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Title: The Spell of Scotland - The Spell Series
Author: Clark, Keith
Language: English
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THE SPELL OF SCOTLAND
+--------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| THE SPELL SERIES |
| |
| _Each volume with one or more colored plates and |
| many illustrations from original drawings or special |
| photographs. Octavo, decorative cover, gilt top, |
| boxed._ |
| |
| _Per volume, net $2.50; carriage paid $2.70_ |
| |
| BY ISABEL ANDERSON |
| |
| THE SPELL OF BELGIUM |
| THE SPELL OF JAPAN |
| THE SPELL OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS AND THE PHILIPPINES |
| |
| BY CAROLINE ATWATER MASON |
| THE SPELL OF ITALY |
| THE SPELL OF SOUTHERN SHORES |
| THE SPELL OF FRANCE |
| |
| BY ARCHIE BELL |
| THE SPELL OF EGYPT |
| THE SPELL OF THE HOLY LAND |
| |
| BY KEITH CLARK |
| THE SPELL OF SPAIN |
| THE SPELL OF SCOTLAND |
| |
| BY W. D. MCCRACKAN |
| THE SPELL OF TYROL |
| THE SPELL OF THE ITALIAN LAKES |
| |
| BY EDWARD NEVILLE VOSE |
| THE SPELL OF FLANDERS |
| |
| BY BURTON E. STEVENSON |
| THE SPELL OF HOLLAND |
| |
| BY JULIA DE W. ADDISON |
| THE SPELL OF ENGLAND |
| |
| BY NATHAN HASKELL DOLE |
| THE SPELL OF SWITZERLAND |
| |
| THE PAGE COMPANY |
| 53 Beacon Street Boston, Mass. |
+--------------------------------------------------------+
[Illustration: _The Pass of Killiecrankie_ (_See page 195_)]
THE SPELL OF SCOTLAND
by
KEITH CLARK
Author of "The Spell of Spain," etc.
"A Traveller may lee wi authority." (Scotch Proverb)
[Illustration]
Illustrated
Boston
The Page Company
MDCCCCXVI
Copyright, 1916, by
The Page Company
All rights reserved
First Impression, November, 1916
The Colonial Press
C. H. Simonds Company, Boston, U. S. A.
TO
THE LORD MARISCHAL
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. HAME, HAME, HAME! 1
II. SCOTTS-LAND 24
III. BORDER TOWNS 53
IV. THE EMPRESS OF THE NORTH 82
V. THE KINGDOM OF FIFE 149
VI. TO THE NORTH 171
VII. HIGHLAND AND LOWLAND 194
VIII. THE CIRCLE ROUND 220
IX. THE WESTERN ISLES 252
X. THE LAKES 277
XI. THE WEST COUNTRY 314
BIBLIOGRAPHY 335
INDEX 339
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
THE PASS OF KILLIECRANKIE (_in full colour_)
(_See page 195_) _Frontispiece_
MAP OF SCOTLAND 1
JAMES VI 6
QUEEN MARY 15
JAMES II 25
MELROSE ABBEY 34
ABBOTSFORD (_in full colour_) 41
THE STUDY, ABBOTSFORD 45
ST. MARY'S AISLE AND TOMB OF SIR WALTER SCOTT, DRYBURGH ABBEY 51
JEDBURGH ABBEY 63
HERMITAGE CASTLE 66
NEWARK CASTLE 74
INTERIOR VIEW, TIBBIE SHIEL'S INN 77
ST. MARY'S LAKE 80
EDINBURGH CASTLE (_in full colour_) 86
MONS MEG 90
GREYFRIARS' CHURCHYARD 96
MORAY HOUSE 102
INTERIOR OF ST. GILES 104
JOHN KNOX'S HOUSE 106
JAMES GRAHAM, MARQUIS OF MONTROSE 108
HOLYROOD PALACE 111
JAMES IV 115
MARGARET TUDOR, QUEEN OF JAMES IV 124
BOTHWELL CASTLE (_in full colour_) 131
PRINCES STREET 134
JOHN GRAHAM OF CLAVERHOUSE, VISCOUNT DUNDEE 142
TANTALLON CASTLE 157
ST. ANDREWS CASTLE 165
DRAWING-ROOM, LINLITHGOW PALACE, WHERE QUEEN MARY WAS BORN 184
HUNTINGTON TOWER 190
GLAMIS CASTLE 194
GLEN TILT 197
INVERCAULD HOUSE 200
BALMORAL CASTLE 205
MARISCHAL COLLEGE 207
DUNNOTTAR CASTLE 212
SPYNIE CASTLE 224
CAWDOR CASTLE (_in full colour_) 227
BATTLEFIELD OF CULLODEN 232
THE OLD MAN OF HOY 237
EARL'S PALACE, KIRKWALL 240
INVERGARRY CASTLE 248
KILCHURN CASTLE 258
AROS CASTLE 265
ENTRANCE TO FINGAL'S CAVE 267
CATHEDRAL OF IONA AND ST. MARTIN'S CROSS 273
DUMBARTON CASTLE 282
LOCH KATRINE 289
THE BRIG O' TURK 294
THE TROSSACHS (_in full colour_) 296
STIRLING CASTLE (_in full colour_) 304
DOUNE CASTLE 310
PORTRAIT OF THOMAS CARLYLE, BY WHISTLER 317
AYR RIVER (_in full colour_) 322
BURNS' COTTAGE, BIRTH-PLACE OF ROBERT BURNS, AYR 328
CAERLAVEROCK CASTLE 333
[Illustration: SCOTLAND]
THE
SPELL OF SCOTLAND
CHAPTER I
HAME, HAME, HAME!
"It's hame, and it's hame, hame fain wad I be,
And it's hame, hame, hame, to my ain countree!"
Time was when half a hundred ports ringing round the semi-island of
Scotland invited your boat to make harbour; you could "return" at almost
any point of entry you chose, or chance chose for you.
To-day, if you have been gone for two hundred and fifty years, or if you
never were "of Scotia dear," except as a mere reading person with an
inclination toward romance, you can make harbour after a transatlantic
voyage at but one sea-city, and that many miles up a broad in-reaching
river. Or, you can come up the English roads by Carlisle or by
Newcastle, and cross the Border in the conquering way, which never yet
was all-conquering. There is shipping, of course, out of the half
hundred old harbours. But it is largely the shipping that goes and
comes, fishing boats and coast pliers and the pleasure boats of the
western isles.
You cannot come back from the far corners of the earth--to which
Scotland has sent such majorities of her sons, since the old days when
she squandered them in battle on the Border or on the Continent, to the
new days when she squanders them in colonization so that half a dozen of
her counties show decline in population--but you must come to Glasgow.
The steamers are second-class compared with those which make port
farther south. They are slower. But their very lack of modern splendour
and their slow speed give time in which to reconstruct your Scotland,
out of which perhaps you have been banished since the Covenant, or the
Fifteen, or the Forty Five; or perhaps out of which you have never taken
the strain which makes you romantic and Cavalier, or Presbyterian and
canny. We who have it think that you who have it not lose something very
precious for which there is no substitute. We pity you. More clannish
than most national tribesmen, we cannot understand how you can endure
existence without a drop of Scotch.
Always when I go to Scotland I feel myself returning "home."
Notwithstanding that it is two centuries and a bittock since my clerical
ancestor left his home, driven out no doubt by the fluctuant fortunes of
Covenanter and Cavalier, or, it may be, because he believed he carried
the only true faith in his chalice--only he did not carry a
chalice--and, either he would keep it undefiled in the New World, or he
would share it with the benighted in the New World; I know not.
All that I know is that in spite of the fact that the Scotch in me has
not been replenished since those two centuries and odd, I still feel
that it is a search after ancestors when I go back to Scotland. And, if
a decree of banishment was passed by the unspeakable Hanoverians after
the first Rising, and lands and treasure were forfeited, still I look on
entire Scotland as my demesne. I surrender not one least portion of it.
