given him shelter till it handed him over to the still wider forest districts of Braemar and Ballochbuie. The trees would. disappear as he approached the snows and precipices of the source of the Dee, but on the other side he would find one or two gnarled pines struggling bravely up to the edge of the snow, and these, thickening as he descended, would bring him to the dense forests of Rothiemurchus, Glen More, and Glen Feshie, where Aaron Hill proposed to establish_timberyards and sawpits for the navy. Such would have been the character of his journey had he turned westward. Eastward was a scene of another kind. There spread the broad plains of Buchan, so affluent in sand that the drifts would often cover many an acre, and once desolated a whole parish. Except the few who make a dash at the Bullers, the modern tourist would no more think of penetrating here-though the aspect of the country has brightened with much verdure since Johnson's day -than he would spend a week in the Romney Marsh. The hospitable mansion of Lord Errol seems to have been the direct attraction that led Johnson into this desert, but when he beheld the character of the country so opened to him, he must have felt the joy which brightens in the bosom of the malignant when their worst suspicions about their enemies are confirmed. His next step showed great ingenuity. It was difficult to get through the Highlands without encountering trees; but through the Highlands he would go, so he selected his route through those districts where General Wade, for strategic reasons, had burned the forests, and thus got through uninterrupted to the Hebrides, where, as in Buchan, the watery winds sweep the shore. He was thus enabled conscientiously to say,— "Of the hills, many may be called, with Homer's Ida, abundant in springs; but few can deserve the epithet which he bestows upon Pelion, of waving their leaves. They exhibit very little variety, being almost wholly covered with dark heath, and even that seems to be checked in its growth. What is not heath is nakedness, a little diversified by now and then a stream rushing down the steep. An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by the wide extent of hopeless sterility."1 Some of the lovers of mountain scenery maintain that it has in it a potency of physical exhilaration, which may impart intellectual enjoyment, but is not under the control of the intellect. They say that a sworn abstainer may as well drink wine and smoke opium experimentally, in the certainty that his hatred of stimulants and narcotics will resist their influence, as a lover of parks and lawns can wander among mountains with 1 Journey, 1st Ed., p. 84. out feeling them stir his blood; and really Johnson seems to have felt it, despite his prejudices and his resolution to adhere to them, uttered in the preceding and many other passages. In fact, he had broken down, like some surly stoic who determines to resist the influence of a tragedy or a touching romance; and we find him, for one brief moment only however, in this condition: "I sat down on a bank such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign. I had, indeed, no trees to whisper over my head, but a clear rivulet streamed at my feet. The day was calm, the air soft, and all was rudeness, silence, and solitude. Before me, and on either side, were high hills, which, by hindering the eye from ranging, fixed the mind to find entertainment for itself."1 The storm which "the journey" raised in the Scottish mind was prodigious, and perhaps had its influence on the reaction in favour of the national scenery. An Englishman, named John Topham, was living in Edinburgh when this thunderbolt burst, and has left this account of the scene: "EDINBURGH, January 24, 1775. "Dr. Johnson's account of his tour into Scotland has just made its appearance here, and has put the country into a flame. Everybody finds some reason to be affronted. A thousand people who know not a single creature in the Western Isles interest themselves in their cause, and are offended at the accounts that are given of them. But let this unfortunate writer say what he will, it must be confessed they return it with interest. Newspapers, magazines, pamphlets-all teem with abuse of the Doctor. While one day some very ingenious criticism shows he might have wrote such a thing better, the next others equally ingenious prove he had better never have wrote such a thing at all. In this general uproar, amidst this strife of tongues, it is impossible that a dispassionate man should be heard." 2 The works of some of his assailants are highly amusing. He laid himself open to assault by the rash way in which he tilted at everything that did not conform with his own experi-. ence and philosophy of high civilisation and culture. For instance, announcing the profound principle that "where there are mountains there are commonly minerals," he finds that in the Western Highlands "common ores would be here of no great value; for what requires to be separated by fire, must, if it were found, be carried away in its mineral state, here being no fuel for the smelting-house or forge." In strange antithesis to this stands a passage in De Foe, also speculating on the possibility of discovering ore in the Highlands: "But it seems reserved for a future and more industrious age to search into; which, if it should happen to appear, especially the iron, 1 Journey, 1st edit., pp. 86, 87. 2 Topham's Letters from Edinburgh, p. 137. VOL. XLII.-NO. LXXXIII. B they would no more have occasion to say that nature furnished them with so much timber and woods of such vast extent to no purpose, seeing it may be all little enough to supply the forges for working up the ironstone, and improving that useful product. And should a time come when these hidden treasures of the earth should be discovered and improved, this part of Scotland may no longer be called poor; for such a production would soon change the face of things, bring wealth and people and commerce to it, fill their harbours full of ships, their towns full of people, and by consuming the provisions, bring the soil to be cultivated, its fish cured, and its cattle consumed at home, and so a visible prosperity would show itself among them." 1 But there was a practical answer to the reproach as affecting the Highlands generally, more conclusive than theory could afford. On account of the vast quantity of wood in the Western Highlands, mining companies in England took their ores to be smelted there. One of these smelting places, within