conceive. But the adaptability of the human animal is amazing, and there are those who can find satisfaction anywhere. Nay, there is a very genial picture of what are the enjoyments the moral enjoyments-of a Gorbals or Stockwell Street, without steamers, in a clever little book called Rambles round Glasgow. The stratum of transition, to use a geological phrase, where the love of waters passes on to their rocky banks, may be hit at Dunkeld, where the soft in forest and meadow blends into the wild. In Captain Slezer's hard engravings of Scottish towns and mansions, scratched about the period of the Revolution, there is just one in which an attempt is made to bring out picturesqueness in mountain scenery, and that one is of Dunkeld. The scene becomes still more picturesque when it is transferred into the Délices de la Grande Bretagne of Beeverell, printed in 1727, where it is said of Dunkeld that it stands "dans une campagne, où l'on voit d'un côté d'agréables forêts et de l'autre de hautes montagnes pelées et fort roides qui semblent la menacer de leurs cimes." Towards the end of the last century, Highland scenery obtained a considerable rise in the market through the combined influence of four great social powers, all working separately and independently of each other, but all helping in one cause. These were, Pennant the traveller, Jane Duchess of Gordon, Robert Burns, and James Macpherson. Pennant, who is now much forgotten, was an eccentric man of genius. Perhaps he is less remembered for his books than for that enmity of his towards the prevailing fashion of wigs, which make his portraits look, even at the present day, as if there were something wanting that should accompany the single-breasted coat and huge waistcoat, and must have brought on him when in the flesh an amount of social torment, which nothing but the strongest sense of an imperious duty could strengthen any human being to endure. One story about him is, that in a tavern in Coventry he had taken such offence at the wig of a peppery old colonel, that nothing would serve him but to snatch it and throw it in the fire; whereupon he had to run for his life, and the community of Coventry-renowned for a rather remarkable procession in old times-were blessed with the vision of the bald traveller fleeing before a bald warrior with a drawn sword in his hand. Pennant had great influence in his day. He described everything he saw, and described it with spirit. Pottering among his heavy quartos, written in an old-fashioned style, one might suppose that all his influence was through hard pounding, but it was not so. He was repeated in the periodicals of the day, for his was an age of many magazines, nearly all of which lived by extracts, without professing to give a single original sentence. There was, besides the library quartos, a drawing-room abridgment of his Tour in The British Tourists' or Travellers' Pocket Companion. The volumes are very readable; so readable indeed as to be now rare, because they were used up. It was through Pennant that the world first received the eloquent outpouring of admiration and surprise with which Sir Joseph Banks commemorated his discovery of Fingal's Cave. It was by Pennant, too, if we mistake not, that the poem on the ascent of Ben Lomond, scratched on a windowpane at Rowardennan, was first published, and became so popular that until lately no Scotch guide-book could any more dispense with it than it now can with woman. "The western waves of ebbing day Roll'd o'er the glen their level way." Jane Maxwell, Duchess of Gordon,1 was a very extraordinary Her strong colours are now fading away almost to extinction, in fulfilment of the destiny of all social reputations. Had she not been a Duchess she would have been famous still, because, filling a rank insufficient within its own bounds to afford work for so active a spirit, she must have done something in literature or otherwise that posterity would have remembered. An anecdote about her father, Sir William Maxwell of Monreith, affords one of the boldest and sharpest of the retorts preserved in Dean Ramsay's pleasant Reminiscences, and shows the blood she inherited. 1 The three great points of the Duchess were her beauty, her wit, and her impudence. She was, to use a modern slang expression, "up to anything." In the great world she could hold her own with Fox and Talleyrand. But her remarkable powers enabled her to appropriate whatever was mentally remarkable in the small world without losing caste-the terror of all people of high rank when they unbend. Thus she had about her Lord Kames, Harry Erskine, Clerk of Eldin, and among men of genius, Beattie the poet and Robert Burns. The two last named were born peasants. The one had made himself a learned professor, and of course a gentleman entitled The other was what all the world to hold his head up. knows; but it served to allay his morbid irritation towards the world, to come within the influence of one so lofty, as to see little difference between the position of the country gentleman or eminent lawyer on the one side of her, and the peasant poet on the other. She had a passion for the scenery in her neighbourhood, and it was worthy of her admiration. 1 See North British Review, No. lxxviii. She lived on the western slope of the Cairngorm mountains, at almost the nearest inhabitable point to the grand scenery walled in by them. All the great folks had to go there whether they liked it or not, and the precipices and scenery of Braeriach and Ben Muich Dhui were thus better known in that day than they have been since. Her daughters succeeded to her taste. There was a story in the country-we forget whether it was about the mother or one of the daughters-how being one day on the top of Ben Muich Dhui with a child and a large dog, she was caressing the child, when the dog either in jealousy or fancying she was injuring the child, flew at her and bit her so as to pull part of the flesh of the forehead over her eyes, and so through that terrible wilderness she had to find her way home bleeding and blinded. It seems to have been through this influence that Burns was prompted to sing of the Highlands, and of course whatever he said was well listened to. He did honour to Foyers, and the power of his pen is attested by the leafy covering that shelters the Bruar Water the fruit of his poetic Petition. Still these are not Burns's great works, nor is his strong spirit in them. Though he proclaimed that his heart was in the Highlands, he never celebrated them with so much heart as in that yell of rage and disappointment in which he says- "There's naething here but Hieland pride, Burns seems to have loved lowland scenery best. This, of course, is