Not any castle, ruined or restored, is alien to me. Highlander and
Lowlander are my undivisive kin. However empty may seem the moorlands
and the woodlands except of grouse and deer, there is not a square foot
of the twenty-nine thousand seven hundred eighty-five square miles but
is filled for me with a longer procession, if not all of them royal,
than moved ghostly across the vision of Macbeth.
Nothing happens any longer in Scotland. Everything has happened. Quite
true, Scotland may some time reassert itself, demand its independence,
cease from its romantic reliance on the fact that it did furnish to
England, to the British Empire, the royal line, the Stewarts. Even Queen
Victoria, who was so little a Stewart, much more a Hanoverian and a
Puritan, was most proud of her Stewart blood, and regarded her summers
in the Highlands as the most ancestral thing in her experience.
Scotland may at sometime dissolve the Union, which has been a union of
equality, accept the lower estate of a province, an American "state,"
among the possible four of "Great Britain and Ireland," and enter on a
more vigorous provincial life, live her own life, instead of exporting
vigour to the colonies--and her exportation is almost done. She may fill
this great silence which lies over the land, and is fairly audible in
the deserted Highlands, with something of the human note instead of the
call of the plover.
But, for us, for the traveler of to-day, and at least for another
generation, Scotland is a land where nothing happens, where everything
has happened. It has happened abundantly, multitudinously, splendidly.
No one can regret--except he is a reformer and a socialist--the absence
of the doings of to-day; they would be so realistic, so actual, so
small, so of the province and the parish. Whereas in the Golden Age,
which is the true age of Scotland, men did everything--loving and
fighting, murdering and marauding, with a splendour which makes it seem
fairly not of our kind, of another time and of another world.
You must know your Scottish history, you must be filled with Scottish
romance, above all, you must know your poetry and ballads, if you would
rebuild and refill the country as you go. Not only over fair Melrose
lies the moonlight of romance, making the ruin more lovely and more
complete than the abbey could ever have been in its most established
days, but over the entire land there lies the silver pall of moonlight,
making, I doubt not, all things lovelier than in reality.
We truly felt that we should have arranged for "a hundred pipers an' a'
an' a'." But we left King's Cross station in something of disguise. The
cockneys did not know that we were returning to Scotland. Our landing
was to be made as quietly, without pibroch, as when the Old Pretender
landed at Peterhead on the far northeastern corner, or when the Young
Pretender landed at Moidart on the far western rim of the islands. And
neither they nor we pretenders.
The East Coast route is a pleasant way, and I am certain the hundred
pipers, or whoever were the merry musicmakers who led the English troops
up that way when Edward First was king, and all the Edwards who followed
him, and the Richards and the Henrys--they all measured ambition with
Scotland and failed--I am certain they made vastly more noise than this
excellently managed railway which moves across the English landscape
with due English decorum.
We were to stop at Peterborough, and walk out to where, "on that
ensanguined block at Fotheringay," the queenliest queen of them all laid
her head and died that her son, James Sixth of Scotland, might become
First of England. We stopped at York for the minster, and because
Alexander III was here married to Margaret, daughter of Henry III; and
their daughter being married to Eric of Norway in those old days when
Scotland and Norway were kin, became mother to the Maid of Norway,
one of the most pathetic and outstanding figures in Scottish history,
simply because she died--and from her death came divisions to the
kingdom.
[Illustration: JAMES VI.]
We paused at Durham, where in that gorgeous tomb St. Cuthbert lies
buried after a brave and Scottish life. We only looked across the
purpling sea where already the day was fading, where the slant rays of
the sun shone on Lindisfarne, which the spirit of St. Cuthbert must
prefer to Durham.
All unconsciously an old song came to sing itself as I looked across
that wide water--
"My love's in Germanie,
Send him hame, send him hame,
My love's in Germanie,
Fighting for royalty,
He's as brave as brave can be,
Send him hame, send him hame!"
Full many a lass has looked across this sea and sung this lay--and shall
again.
The way is filled with ghosts, long, long processions, moving up and
down the land. A boundary is always a lodestone, a lodeline. Why do men
establish it except that other men dispute it? In the old days England
called it treason for a Borderer, man or woman, to intermarry with
Scotch Borderer. The lure, you see, went far. Even so that kings and
ladies, David and Matilda, in the opposing edges of the Border, married
each other. And always there was Gretna Green.
Agricola came this way, and the Emperor Severus. There is that
interesting, far-journeying Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the "Gil Blas of
the Middle Ages," who later became Pius II. He came to this country by
boat, but becoming afraid of the sea, returned by land, even opposite to
the way we are going. Froissart came, but reports little. Perhaps
Chaucer, but not certainly. George Fox came and called the Scots "a dark
carnal people."
With the Act of Union the stream grows steady and full. There is Ben
Jonson, trudging along the green roadway out yonder; for on foot, and
all the way from London, he came northward to visit William Drummond of
Hawthornden. Who would not journey to such a name? But, alas, a fire
destroyed "my journey into Scotland sung with all the adventures." All
that I know of Ben is that he was impressed with Lomond--two hundred
years before Scott.
And there trails Taylor, "water poet," hoping to rival Rare Ben, on his
"Pennyless Pilgrimage," when he actually went into Scotland without a
penny, and succeeded in getting gold to further him on his way--"Marr,
Murraye, Elgin, Bughan, and the Lord of Erskine, all of these I thank
them, gave me gold to defray my charges in my journey."
James Howell, carries a thin portfolio as he travels the highway. But we
must remember that he wrote his "Perfect Description of the People and
Country of Scotland" in the Fleet.
Here is Doctor Johnson, in a post chaise. Of course, Sir! "Mr. Boswell,
an active lively fellow is to conduct me round the country." And he's
still a lively conductor. Surely you can see the Doctor, in his high
boots, and his very wide brown cloth great coat with pockets which might
be carrying two volumes of his folio dictionary, and in his hand a large
oak staff. One tries to forget that years before this journey he had
said to Boswell, "Sir, the noblest prospect that a Scotchman ever sees
is the highroad that leads him to London." And, was there any malice in
Boswell's final record--"My illustrious friend, being now desirous to be
again in the great theater of life and animated existence"?
The poet Gray preceded him a little, and even John Wesley moves along
the highroad seeking to save Scottish souls as well as English. A few
years afterward James Hogg comes down this way to visit his countryman,
Tammas Carlyle in London; who saw Hogg as "a little red-skinned stiff
rock of a body with quite the common air of an Ettrick shepherd."
There is Scott, many times, from the age of five when he went to Bath,
till that last journey back from Italy--to Dryburgh! And Shadowy Jeanie
Deans comes downward, walking her "twenty-five miles and a bittock a
day," to save her sister from death.
Disraeli comes up this way when he was young and the world was his
oyster. Stevenson passes up and down, sending his merry men up and down.
And one of the most native is William Winter--"With a quick sense of
freedom and of home, I dashed across the Border and was in Scotland."
There is a barricade of the Cheviots stretching across between the two
countries, but the Romans built a Wall to make the division more
apparent. In the dawn of the centuries the Romans came hither, and
attempting to come to Ultima Thule, Picts and Scots--whatever they were,
at least they were brave--met the Romans on the Border, as yet
unreported in the world's history and undefined in the world's
geography, and sent them back into what is England. The Romans in single
journeys, and in certain imperial attempts, did penetrate as far as
Inverness. But they never conquered Scotland. Only Scotland of all the
world held them back. And in order to define their defeat and to place
limits to the unlimited Roman Empire, the Great Wall was built, built by
Hadrian, that men might know where civilization, that splendid thing
called Roman civilization, and barbarism did meet. Scotland was
barbarism. And I think, not in apology but in all pride, she has
remained something of this ever since. Never conquered, never subdued.
