his popular miscellanies on Scottish scenery; has cited them of course as attractive to readers of the present age, though that to which they were addressed looked upon all such scenery as odious.

The charm of De Foe is that he is perfectly natural, yielding to the influences around him, and giving himself up to the absolute control of no conventionality. He begins hill-climbing at the Cheviots, and lets out his greenness and Cockneyism by his anxiety about the question, whether he shall find standing-room on the top. "We all had a notion that when we came to the top we should be just as upon a pinnacle, that the hill narrowed to a point, and we should only have room enough to stand, with a precipice every way around us;" but the end of the adventure, on the contrary, is, "I was agreeably surprised when, coming to the top of the hill, I saw before me a smooth, and with respect to what we expected, a most pleasant plain of at least half a mile in diameter, and in the middle of it a large pond, or little lake of water; and the ground seeming to descend in every way from the edges of the

* Review, iii. 62.