he did not deal with it as our modern poets do. But Lord Stirling perhaps better known as Sir William Alexander, the founder of the Scottish baronetage of Nova Scotia has left other touches which show that he and Drummond had some little enjoyment of Scottish scenery of the secondary kind. Thus"Those madrigals we sung amidst our flocks, With garlands guarded from Apollo's beams, On Ochils whiles, whiles near Bodotrian streams, The echoes did resound them from the rocks, Of foreign shepherds bent to try the states; Though I, world's guest, a vagabond do stray, Thou may thy store, which I esteem, survey.'

Thus it appears that the two poets had companionable wanderings among the Ochils-a seat of very noble scenery, including the cleft rock on which Castle Campbell stands, the turbulent rocky break of the Devon called the Devil's Mill, the Rumbling Bridge, and the Calder Linn.

We shall find Scottish poets of a century later affording us fewer traces of a love of scenery even than this. There is a beautiful poem which, since the days of Leyden's and Scott's early investigations, has been at large in search of an author. It is called "Albania," and may be, for aught we know, quite familiar to our readers, though the original edition of it is a rarity, and even Leyden's Scottish Descriptive Poems in which it is reprinted, is not in every one's hands. It was first printed in 1737, the editor telling the world that it "was wrote by a Scottish clergyman some years ago, who is since dead." Aaron Hill-who, as we have seen, travelled in Scotland-was much struck by this piece, and endeavoured to express his appreciation of it in poetry :

"Known though unnamed since, shunning vulgar praise,

Thy muse would shine, and yet conceal her rays."

All that internal evidence tells is, that he lived in Aberdeen, whether a native of that district or not. This poem rather deals with the material elements of the country's strength, than with anything æsthetic. In the noble simplicity and beauty with which it describes vulgar material objects it might be compared to Raphael's arabesques. But touches of a sense of the beautiful in nature break through it, and the concluding lines testify that the author enjoyed wild scenery :—

"There view I winged Skye and Lewes long,

Resort of whales, and Uist where herrings swarm,
And talk, at once delighted and appalled
By the pale moon with utmost Hirta's seers,
Of beckoning ghosts, and shadowy men that bode

Sure death. Nor there doth Jura's double hill
Escape my sight; nor Mull, though bald and bare;
Nor Islay, where erewhile Macdonalds reigned.
Thee too Lismore! I hail St. Moloch's shrine;
Inchgall, first conquered by the brand of Scots:
And filled with awe of ancient saints and kings,
I kiss, O Icolmkill, thy hallowed mould.

Thus, Caledonia, many-hilled, to thee
End and beginning of my ardent song

I turn the Druid's lyre, to thee devote

This lay, and love not music but for thee."

There is here a germ of the pure feeling for Scottish scenery which is not to be found in Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd, pastoral though it be. It has often been remarked that Allan's shepherds have a kind of Cowgate twang about them, and the imperfectness of his descriptive power is to this day a distraction and torment to hapless tourists, in this respect, that there are two rival competitors-quite unlike each other for the honour of being the genuine "Habbie's-How."

There is a powerful revelation of the feeling of the day in that beautiful little ode of Smollett's on Leven Water. The tourist now rushes as fast as he can past that commonplace stream no better than an ordinary English river-ardent to seek the inner wilds of Glenfalloch or Balquhidder. It was probably the immediate contrast with such abominations that inspired the poet to sing how

"No torrents stain thy limpid source,

No rocks impede thy dimpling course,
That sweetly rambles o'er its bed
With white round polished pebbles spread.
While lightly poised, the scaly brood
In myriads cleave thy crystal flood:
The springing trout, in speckled pride;
The salmon, monarch of the tide;
The ruthless pike, intent on war,
The silver eel, and mottled par.
Devolving from thy parent lake,
A charming maze thy waters make
By bowers of birch, and groves of pine,
And hedges flower'd with eglantine."

It' would almost seem as if these mellifluous lines were made so attractive to draw off attention from the earlier stages of these waters, tossing down the sides of the mountains in their disreputable ruffianism; yet at this day it is in this early stage, and not in their reputable condition as "a charming maze," that the waters which, in the Falloch and other roaring torrents, toss

themselves into Loch Lomond, and pass through to the Firth of Clyde, delight the pleasure-seeker.

James Thomson was an exquisite describer of nature, but he chose English nature for his theme, discarding the claims of the wild Border land in which he passed his youth, as well as those of the North Highlands in which he was a sojourner. Yet it is possible to detect here and there the tone of one whose eye had been educated in scenery wilder than he describes. For instance, that fine descriptive touch

"Where o'er the rock the scarcely waving pine,

Fills the brown shade with a religious awe."