The Wall was, in truth, a very palpable thing, stretching from the
Solway to the North Sea at the Tyne, with ample width for the constant
patrol, with lookout towers at regular and frequent intervals, with
soldiers gathered from every corner of the Empire, often the spawn of
it, and with much traffic and with even permanent villas built the
secure side of the barrier. If you meet Puck on Pook's hill, he will
tell you all about it.
Our fast express moves swiftly northward, through the littoral of
Northumberland, as the ship bearing Sister Clare moved through the sea--
"And now the vessel skirts the strand
Of mountainous Northumberland;
Towns, towers, and hills successive rise,
And catch the nun's delighted eyes."
_Berwick_
The voyager enters Berwick with a curious feeling. It is because of the
voyagers who have preceded him that this town is singular among all the
towns of the Empire. It is of the Empire, it is of Britain; but battled
round about, and battled for as it has been since ambitious time began,
it is of neither England nor Scotland. "Our town of Berwick-upon-Tweed,"
as the phrase still runs in the acts of Parliament, and in the royal
proclamations; not England's, not Scotland's. Our town, the King's town.
For it is an independent borough (1551) since the men who fared before
us could not determine which should possess it, and so our very own time
records that history in an actual fact. I do not suppose the present
serious-looking, trades-minded people of the city, with their dash of
fair Danish, remember their singular situation day by day. The tumult
and the shouting have died which made "the Border" the most embattled
place in the empire, and Berwick-upon-Tweed the shuttlecock in this
international game of badminton.
It is a dual town at the best. But what has it not witnessed, what
refuge, what pawn, has it not been, this capital of the Debatable Land,
this Key of the Border.
The Tweed is here spanned by the Royal Border Bridge, opened in 1850,
and called "the last Act of Union." But there is another bridge, a Roman
bridge of many spans, antique looking as the Roman-Moorish-Spanish
bridge at Cordova, and as antique as 1609, an Act of Union following
swiftly on the footsteps of King James VI--who joyously paused here to
fire a salute to himself, on his way to the imperial throne.
The walls of Berwick, dismantled in 1820 and become a promenade for
peaceful townsfolk and curious sightseers, date no farther back than
Elizabeth's time. But she had sore need of them; for this "our town,"
was the refuge for her harriers on retaliatory Border raids,
particularly that most terrible Monday-to-Saturday foray of 1570, that
answer to an attempt to reassert the rights of Mary, when fifty castles
and peels and three hundred villages were laid waste in order that
Scotland might know that Elizabeth was king.
It was her kingly father, the Eighth Henry, who ordered Hertford into
Scotland--"There to put all to fire and sword, to burn Edinburgh town,
and to raze and deface it, when you have sacked it and gotten what you
can of it, as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the
vengeance of God lighted upon it for their falsehood and disloyalty.
Sack Holyrood House and as many towns and villages about Edinburgh as ye
conveniently can. Sack Leith and burn it and subvert it, and all the
rest, putting man, woman and child to fire and sword without exception,
when any resistance is made against you. And this done, pass over to the
Fife land, and extend like extremities and destructions in all towns and
villages whereunto ye may reach conveniently, not forgetting among the
rest, so to spoil and turn upside down the Cardinal's town of St.
Andrews, as the upper stone may be the nether, and not one stick stand
by another, sparing no creature alive within the same, especially such
as either in friendship or blood be allied to the Cardinal. The
accomplishment of all this shall be most acceptable to the Majesty and
Honour of the King."
Berwick has known gentler moments, even marrying and giving in marriage.
It was at this Border town that David, son of the Bruce, and Joanna,
sister of Edward III, were united in marriage. Even then did the
kingdoms seek an Act of Union. And Prince David was four, and Princess
Joanna was six. There was much feasting by day and much revelry by
night, among the nobles of the two realms, while, no doubt, the babies
nodded drowsily.
[Illustration: QUEEN MARY.]
At Berwick John Knox united himself in marriage with Margaret Stewart,
member of the royal house of Stewart, cousin, if at some remove, from
that Stewart queen who belonged to "the monstrous regiment of women,"
and to whose charms even the Calvinist John was sensitive. One remembers
that at Berwick John was fifty, and Margaret was sixteen.
There is not much in Berwick to hold the attention, unless one would
dine direct on salmon trout just drawn frae the Tweed. There are
memories, and modern content with what is modern.
Perhaps the saddest eyes that ever looked on the old town were those of
Queen Mary, as she left Jedburgh, after her almost fatal illness, and
after her hurried ride to the Hermitage to see Bothwell, and just before
the fatal affair in Kirk o' Field. Even then, and even with her spirit
still unbroken, she felt the coming of the end. "I am tired of my life,"
she said more than once to Le Croc, French ambassador, on this journey
as she circled about the coast and back to Edinburgh.
She rode toward Berwick with an escort of a thousand men, and looked
down on the town from Halidon Hill, on the west, where two hundred years
before (1333) the Scots under the regent Douglass had suffered defeat by
the English.
It was an old town then, and belonged to Elizabeth. But it looked much
as it does to-day; the gray walls, so recently built; the red roofs,
many of them sheltering Berwickians to-day; the church spires, for men
worshiped God in those days in churches, and according to the creeds
that warred as bitterly as crowns; masts in the offing, whence this last
time one might take ship to France, that pleasant smiling land so
different from this dour realm. At all these Mary must have looked
wistfully and weariedly, as the royal salute was fired for this errant
queen. She looked also, over the Border, then becoming a hard-and-fast
boundary, and down the long, long road to Fotheringay, and to peace at
last and honour, in the Abbey.
It is well to stand upon this hill, before you go on to the West and the
Border, or on to the North and the gray metropolis, that you may
appreciate both the tragedy and the triumph that is Scotland's and was
Mary's. The North Sea is turning purple far out on the horizon, and
white sea birds are flying across beyond sound. The long level light of
the late afternoon is coming up over England. In the backward of the
Border a plaintive curlew is crying in the West, as he has cried since
the days of Mary, and æons before.
_Flodden_
You may go westward from here, by train and coach, and carriage and on
foot, to visit this country where every field has been a battlefield,
where ruined peel towers finally keep the peace, where castles are in
ruins, and a few stately modern homes proclaim the permanence of
Scottish nobility; and where there is no bird and no flower unsung by
Scottish minstrelsy, or by Scott. Scott is, of course, the poet and
prose laureate of the Border. "Marmion" is the lay, almost the
guide-book. It should be carried with you, either in memory or in
pocket.
If the day is not too far spent, the afternoon sun too low, you can make
Norham Castle before twilight, even as Marmion made it when he opened
the first canon of Scott's poem--
"Day set on Norham's castle steep
And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep,
And Cheviot's mountains lone;
The battled towers, the donjon keep,
The loophole grates, where captives weep,
The flanking walls that round it sweep,
In yellow luster shone."
There is but a fragment of that castle remaining, and this, familiar to
those who study Turner in the National Gallery. A little village with
one broad street and curiously receding houses attempts to live in the
shadow of this memory. The very red-stone tower has stood there at the
top of the steep bank since the middle Eleven Hundreds. Henry II held it
as a royal castle, while his craven son John--not so craven in
battle--regarded it as the first of his fortresses. Edward I made it his
headquarters while he pretended to arbitrate the rival claims of the
Scottish succession, and to establish himself as the Lord Superior. On
the green hill of Holywell nearby he received the submission of Scotland
in 1291--the submission of Scotland!
Ford castle is a little higher up the river, where lodged the dubious
lady with whom the king had dalliance in those slack days preceding
Flodden--the lady who had sung to him in Holyrood the challenging ballad
of "Young Lochinvar!" James was ever a Stewart, and regardful of the
ladies.
"What checks the fiery soul of James,
Why sits the champion of dames
Inactive on his steed?"
