tarian purposes, and he greatly enriched the country by opening trade. Before his time, everything known about the national resources is of a vague kind, and had there been tourists in the reign of Charles II., it would have been in the records of the proceedings of the Protectorate, that they would have found what parts of Scotland were likely to afford a good inn. Cromwell sent a commissioner named Thomas Tucker to investigate the trade statistics of Scotland. This man's report was printed by the late Lord Murray for the Bannatyne Club, and is the earliest satisfactory account of the towns and harbours of Scotland, and of the material resources of the country.

It is more to the point of the present article, that one of Cromwell's troopers, by name Richard Franck, wandered over a great part of Scotland, and recorded his movements in a solid book. The temptation that led him onwards was the fishingrod. For an estimate of his knowledge and aptness in this craft, we may refer to Mr. Russel's book on the Salmon: a wonderful combination, by the way, of those qualities deemed incompatible with each other, science, statistics, and fun. Franck seems to have been a conceited, pompous, prosing man, and a euphuist of the most inflated kind. Yet the fellow had evidently a sense of scenery, which he lets out in his own floundering way. So of Loch Lomond he says:-" This small Mediterrane is surrounded with woods, mountains, rockey, boggy, sandy, and miry earth; and is the greatest inland sea in Scotland; nor is it parallel'd with any southward; and all the north inferiour to it, excepting only the Lough called Ness." Then presently comes he to" Beautiful Buchanan, besieged with bogs and baracadoed with birch trees; the Highlander's landscape and the Lowlander's prospect; whose boggy swamps incommode the traveller." The following fragmentary passages will perhaps suffice as specimens of the trooper's manner :

"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

"Glides the glittering Kaldar; a large and river, accommodated both with trout and salmon

spacious rapid 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 remarkable characters of shining rocks, glittering sands, and falls of water, which 'tis morally impossible he should ever forget.

"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 memorable Anderwick, 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 consulted, 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.1 There is an old Latin saying, that indignation makes one poetical; and the indignant expression of his fears and sufferings has actually imparted to this man's narrative a descriptive vigour and richness totally unintended on his part. Leaving Crawfordjohn, he says: From this place I went over mighty hills, sometimes being amongst the clouds and sometimes amongst bogs, I think without 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 past Elvinfoot, and the road, or rather steep tracks for since I left Douglass I hardly saw any otherwere 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

1 North of England and Scotland in 1704. Printed in 1818 from a Ms. in possession of Mr. Johnson.

on that ground without a pocket-compass, a folly no tourist should ever perpetrate.

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 presently, and it grew so suddenly dark that 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 a distance, and sometimes a house; but plainly discerned that if I had gone lower down the hill, I had gone into a deep bog by the river side. I went a mile one way, and then back again, and a mile the other, but could see 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 windows, 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 Davis, who says he was a pompous man, and tells a story about his pomposity being

snubbed. Rebuking an Aberdeen boy for not tendering him due respect, he said: "Don't you know, sirrah, that I'm the representative of His Majesty;" to which the answer was: "Representative o' His Maujesty! I've seen a better representative o' His Maujesty on a bawbee," that is to say, on a halfpenny. The anecdote is in keeping with the remarkable absence of the faculty of veneration common to the youth of Aberdeen, but it 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 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 :

"It is a rarity to see the sun, but constantly black skies and rusty looking rocky mountains, 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.'

112

Almost alongside of Burt's homely book came a performance of a different order, from the pen of a higher artist. Whenever 1 Letters from a Gentleman, ii. 13.

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

there is found bearing date somewhere in the first quarter of the eighteenth century a book on any matter of everyday life, full of vivacity, wit, humour, exactness of description, and worldly sagacity, it is attributed to Daniel Defoe. In many instances the judgment is dubious, or absolutely a mistake, but the belief that he is the author of A Tour through the whole Island of Great Britain stands on circumstantial evidence, which would be incontrovertible, if the internal evidence of the style and substance did not at once satisfy the reader that no other man could have written such a book. A portion of the third volume, published in 1727, is given to Scotland. Defoe lived some time among us, and his estimate of Scotland, standing where it does in the midst of literature as full of gross abuse as it is destitute of knowledge concerning us, is alike a proof of the soundness of his judgment and the breadth of his sympathies. "Those," he says, "who fancy there but wild men and ragged mountains, storms, snows, poverty, and barrenness, are much mistaken: it being a noble country, of a fruitful soil and healthy air, well seated for trade, full of manufactures by land, and a treasure great as the Indies at their door by sea. The poverty of Scotland and the fruitfulness 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

1 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, Diversions, and Employment of the People. III. The Produce and Improvement of the Lands, the Trade and Manufactures. IV. The SeaPorts 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. M DCC XXVII."

2 Review, iii. 671.