His account of the shepherd lost in the snow is thoroughly moorland, and in the Castle of Indolence, there is a picture one would carry home to the Highland forests-which were more abundant in his day than they now are:

"Full in the passage of the vale above,

A sable silent solemn forest stood,

Where nought but shadowy forms was seen to move,
As idless fancied in her dreaming mood;

And, up the hills on either side, a wood

Of blackening pines aye waving to and fro,
Sent forth a sleepy horror through the blood,

And where this valley winded out below,

The murmuring main was heard, and scarcely heard to flow." Another poet was much more untrue to his native hills, though he professed to sing of them. This was Alexander Ross, the author of the Fortunate Shepherdess. That work is a remarkable testimony to a phenomenon which might be termed absolute blindness to sublimity in scenery. The cottage of its author may still be seen in the wild pass fortified by the old tower of Invermark, whence rises up an array of vast mountains rough and precipitous-the group of which the chief is Byron's Lochinygair. The author had not the excuse of seeking distant classical scenery for neglecting what were thus continually in his eye, for the incidents of the poem are entirely Highland. They turn on the event thus curtly set down

"Nae property these honest shepherds pled,
All kept alike, and all in common fed;
But ah! misfortune, while they feared no ill,
A crowd of Ketterin did their forest fill;
On ilka side they took it in wi' care,

And in the ca' nor cow nor ewe did spare."

They carried off the heroine-and hence the story. But it is all mythical and fancy pastoral, a good deal like Barclay's Argenis, which the author, who was a scholar, seems to have

had in his eye. In one place, he gives a very pretty little description of a scene which shows that he could paint with the pen-but he goes down the glen for it, describing a scene purely lowland.

"The water keely on a level slid

Wi' little din, but couthy what it made.

On ilka side the trees grew thick and strang,
And wi' the birds they a' were in a sang;
On every side, a full bowshot and mair,
The green was even, gowany, and fair;
With easy sklent on every hand the braes,
To right well up, wi' scattered busses raise.
Wi' goats and sheep abone, and ky below,
The bonny braes a' in a swarm did go."

On the supposition that the love of mountain scenery is an acquired taste, and that the first and most natural objects of human admiration are things made by human hands, one would expect the waterfall to be the first prominent object taken up as the taste for nature advances, and so in practice we find it to be. Among what may be called the rugged elements of nature, the cataract was the first to be tolerated. It presented an immediate analogy to the fountain -a very ancient ornament. When water power came into use, it was impossible to resist admiration of a phenomenon. which was so grand an exaggeration of the mill-race, from the edge of which careful mothers drew their children with a shudder. It was an admiration like Hajji Baba's, who, when told that the huge steamship was moved by the vapour of boiling water, said it must have the great-grandmother of all kettles on board. The Romans made waterfalls; articles that laugh to scorn such productions as the cataract at Virginia Water. There was Tivoli, and also Terni, "a hell of waters where they howl and hiss," as Byron said. He pronounced it to be the first waterfall in Europe, Handec being the second; but we suspect he is wrong, and that there are finer specimens than either in Norway or Bavaria.

There was something in the geological conditions of waterfalls to facilitate early familiarity with them. The finest of them belong to accessible countries. The feeders up among the far recesses of the mountains have not wealth enough of water to make a great display, and have only the interest of wild, little, restless, raving torrents through dungeons walled in by closing rocks. Even when the burn descends from near the top of a mountain to the glen below, there are few high leaps sometimes to the hunter after the picturesque provokingly few. The adjustment to each other of the masses of primitive

rock through which they generally pass makes it so. It is when the streams have united and swollen into rivers, and then find the terraces on the lower ranges of the mountains that the most notable waterfalls exist-witness Niagara, where the fall is from a terrace in a country comparatively flat. Niagara was known and wondered at long before people cared for other kinds of wild scenery-dry scenery we might call it, if we were to frame a tourist nomenclature on the principles of the commercial room. We know this from a large old engraving of itseventeenth century work evidently. So early as the year 1678, indeed, a certain Johannes Herbinius wrote a systematic dissertation on cataracts, full of curious reading and curious plates.1

The chief Scottish falls are very accessible. Those of the Clyde in the midst of agriculture and manufactures; the Grey Mare's Tail close to a high-road through the pass from one district to another; the falls of Devon in a fruitful vale; and even Foyers, not far from a frequented high-way and a navigable loch. At Corra Linn there is, or used to be, a testimony to its popularity, at a time when mountain scenery was not only neglected but detested. This is a summer-house built in a substantial manner by Sir James Carmichael of Bonniton in 1708. "From its uppermost room," says the parish clergyman in the old Statistical Account, "it affords a very striking prospect of the fall; for all at once, on throwing your eyes towards a mirror on the opposite side of the room from the fall, you see the whole tremendous cataract pouring as it were upon your head." The founder of this summer-house had probably been a travelled man, who brought such an idea home with him as one of the ingenious resources of the polite world abroad, which, fortunately, has not been extensively adopted among us. The falls of the Clyde have been celebrated in a poem of the middle of last century by the elder John Wilson, who deals in powerful metaphors :

"Where down at once the foaming waters pour,
And tottering rocks repel the deafening roar;
Viewed from below, it seems from heaven they fell,
Seen from above, they seem to sink to hell."

Thus we find people so far awakened to a hankering for the picturesque as to find something to feed it on in a cataract. The phenomenon is, in fact, calculated to awaken the lowest and least æsthetic instincts of curiosity. It is a seeming insurrection against the orderly conditions of nature-a row, a kick-up, a great splutter. The persons who rush to see a fire or a street 1 Dissertationes de Admirandis Mundi cataractis, supra et subterraneis, earumque Principio, auctore M. Johanne Herbinio, Bicina-Silesio, Amsterdam. 1678.