a few miles of Inverary Castle, where Johnson got high hospitality, has left its reminiscences in the name of " Furnace," yet held by the village where it stood, and in the quantity of slag still scattered around the site of its extinguished and demolished furnaces.2 It is remarkable, however, that all the assailants deal with the material charges of poverty and barrenness; none of them has the hardihood to maintain that the scenery of "Caledonia stern and wild," has its own special merits as well as the parks and pastures of England. Of the weakness of a cause one may sometimes find a clearer revelation in a defence of it than in an attack on it. Among the national champions, a certain James Alves delivered in rhyme his wrath against the partial tales "When Johnson fibs, or jaundiced Junius rails, When Wilkes degrades, or Churchill bolder sings The following lines, with their extremely meagre amount of inspiration, are curious in their very prosaicness, as showing the terms on which the impeacher and the vindicator met. That 1 Tour, iii. 201. 2 Some of his critics were too angry, and in too much haste to give vent to their wrath, to limit their comments to matters in which he could be thus distinctly contradicted. A good specimen of angry incoherence is furnished by Remarks on Dr. Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Hebrides, by the Rev. Donald M'Nicol, A.M., minister of Lismore, in Argyleshire. This Highland minister, writing from the fastnesses of his own mountains, thus gallantly maintains the ancient renown of his country for shipbuilding, without having his authorities at hand :-" There was a ship of war built in Scotland, in the minority of James IV., the equal of which had never been built in Britain, nor seen upon the seas in those times. Its dimensions I am not just now able to ascertain; but they have been accurately described by several of our historians, whom I have not at present an opportunity of consulting" (p. 158). all the scenery which tourists now swarm in was abominable to When mould'ring bricks are mingled with the dust."1 These verses, which cannot be called poetry, remind us that hitherto, like Monsieur Jourdain, we have been dealing with mere prose. It is naturally to poetry and romance that we should look for the most distinctive symptoms of the existence of a sense of the sublime and beautiful in scenery. Let us see whether these do more than their plain companion for our scenery. It is said by some Welsh scholars that the descriptions of scenery in the old Welsh poems are so applicable to the West Highlands, as to show that King Arthur held his court there; but this is a point on which we possess neither Welsh learning nor virtue enough to lift up our testimony. If Thomas of Erceldoun wrote the Romance of Sir Tristrem, he would have preserved his copyright of fame by describing the Eildons and Huntly Burn. It is difficult to speak to what is not to be found in any kind of literature; yet from a considerable acquaintance with old Scots poetry, from The Bruce downwards, we incline to deny that throughout there is in it anything descriptive of the romantic scenery of Scotland. James I. and Dunbar are both exquisite describers of nature; but it is of garden or agricultural nature. Alexander Hume's delicious poem of The Day Estival, or Summer Day, contains a series of pictures of rural life as lovely as Cuyp's, but all are life in the plain, or by the side of the smooth flowing river. The sole allusion to anything else is when he describes the heat of midday : "The time sae tranquil is and still, That nowhere shall ye find, Save on a high and barren hill, The ayr of peeping wind." Mr. Pierce Gillies, in editing The Essayes of a Prentise in the 1 Alves's Banks of Esk. Divine Art of Poesie, by James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England, says: "Amid the romantic scenery of his birth and education, he probably never looked on any object with the true eye of a poet. . . . He had no eye for wild and unsophisticated nature. There is no evidence that he ever looked with rapture on the castled cliffs and aërial towers of his native city; or that he ever watched with a heart full of emotion the beams of the morning sun ascending out of the sea; and the rocky cliffs of Arthur Seat, that overhang Holyrood Palace, half seen, half lost, amidst the lingering vapour of night." How should he have been expected to have an eye for such things? The sense of them had not been discovered or invented-whichever be the proper term. It was no more likely to be referred to in poetry than any undiscovered portion of science, such as the steamengine or electricity. Perhaps Shakspeare, in the two words of his scene direction, "Blasted Heath," has done more than any one in his day to stamp a feature of Scottish scenery. Mr. Charles Knight laboured hard to prove him one of a set of players who had gone as far northward as Aberdeen. He thought the description of Macbeth's Castle had the clearness and precision of one who had seen the building. Then he is accurate in his topography while speaking of two remarkable features of our scenery-Dunsinane and Birnam. The strongest point, however, was, that his witch was the Scottish witch- -a creature of the wilds and wastes and storms-not the English witch, who existed in barn-door plebeianism, tormenting poor clowns and their cattle in the most vulgar and unpoetic of forms. Shakspeare, however, found the nature of the Scottish witch in the books. His instinct told him there was poetry in it, and he seized it. Perhaps if he had actually been in Scotland we should have had something from him as good as the description of Dover Cliff. To the general dearth of expressions in old poetry purporting an enjoyment of the savage features of the scenery of Scotland, there is an odd exception; an exception carrying us a great deal further than the old proverbial notion that the exception renders the rule all the more distinct by drawing attention to its precise terms. In the old poem we refer to there are quaint melodious reminiscences of scenes which are thronged by the tourists of the present day, and which yet, for centuries after the date of the poem, were deemed howling wildernesses, into which the lover of pleasure journeys no more thought of entering, than he now does of going to the Black country or the Fens. Here are some lines from that poem, in which the ordinary tourist will recognise several of the places he has been compelled to go to in the course of his duty: |