The Norman tower of Ford (the castle has been restored), called the
King's tower, looks down on the battlefield, and in the upper room,
called the King's room, there is a carved fireplace carrying the
historic footnote--
"King James ye 4th of Scotland did lye
here at Ford castle, A. D. 1513."
Somehow one hopes that the lady was not sparring for time and Surrey,
and sending messages to the advancing Earl, but truly loved this Fourth
of the Jameses, grandfather to his inheriting granddaughter.
Coldstream is the station for Flodden. But the village, lying a mile
away on the Scotch side of the Tweed, has memories of its own. It was
here that the most famous ford was found between the two countries,
witness and way to so many acts of disunion; from the time when Edward
I, in 1296, led his forces through it into Scotland, to the time when
Montrose, in 1640, led his forces through it into England.
"There on this dangerous ford and deep
Where to the Tweed Leet's eddies creep
He ventured desperately."
The river was spanned by a five-arch bridge in 1763, and it was over
this bridge that Robert Burns crossed into England. He entered
the day in his diary, May 7, 1787. "Coldstream--went over to
England--Cornhill--glorious river Tweed--clear and majestic--fine
bridge."
It was the only time Burns ever left Scotland, ever came into England.
And here he knelt down, on the green lawn, and prayed the prayer that
closes "The Cotter's Saturday Night"--
"O Thou who pour'd the patriot tide
That streamed through Wallace's undaunted heart,
Who dared to nobly stem tyrannic pride
Or nobly die, the second glorious part,
(The patriot's God, peculiarly Thou art,
His friend, inspirer, guardian and reward!)
O never, never, Scotia's realm desert;
But still the patriot and the patriot bard,
In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard!"
Surely a consecration of this crossing after its centuries of unrest.
General Monk spent the winter of 1659 in Coldstream, lodging in a house
east of the market-place, marked with its tablet. And here he raised
the first of the still famous Coldstream Guards, to bring King Charles
"o'er the water" back to the throne. Coldstream is the Gretna Green of
this end of the Border, and many a runaway couple, noble and simple, has
been married in the inn.
Four miles south of Coldstream in a lonely part of this lonely
Border--almost the echoes are stilled, and you hear nothing but
remembered bits of Marmion as you walk the highway--lies Flodden Field.
It was the greatest of Scotch battles, not even excepting Bannockburn;
greatest because the Scotch are greatest in defeat.
It was, or so it seemed to James, because his royal brother-in-law Henry
VIII was fighting in France, an admirable time wherein to advance into
England. James had received a ring and a glove and a message, from Anne
of Brittany, bidding him
"Strike three strokes with Scottish brand
And march three miles on Scottish land
And bid the banners of his band
In English breezes dance."
James was not the one to win at Flodden, notwithstanding that he had
brought a hundred thousand men to his standard. They were content to
raid the Border, and he to dally at Ford.
"O for one hour of Wallace wight,
Or well skill'd Bruce to rule the fight,
And cry--'Saint Andrew and our right!'
Another sight had seen that morn
From Fate's dark book a leaf been torn,
And Flodden had been Bannockburn!"
The very thud of the lines carries you along, if you have elected to
walk through the countryside, green now and smiling faintly if deserted,
where it was brown and sere in September, 1513. One should be repeating
his "Marmion," as Scott thought out so many of its lines riding over
this same countryside. It is a splendid, a lingering battle picture--
"And first the ridge of mingled spears
Above the brightening cloud appears;
And in the smoke the pennon flew,
As in the storm the white sea mew,
Then mark'd they, dashing broad and far,
The broken billows of the war;
And plumed crests of chieftains brave,
Floating like foam upon the wave,
But nought distinct they see.
Wide ranged the battle on the plain;
Spears shook, and falchions flash'd amain,
Fell England's arrow flight like rain,
Crests rose and stooped and rose again
Wild and disorderly."
Thousands were lost on both sides. But the flower of England was in
France, while the flower of Scotland was here; and slain--the king,
twelve earls, fifteen lords and chiefs, an archbishop, the French
ambassador, and many French captains.
You walk back from the Field, and all the world is changed. The green
haughs, the green woodlands, seem even in the summer sun to be dun and
sere, and those burns which made merry on the outward way--can it be
that there are red shadows in their waters? It is not "Marmion" but Jean
Elliott's "Flower of the Forest" that lilts through the memory--
"Dule and wae was the order sent our lads to the Border,
The English for once by guile won the day;
The Flowers of the Forest that foucht aye the foremost,
The pride of our land are cauld in the clay.
"We'll hear nae mair liltin' at the eve milkin',
Women and bairns are heartless and wae;
Sighin' and moanin' on ilka green loanin'--
The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away."
I know not by what alchemy the Scots are always able to win our sympathy
to their historic tragedies, or why upon such a field as Flodden, and
many another, the tragedy seems but to have just happened, the loss is
as though of yesterday.
CHAPTER II
SCOTTS-LAND
It is possible to enter the Middle Marches from Berwick; in truth, Kelso
lies scarcely farther from Flodden than does Berwick. But Flodden is on
English soil to-day, and memory is content to let it lie there. These
Middle Marches however are so essentially Scottish, the splendour and
the romance, the history and the tragedy, that one would fain keep them
so, and come upon them as did the kings from David I, or even the Celtic
kings before him, who sought refuge from the bleak Scottish north in
this smiling land of dales and haughs, of burns and lochs. Not at any
moment could life become monotonous even in this realm of romance, since
the Border was near, and danger and dispute so imminent, so incessant.
Preferably then one goes from Edinburgh (even though never does one go
from that city, "mine own romantic town," but with regret; not even
finally when one leaves it and knows one will not return till next
time) to Melrose; as Scottish kings of history and story have passed
before. There was James II going to the siege of Roxburgh, and not
returning; there was James IV going to the field of Flodden and not
returning; there was James V going to hunt the deer; there was James VI
going up to London to be king; Mary Queen on that last journey to the
South Countrie; Charles I and Charles II losing and getting a crown;
Charles III--let us defy history and call the Bonnie Prince by his
title--when he went so splendidly after Prestonpans.
[Illustration: JAMES II.]
It is a royal progress, out of Edinburgh into the Middle Marches; past
Dalkeith where James IV rode to meet and marry Margaret of England; past
Borthwick, where Queen Mary spent that strange hot-trod honeymoon with
Bothwell--of all place of emotion this is the most difficult to realize,
and I can but think Mary's heart was broken here, and the heartbreak at
Carberry Hill was but an echo of this; past Lauder, where the nobles of
ignoble James III hung his un-noble favourite from the stone arch of the
bridge; into the level rays of a setting sun--always the setting sun
throws a more revealing light than that of noonday over this Scotland.
_Melrose_
I remember on my first visit to Melrose, of course during my first visit
to Scotland, I scheduled my going so as to arrive there in the evening
of a night when the moon would be at the full. I had seen it shine
gloriously on the front of York, splendidly on the towers of Durham.
What would it not be on fair Melrose, viewed aright?
I hurried northward, entered Edinburgh only to convey my baggage, and
then closing my eyes resolutely to all the glory and the memory that lay
about, I went southward through the early twilight. I could see, would
see, nothing before Melrose.
The gates of the Abbey were, of course, closed. But I did not wish to
enter there until the magic hour should strike. The country round about
was ineffably lovely in the rose light of the vanishing day.
"Where fair Tweed flows round holy Melrose
And Eildon slopes to the plain."
The Abbey was, of course, the center of thought continually, and its
red-gray walls caught the light of day and the coming shadows of night
in a curious effect which no picture can report; time has dealt
wondrously with this stone, leaving the rose for the day, the gray for
the night.