matter of opinion, but we shall put it to something like a test. Every one knows the land of Burns as a professional tourist's district. That land is lowland, though it is close to a fine Highland district which would have been included in it, had Burns been partial to wandering there. He sang of the "banks and braes of bonny Doon," blooming so fresh and fair; this is the lowland part of the Doon where it winds through the pastures of Ayrshire. But far up, the Doon roars between great walls of rock, and brings you to a lake surrounded by grand mountains of granite. This region where Kirkcudbrightshire and Ayrshire meet would have been in itself probably an illustrious touring district, but for the ease with which the western Highlands are reached. Throughout Macpherson's Poems of Ossian, however, which, though written earlier, reached the climax of their celebrity about the same time, there is quite a Highland spirit. It is not that there are set descriptions of scenery, but there is a feeling that the whole action goes on in a land of wild heaths, great mountains, torrents, tempests, and ancient forests. People have occupied themselves so much about the great question of genuineness that they have overlooked. the mighty poetic genius of the author. Whatever he got from authentic sources, the scenery is his own, for it is not the way of the old Irish writers to touch it. Indeed, this was one of the metamorphoses necessary in the subtraction of the stories from Ireland and their adaptation to Scotland, since the portion of Ireland ruled by Fingal or the Fin M'Coull of the annalists has little or no mountain scenery. He does not deal in detailed pictures of scenery, but the feeling of it is in almost every line, and sometimes a little sketch weaves itself into the narrative, as in the description of an ancient tomb: "A mountain stream comes roaring down, and sends its waters round a green hill. Four mossy stones in the midst of withered grass rear their heads on the top. Two trees which the storms have bent spread their whistling branches around. This is thy dwelling, Eragon; this thy narrow house." Or take a passage from the many addresses to the sun: "Thou too, perhaps, must fail: thy darkening hour may seize thee, struggling as thou rollest through the sky. But pleasant is the voice of the bard-pleasant to Ossian's soul. It is like the shower of the morning when it comes through the rustling vale on which the sun looks through mist just rising from his rocks. . Pleasant is thy beam to the hunter sitting by the rock in a storm, when thou showest thyself from the parted cloud, and brightenest his dewy locks; he looks down on the streamy vale, and beholds the descent of roes." Again: "Pleasant from the way of the desert the voice of music came. It seemed at first the voice of a stream far distant on its rocks. Slow it rolled along the hill, like the ruffled wings of a breeze when it takes the tufted beards of the rocks in the still season of night." The Poems of Ossian were one of the literary feats that from time to time have taken the world by storm. They filled the hearts of their readers with their own sentiment; and thus the roaring of the mountain-torrents, the sighing of the winds among the rocks, the grey moors, and the stormy hill-tops were rescued from vulgarity; they were associated with the sublimity, instead of the coldness, bleakness, and sterility that chilled the soul of Captain Burt. Still there were several steps ere the passion for scenery in its present shape reached its climax in the Lady of the Lake. Of It is a pleasant task to endeavour to throw a little sunshine on a reputation which has been overshadowed by another. all those who have heard of Scott's Lady of the Lake, only a few have heard of the little book called "Sketches descriptive of Picturesque Scenery on the Southern Confines of Perthshire," published in 1806, by Patrick Graham, minister of Aberfoyle. Though it was Scott who made the Trossachs illustrious, Graham was their discoverer. This book is meritorious and curious in literature, from its being among the earliest not only to notice. the specialties of Highland scenery, but to notice them in the same æsthetic spirit in which they are now cultivated. Take this "Ben-Venue, in Aberfoyle, is perhaps one of the most picturesque mountains in Britain. Its height is about 2800 on the north; besides the immense masses of rock which appear in this and in all other mountains to have been, by some convulsion of nature, torn from the summit, the whole slope is covered, for two-thirds upwards, with alders, birches, and mountain ashes of ancient growth, and sprinkled over the surface with a grace and beauty unattainable by the hand of art. At the first opening of Loch Katrine especially, and for a considerable way along the lake, the shoulder of Ben-Venue, stretching in abrupt masses towards the shore, presents a sloping ridge, elegantly feathered with birches, in a style which the pencil may in some degree exhibit, but which verbal description cannot possibly represent." He offers his advice to the visitor in a way which shows his decided conviction that he was revealing to the world what it was a great loser by not being acquainted with, and the crowds who have since flocked thither confirm his testimony. Having induced his stranger to visit his favourite district, he says "On entering the Trossachs, let him remark on the right the beautiful disposition into which nature has thrown the birches and the oaks which adorn the projecting cliffs; let him remark the grouping of the trees, with their elegant figure and form. Some aged weeping birches will attract. Ben-An and Ben-Venue will present at every step varied pictures. In passing through the dark ravine that opens on Loch Katrine, whilst he admires again the disposition of the birches, the hawthorn, the hazels, and oaks, and mountain ashes, let him remark an echo produced by the concave rock on the left, which, though too near to repeat many syllables, is remarkably distinct and loud. Immediately on entering Loch Katrine, let him attend to the magnificent masses of Ben-Venue as they tumble in upon the eye from the south; there can be nothing more sublime." Observe, we are not maintaining that this would be either very remarkable thinking or very fine writing were it some quarter of a century nearer us. There are some conventionalisms of a past style in it, not in full harmony with the genius of the place, such as the word "elegant," which reminds you of the Irish guides at Killarney, with their "illigant" waterfalls and "illigant" echoes. But remember that Mr. Graham is a beginner of a school. We test him as we do Chaucer in poetry, or Van |