I wandered about, stopping in the empty sloping market-place to look at
the Cross, which is as old as the Abbey; looking at the graveyard which
surrounds the Abbey, where men lie, common men unsung in Scottish
minstrelsy, except as part of the great hosts, men who heard the news
when it was swift and fresh from Bannockburn, and Flodden, and Culloden;
and where men and women still insert their mortality into this
immortality--Elizabeth Clephane who wrote the "Ninety and Nine" lies
there; and out into the country and down by the Tweed toward the Holy
Pool, the Haly Wheel, to wonder if when I came again in the middle
night, I, too, should see the white lady rise in mist from the waters,
this lady of Bemersyde who had loved a monk of Melrose not wisely but
very well, and who drowned herself in this water where the monk in
penance took daily plunges, come summer, come winter. How often this is
the Middle-Age penalty!
Far across the shimmering green meadows and through the fragrant
orchards came the sound of bagpipes--on this my first evening in
Scotland! And whether or not you care for the pipes, there is nothing
like them in a Scottish twilight, a first Scottish twilight, to
reconstruct all the Scotland that has been.
The multitudes and the individuals came trooping back. At a time of
famine these very fields were filled with huts, four thousand of them,
for always the monks had food, and always they could perform miracles
and obtain food; which they did. That for the early time. And for the
late, the encampment of Leslie's men in these fields before the day when
they slaughtered Montrose's scant band of royalists at Philipshaugh, and
sent that most splendid figure in late Scottish history as a fugitive to
the north, and to the scaffold.
I knew that in the Abbey before the high altar lay the high heart of The
Bruce, which had been carried to Spain and to the Holy Land, by order of
Bruce, since death overtook him before he could make the pilgrimage.
Lord James Douglass did battle on the way against the Moslems in
southern Spain, where "a Douglass! a Douglass!" rang in battle clash
against "Allah, illah, allah," and the Douglass himself was slain. The
heart of The Bruce flung against the infidel, was recovered and sent on
to Jerusalem, and then back to Melrose. The body of Douglass was brought
back to Scotland, to St. Bride's church in Douglass, and his heart also
lies before the high altar of Melrose. "In their death they were not
divided."
There lies also buried Michael Scot
"Buried on St. Michael's night,
When the bell toll'd one and the moon was bright."
On such a night as this, I hoped. And Scot is fit companion for the
twilight. This strange wizard of a strange time was born in Upper
Tweedale, which is the district of Merlin--the older wizard lies buried
in a green mound near Drummelzier. Michael traveled the world over,
Oxford, Paris, Bologna, Palermo, Toledo, and finally, perhaps because
his wizardry had sent him like a wandering Jew from place to place, back
to the Border, his home country, where he came and served the Evil One.
Dante places him in the Purgatory of those who attempt blasphemously to
tear the veil of the future. The thirteenth century was not the time in
which to increase knowledge, whether of this world or the next. Even
to-day perhaps we save a remnant of superstition, and we would not boast
"I could say to thee
The words that cleft the Eildon hills in three."
Very dark against the gathering dark of the night sky rose the Eildon
hills above, cleft in three by the wizardry of Scot. To that height on
the morrow I should climb, for it is there that Sir Walter Scott, a
later wizard, had carried our Washington Irving, just a century ago, and
shown him all this Borderland--which lay about me under the increasing
cover of night.
"I can stand on the Eildon Hill and point out forty-three places famous
in war and verse," Sir Walter said to our Irving. "I have brought you,
like a pilgrim in the Pilgrim's Progress, to the top of the Delectable
Mountains, that I may show you all the goodly regions hereabouts. Yonder
is Lammermuir and Smailholm; and there you have Galashiels and
Torwoodelee and Gala Water; and in that direction you see Teviotdale and
the Braes of Yarrow; and Ettrick stream winding along like a silver
thread to throw itself into the Tweed. It may be pertinacity, but to my
eye, these gray hills and all this wild Border country have beauties
peculiar to themselves. When I have been for some time in the rich
scenery about Edinburgh, which is like an ornamented garden land, I
begin to wish myself back again among my own honest gray hills; and if I
did not see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die."
On the morrow. But for to-night it was enough to remember that perfect
picture as imagination painted it in Andrew Lang's verse--
"Three crests against the saffron sky,
Beyond the purple plain,
The kind remembered melody
Of Tweed once more again.
"Wan water from the Border hills,
Dear voice from the old years,
Thy distant music lulls and stills,
And moves to quiet tears.
"Like a loved ghost thy fabled flood
Fleets through the dusky land;
Where Scott, come home to die, has stood,
My feet returning, stand.
"A mist of memory broods and floats,
The Border waters flow;
The air is full of ballad notes
Borne out of long ago.
"Old songs that sung themselves to me,
Sweet through a boy's day dream,
While trout below the blossom'd tree
Plashed in the golden stream.
"Twilight, and Tweed, and Eildon Hill,
Fair and too fair you be;
You tell me that the voice is still
That should have welcomed me."
I did not miss the voice, any of the voices. They whispered, they sang,
they crooned, they keened, about me. For this was Melrose, _mael ros_,
so the old Celtic goes, "the naked headland in the wood." And I was
seeing, was hearing, what I have come to see and hear; I, a Scot, if far
removed, if in diluted element, and Scott's from the reading days of
Auld Lang Syne.
And should I not within the moonlight see the white lady rise from the
Haly Wheel? And should I not see the moonlight flooding the Abbey,
Melrose Abbey? Out of a remembered yesterday, out of a confident
midnight--surely there was a budding morrow in this midnight--I
remembered the lines--
"If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright,
Go visit it by the pale moonlight;
For the gay beams of lightsome day
Gild but to flout the ruins gray.
When the broken arches are black in night,
And each shafted oriel glimmers white,
When the cold light's uncertain shower
Streams on the ruined central tower;
When buttress and buttress alternately
Seem framed of ebon and ivory;
When silver edges the imagery,
And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die;
When distant Tweed is heard to rave,
And the owlet to hoot o'er the dead man's grave,
Then go--but go alone the while--
Then view St. David's ruined pile;
And, home returning, soothly swear
Was never scene so sad and fair."
The moon did not rise that night.
I walked about the fields, lingered about the Cross in the market,
looked expectantly at the Abbey, until two in the morning.
"It was near the ringing of matin bell,
The night was well nigh done."
The moon did not rise, and neither did the white lady. It was not
because there was a mist, a Scottish mist, over the heavens; they were
clear, the stars were shining, and the pole star held true, Charles'
wain--as Charles should in Bonnie Scotland--held true to the pole. But
it was a late July moon, and those Eildon hills and their circling kin
rose so high against the night sky--daytime they seemed modest
enough--that the moon in this latitude as far north as Sitka did not
circle up the sky. Neither does the sun in winter, so the guardian
explained to me next day.
Fair Melrose is fairest, o' nights, at some later or earlier time of the
year. It was then that I resolved to return in December, on December 27,
when the festival of St. John's is celebrated with torch lights in the
ruins of the Abbey--and Michael Scot comes back to his own! But then I
reflected that the moon is not always full on the Eve of St. John's.
"I cannot come, I must not come,
I dare not come to thee,
On the Eve of St. John's, I must walk alone,
In thy bower I may not be."
I chose, years later, an October moon, in which to see it "aright."
Viewed by day, Melrose is surely fair; fair enough to enchant mortal
vision. It is the loveliest ruin in the land where reform has meant
ruin, and where from Kelso to Elgin, shattered fanes of the faith
proclaim how variable is the mind of man through the generations, and
how hostile when it forsakes.
Melrose is an old foundation. In truth the monastery was established at
old Melrose, two miles farther down the Tweed, and is so lovely, so
dramatic a corner of the Tweed, that Dorothy Woodsworth declared, "we
wished we could have brought the ruins of Melrose to this spot." She
missed the nearby murmur of the river as we do.
This oldest harbour of Christianity was founded in the pagan world by
monks from Iona. Therefore by way of Ireland and not from Rome, blessed
by Saint Columba sixty years before Saint Augustine came to
Canterbury. It was the chief "island" between Iona and Lindisfarne. Very
haughty were these monks of the West. "Rome errs, Alexandria errs, all
the world errs; only the Scots and the Britons are in the right." There
is surely something still left of the old spirit in Scotia, particularly
in spiritual Scotia.
[Illustration: MELROSE ABBEY.]
Near Melrose was born that Cuthbert who is the great saint of the North,
either side the Border, and who lies in the midst of the splendour of
Durham. A shepherd, he watched his sheep on these very hills round about
us, and saw, when abiding in the fields, angels ascending and descending
on golden ladders. Entering Melrose as a novice he became prior in 664,
and later prior at Lindisfarne. When the monks were driven from the Holy
Island by the Danes they carried the body of St. Cuthbert with them for
seven years, and once it rested at Melrose--
"O'er northern mountain, march and moor,
From sea to sea, from shore to shore,
Seven years St. Cuthbert's corpse they bore,
They rested them in fair Melrose;
But though alive he loved it well,
Not there his relics might repose."
When King David came to the making of Scotland, he came into the Middle
Marches, and finding them very lovely--even as you and I--this "sair
sanct to the Croon," as his Scottish royal descendant, James VI saw
him--and James would have fell liked to be a saint, but he could
accomplish neither sinner nor saint, because Darnley crossed Mary in his
veins--David determined to build him fair Abbeys. Of which, Melrose,
"St. David's ruined pile," is the fairest. He brought Cistercians from
Rievaulx in Yorkshire, to supplant the Culdees of Iona, and they builded
them a beautiful stone Melrose to supplant the wooden huts of old
Melrose. It centered a very active monastic life, where pavements were
once smooth and lawns were close-clipped, and cowled monks in long robes
served God, and their Abbot lorded it over lords, even equally with
kings.
But it stood on the highway between Dunfermline and London, between
English and Scottish ambitions. And it fell before them. Edward I spared
it because the Abbots gave him fealty. But Edward II, less royal in
power and in taste, destroyed it. The Bruce rebuilded it again, greater
splendour rising out of complete ruin. When Richard II came to Scotland
he caused the Abbey to be pillaged and burned. And when Hertford came
for Henry VIII, after the Thirty Nine Articles had annulled respect for
buildings under the protection of Rome, the final ruin came to St.
David's church-palace. Yet, late as 1810, church service, reformed, of
course, was held in a roofed-over part of the Abbey ruin. To-day it is
under the protection of the Dukes of Buccleuch. And, we remember as we
stand here, while the beams of lightsome day gild the ruin, the mottoes
of the great family of the Border, _Luna Cornua Reparabit_, which being
interpreted is, "There'll be moonlight again." Then to light the raids,
the reiving that refilled the larder. But to-morrow for scenic effect.
Examined in this daylight, the beauty of Melrose surely loses very
little. It is one of the most exquisite ruins in the United Kingdom,
perhaps second to Tintern, but why compare? It is of finest Gothic, out
of France, not out of England. In its general aspect it is nobly
magnificent--
"The darken'd roof rose high aloof
On pillars, lofty, light and small;
The keystone that locked each ribbed aisle
Was a fleur de lys or a quatre feuille,
The corbels were carved grotesque and grim;
And the pillars with clustered shafts so trim,
With base and with capital flourish'd around
Seem'd bundles of lances which garlands had bound."
And, as a chief detail which yields not to Tintern or any other, is the
east window over the high altar, through which the moon and sun shines
on those buried hearts--
"The moon on the east oriel shone
Through slender shafts of shapely stone,
By foliaged tracery combined.
Thou would'st have thought some fairy'd hand
'Twixt poplars straight the osier wand
In many a freakish knot had twined,
Then framed a spell when the work was done,
And changed the willow wreaths to stone.
The silver light, so pale and faint,
Showed many a prophet and many a saint,
Whose image on the glass was dyed,
Full in the midst his cross of red
Triumphant Michael brandish'd,
And trampled on the Apostate's pride;
The moonbeams kissed the holy pane,
And threw on the pavement a bloody stain."
_Abbotsford_
If "Scott restored Scotland," he built the "keep" which centers all the
Scott-land of the Border side.
Two miles above Melrose, a charming walk leads to Abbotsford; redeemed
out of a swamp into at least the most memory-filled mansion of all the
land. Scott, like the monks, could not leave the silver wash of the
Tweed; and, more loving than those who dwelt at Melrose and Dryburgh, he
placed his Abbot's House where the rippling sound was within a stone's
throw.
The Tweed is such a storied stream that as you walk along, sometimes
across sheep-cropped meadows, sometimes under the fragant rustling bough
and athwart the shifting shadows of oak, ash, and thorn--Puck of Pook's
hill must have known the Border country in its most embroidered
days--you cannot tell whether or not the deep quiet river is the noblest
you have seen, or the storied hills about are less than the Delectable
mountains.
The name "Tweed" suggests romance--unless instead of having read your
Scott you have come to its consciousness through the homespun, alas,
to-day too often the factory-spun woolens, which are made throughout all
Scotland, but still in greatest length on Tweedside.
Dorothy Wordsworth, winsome marrow, who loved the country even better
than William, I trow--only why remark it when he himself recognized how
his vision was quickened through her companionship?--has spoke the word
Tweed--"a name which has been sweet in my ears almost as far back as I
can remember anything."
The river comes from high in the Cheviot hills, where East and West
Marches merge and where--
"Annan, Tweed, and Clyde
Rise a' out o' ae hillside."
And down to the sea it runs, its short hundred miles of story--
"All through the stretch of the stream,
To the lap of Berwick Bay."
As you walk along Tweedside, you feel its enchantment, you feel the
sorrow of the thousands who through the centuries have exiled themselves
from its banks, because of war, or because of poverty, or because of
love--
"Therefore I maun wander abroad,
And lay my banes far frae the Tweed."
But now, you are returned, you are on your way to Abbotsford, there are
the Eildons, across the river you get a glimpse of the Catrail, that
sunken way that runs along the boundary for one-half its length, and may
have been a fosse, or may have been a concealed road of the Romans or
what not. Scott once leaped his horse across it, nearly lost his life,
and did lose his confidence in his horsemanship.
[Illustration: _Abbotsford_]
"And all through the summer morning
I felt it a joy indeed
To whisper again and again to myself,
This is the voice of the Tweed."
It is not possible to approach Abbotsford, as it should be approached,
from the riverside, the view with which one is familiar, the view the
pictures carry. Or, it can be done if one would forego the walk, take it
in the opposite direction, and come hither by rail from Galashiels--that
noisy modern factory town, once the housing place for Melrose pilgrims,
which to-day speaks nothing of the romance of Gala water, and surely not
these factory folk "can match the lads o' Gala Water." It is a short
journey, and railway journeys are to be avoided in this land of
by-paths. But there, across the water, looking as the pictures have it,
and as Scott would have it, rises Abbotsford, turreted and towered,
engardened and exclusive.
It stands on low level ground, for it is redeemed out of a duckpond, out
of Clarty hole. Sir Walter wished to possess the Border, or as much of
it as might be, so he made this first purchase of a hundred acres in
1811. As he wrote to James Ballantyne--
"I have resolved to purchase a piece of ground sufficient for a cottage
and a few fields. There are two pieces, either of which would suit me,
but both would make a very desirable property indeed, and could be had
for between 7,000 and 8,000 pounds, or either separate for about half
that sum. I have serious thoughts of one or both."
He began with one, and fourteen years later, when the estate had
extended to a thousand acres, to the inclusion of many fields,
sheep-cropped and story-haunted, he entered in his diary--
"Abbotsford is all I can make it, so I am resolved on no more building,
and no purchases of land till times are more safe."
By that time the people of the countryside called him "the Duke," he had
at least been knighted, and was, in truth, the Chief of the Border; a
royal ambition which I doubt not he cherished from those first days when
he read Percy under a platanus.
He paid fabulous prices for romantic spots, and I think would have
bought the entire Border if the times had become safer, in those scant
seven years that were left to him. Even Scott could be mistaken, for he
bought what he believed was Huntlie Bank, where True Thomas had his love
affair with the fair ladye--
"True Thomas lay on Huntlie Bank;
A ferlie he spied wi' his e'e;
And there he saw a ladye bright
Come riding down by the Eildon tree.
"Her skirt was o' the grass-green silk,
Her mantle o' the velvet fyne;
At ilka tett o' her horse's mane
Hung fifty siller bells and nine."
And now the experts tell us that it is not Huntlie Bank at all, but that
is in an entirely different direction, over toward Ercildoune and the
Rhymer's Tower.
There is a satisfaction in this to those of us who believe in fairies
and in Scott. For fairies have no sense of place or of time. And of
course if they knew that Scott wished them to have lived at his Huntlie
Bank, they straightway would have managed to have lived there. Always,
as you go through this land of romance, or any romance land, and wise
dull folk dispute, you can console yourself that Scott also was
mistaken(?).
The castle began with a small cottage, not this great pile of gray stone
we can see from the railway carriage across the Tweed, into which we
make our humble way through a wicket gate, a restrained walk, and a
basement doorway. "My dreams about my cottage go on," he wrote to
Joanna Baillie, as we all dream of building cottages into castles. "My
present intention is to have only two spare bedrooms," but "I cannot
relinquish my Border principles of accommodating all the cousins and
duniwastles, who will rather sleep on chairs, and on the floor, and in
the hay-loft, than be absent when folks are gathered together."
So we content ourselves with being duniwastles, whatever that may be,
and are confident that Sir Walter if he were alive would give us the
freedom of the castle.
In any event, if we feel somewhat robbed of any familiar intercourse, we
can remember that Ruskin called this "perhaps the most incongruous pile
that gentlemanly modernism ever designed." This may content the
over-sensitive who are prevented ever hearing the ripple of the Tweed
through the windows.
Scott was a zealous relic hunter, and if you like relics, if you can
better conjure up persons through a sort of transubstantiation of
personality that comes by looking on what the great have possessed,
there can be few private collections more compelling than this of
Abbotsford.
[Illustration: THE STUDY, ABBOTSFORD.]
In the library are such significant hints for reconstruction as the
blotting book wherewith Napoleon cleared his record, the crucifix on
which Queen Mary prayed, the quaigh of her great great and last
grandson, the tumbler from which Bobbie Burns drank--one of them--the
purse into which Rob Roy thrust his plunder, the pocket book of Flora
MacDonald, which held nothing I fear from the generosity of the Bonnie
Prince.
In the armoury are Scott's own gun, Rob Roy's gun, dirk and skene dhu,
the sword of Montrose, given to that last of the great Cavaliers by his
last king, Charles I, the pistol of Claverhouse, the pistol of Napoleon,
a hunting flask of James III; and here are the keys of Loch Leven
castle, dropped in the lake by Mary Queen's boatman; and the keys of the
Edinburgh Tolbooth turned on so many brave men, yes, and fair women, in
the old dividing days, of Jacobite and Covenanter.
The library of Scott, twenty thousand volumes, still lines the shelves,
and one takes particular interest in this place, and its little stairway
whereby ascent is made to the balcony, also book-lined, and escape
through a little doorway. When Scott first came to the cottage of
Abbotsford he wrote, furiously, in a little window embrasure with only a
curtain between him and the domestic world. Here he had not only a
library, but a study, where still stands the desk at which the
Waverleys were written, and the well-worn desk chair.
After he had returned from Italy, whither he went in search of health
and did not find it, he felt, one day, a return of the old desire to
write, the ruling passion. He was wheeled to the desk, he took the
pen,--nothing came. He sank back and burst into tears. As Lockhart
reports it--"It was like Napoleon resigning his empire. The scepter had
departed from Judah; Scott was to write no more."
Scott has always seemed like a contemporary. Not because of his novels;
I fear the Waverleys begin to read a little stilted to the young
generation, and there are none left to lament with Lowell that he had
read all of Scott and now he could never read him all over again for the
first time. It is rather because Scott the man is so immortal that he
seems like a man still living; or at least like one who died but
yesterday. Into the dining-room where we cannot go--and perhaps now that
we think it over it is as well--he was carried in order that out of it
he might look his last on "twilight and Tweed and Eildon hill." And
there he died, even so long ago as September, 1832.
"It was a beautiful day," that day we seem almost to remember as we
stand here in the vivid after glow, "so warm that every window was wide
open, and so peacefully still that the sound of all others most
delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed, was distinctly
audible."
_Dryburgh_
Five days after they carried him to rest in the Abbey--rival certainly
in this instance of The Abbey of England, where is stored so much
precious personal dust. The time had become thrawn; dark skies hung over
the Cheviots and the Eildon, and over the haughs of Ettrick and Yarrow;
the silver Tweed ran leaden, and moaned in its going; there was a
keening in the wind.
The road from Abbotsford past Melrose to Dryburgh is--perhaps--the
loveliest walk in the United Kingdom; unless it be the road from
Coventry past Kenilworth to Stratford. It was by this very way that
there passed the funeral train of Scott, the chief carriage drawn by
Scott's own horses. Thousands and thousands of pilgrims have followed
that funeral train; one goes to Holy Trinity in Stratford, to the
Invalides in Paris, but one walks to Dryburgh through the beautiful
Tweedside which is all a shrine to Sir Walter.
The road runs away from the river to the little village of Darnick, with
its ivy-shrouded tower, across the meadows to the bridge across the
river, with the ringing of bells in the ear. For it was ordered on that
September day of 1832, by the Provost, "that the church bell shall toll
from the time the funeral procession reaches Melrose Bridge till it
passes the village of Newstead."
I do not suppose the people of this countryside, who look at modern
pilgrims so sympathetically, so understandingly, have ever had time to
forget; the stream of pilgrims has been so uninterrupted for nearly a
century. Through the market-place of Melrose it passed, the sloping
stony square, where people of the village pass and repass on their
little village errands. And it did not stop at the Abbey.
The day was thickening into dusk then; it is ripening into sunset glory
to-day. And the Abbey looks very lovely, and very lonely. And one
wonders if Michael Scot did not call to Walter Scott to come and join
the quiet there, and if the dust that once was the heart of Bruce did
not stir a little as the recreator of Scotland was carried by.
To the village of Newstead you move on; with the sound of immemorial
bells falling on the ear, and pass through the little winding
street--and wonder if the early Roman name of Trimontium, triple
mountains, triple Eildon, was its first call name out of far antiquity
as Scott believed.
Then the road ascends between hedgerows, and begins to follow the Tweed
closely--and perhaps you meet pilgrims on Leaderfoot bridge who have
come the wrong way. There is a steep climb to the heights of Bemersyde,
where on the crest all Melrose Glen lies beautifully storied before you.
And here you pause--as did those horses of Scott's, believing their
master would fain take one last look at his favourite view.
There is no lovelier landscape in the world, or in Scotland. The blue
line of the Cheviots bars back the world, the Dunion, the Ruberslaw, the
Eildon rise, and in the great bend of the river with richly wooded braes
about is the site of Old Melrose. Small wonder he paused to take
farewell of all the country he had loved so well.
The road leads on past Bemersyde village with woodlands on either side,
and to the east, near a little loch, stands Sandyknowe Tower.
Near the tower lies the remnant of the village of Smailholm, where Scott
was sent out of Edinburgh when only three years old. It is in truth his
birthplace, for without the clear air of the Border he would have
followed the other Scott children; and without the romance of the Border
he might have been merely a barrister.
Sandyknowe is brave in spite of its ruin, for it is built of the very
stone of the eternal hills, and has become part of the hills. From its
balcony, sixty feet high, a beautiful Scottish panorama may be glimpsed,
and here Scott brought Turner to make his sketch of the Border. And
here, because a kinsman agreed to save Sandyknowe Tower from the
mortality that comes even to stone if Scott would write a ballad and
make it immortal, is laid the scene of "Eve of St. John's"--with these
last haunting intangible lines--
"There is a nun in Dryburgh bower
Ne'er looks upon the sun;
There is a monk in Melrose tower
He speaketh a word to none."
Then, back to the Tweed, where the river sweeps out in a great circle,
and leaves a peninsula for Dryburgh. The gray walls of the ruin lift
above the thick green of the trees; yew and oak and sycamore close in
the fane. Druid and Culdee and Roman have built shrines in this
lovely spot, but to-day pilgrimage is made chiefly because in the quiet
sheltered ruined St. Mary's aisle sleeps Sir Walter. It would make
one-half in love with death to think of being buried in so sweet a
place.
[Illustration: ST. MARY'S AISLE AND TOMB OF SIR WALTER SCOTT, DRYBURGH
ABBEY].
Dryburgh is also one of St. David's foundations, in the "sacred grove of
oaks," the Darach Bruach of the worship that is older than Augustus or
Columba. These were white monks that David brought up from Alnwick where
his queen had been a Northumbrian princess, and their white cloaks must
have seemed, among these old old oaks, but the white robes of the Druids
come back again.
It is a well-kept place, vines covering over the crumbling gray stone,
kept by the Lords of Buchan. And, perhaps too orderly, too fanciful, too
"improved"; one likes better the acknowledged ruin of Melrose, and one
would prefer that Sir Walter were there with his kin, instead of here
with his kindred. But this is a sweet place, a historic place, begun by
Hugh de Moreville, who was a slayer of Thomas à Becket, and was
Constable of Scotland. His tomb is marked by a double circle on the
floor of the Chapter House, and there is nothing of the Chapter House;
it is open to beating rain and scorching sun--fit retribution for his
most foul deed.
It is not this remembrance you carry away, but that of St. Mary's aisle,
in
"Dryburgh where with chiming Tweed
The lintwhites sing in chorus."
CHAPTER III
BORDER TOWNS
_Kelso_
It is a very great little country which lies all about Melrose, with
never a bend of the river or a turn of the highway or a shoulder of the
hill, nay, scarce the shadow of any hazel bush or the piping of any wee
bird but has its history, but serves to recall what once was; and
because the countryside is so teeming seems to make yesterday one with
to-day. The distances are very short, even between the places the
well-read traveler knows; with many places that are new along the way,
each haunted with its tradition, soon to haunt the traveler, while the
people he meets would seem to have been here since the days of the
Winged Hats.
Perhaps in order to get into the center of the ecclesiastical
country--for after this being a Borderland, and a Scott-land, it is
decidedly Abbots-land, even before Abbotsford came into being with its
new choice of old title--the traveler will take train to Kelso, or walk
there, a scant dozen miles from Melrose.
The journey is down the Tweed, which opens ever wider between the gentle
hills that are more and more rounding as the flow goes on to the sea.
There is not such intense loneliness; here is the humanest part of the
Scottish landscape, and while even on this highway the cottages are not
frequent, and one eyes the journeymen with as close inspection as one is
eyed, still it is a friendly land. The southern burr--we deliberately
made excuse of drinking water or asking direction in order to hear
it--is softer than in the North; yet, you would not mistake it for
Northumberland. We wondered if this was the accent Scott spoke with; but
to him must have belonged all the dialect-voices.
It was at Roxburgh Castle that King David lived when he determined to
build these abbeys of the Middle Marches, of which the chief four are
Melrose, Dryburgh, Jedburgh and Kelso, with Holyrood as their royal
keystone.
Roxburgh was a stronghold of the Border, and therefore met the fate of
those strongholds, when one party was stronger than the other; usually
the destruction was by the English because they were farther away and
could hold the country only through making it desolate.
Who would not desire loveliness and desire to fix it in stone, if he
lived in such a lovely spot as this where the Tweed and Teviot meet?
David had been in England. He was brother to the English queen Maude,
wife of Henry I, and had come in contact with the Norman culture. Or, as
William of Malmesbury put it, with that serene assurance of the
Englishman over the Scot, he "had been freed from the rust of Scottish
barbarity, and polished from a boy from his intercourse and familiarity
with us." Ah, welladay! if residence at the English court and Norman
culture resulted in these lovely abbeys, let us be lenient with William
of Malmesbury. Incidentally David added to the Scotland of that time
certain English counties, Northumberland and Cumberland and
Westmoreland--as well as English culture!
David was son to Saxon Margaret, St. Margaret, and from her perhaps the
"sair sanct" inherited some of his gentleness. But also he had married
Matilda of Northumberland, wealthy and a widow, and he preferred to
remain on the highway to London rather than at Dunfermline. So he was
much at Roxburgh.
But the castle did not remain in Scottish or English hands. It was while
curiously interested in a great Flemish gun that James II was killed by
the explosion--and the siege of Roxburgh went on more hotly, and the
castle was razed to its present low estate.
To-day the silly sheep are cropping grass about the scant stones that
once sheltered kings and defied them; and ash trees are the sole
occupants of the once royal dwelling. To the American there is something
of passing interest in the present seat of the Duke of Roxburgh, Floors
castle across the Teviot. For the house, like many another Scottish
house, still carries direct descent. And an heiress from America, like
the heiress from Northumberland, unites her fortune with this modern
splendour--and admits Americans and others on Wednesdays!
The town of Kelso is charming, like many Tweed towns. It lies among the
wooded hills; there is a greater note of luxury here. Scott called it
"the most beautiful if not the most romantic village in Scotland." Seen
from the bridge which arches the flood, that placid flood of Tweed, and
a five-arched bridge ambitiously and successfully like the Waterloo
bridge of London, one wonders if after all perhaps Wordsworth wrote his
Bridge sonnet here--"Earth hath not anything to show more fair." Surely
this bridge, these spires and the great tower of the Abbey, "wear the
beauty of the morning," the morning of the world. The hills, luxuriously
wooded, rise gently behind, the persistent Eildons hang over, green
meadows are about, the silver river runs--and the skies are Scottish
skies, whether blue or gray.
The Abbey, of course, is the crown of the place, bolder in design and
standing more boldly in spite of the havoc wrought by men and time, and
Hertford and Henry VIII; calmer than Melrose, less ornamental, with its
north portal very exquisite in proportion.
The Abbot of Kelso was in the palmy early days chief ecclesiastic of
Scotland, a spiritual lord, receiving his miter from the Pope, and
armoured with the right to excommunicate.
There have been other kings here than David and the Abbot. The latter
days of the Stewarts are especially connected with Kelso, so near the
Border. Baby James was hurried hither and crowned in the cathedral as
the III after Roxburgh. Mary Queen lodged here for two nights before she
rode on to Berwick. Here in the ancient market-place, looking like the
square of a continental town, the Old Chevalier was proclaimed King
James VIII on an October Monday in 1715, and the day preceding the
English chaplain had preached to the troops from the text--"The right
of the first born is his." Quite differently minded from that Whig
minister farther north, who later prayed "as for this young man who has
come among us seeking an earthly crown, may it please Thee to bestow
upon him a heavenly one."
When this Rising of the Forty Five came, and he who should have been
Charles III (according to those of us who are Scottish, and royalist,
and have been exiled because of our allegiance) attempted to secure the
throne for his father, he established his headquarters at Sunilaw just
outside Kelso; the house is in ruins, but a white rose that he planted
still bears flowers. To the citizens of Kelso who drank to him, the
Prince, keeping his head, and having something of his royal great
uncle's gift of direct speech, replied, "I believe you, gentlemen, I
believe you. I have drinking friends, but few fighting ones in Kelso."
Scott knew Kelso from having lived here, from going to school here, and
it was in out of the Kelso library--where they will show you the very
copy--that he first read Percy's Reliques.
"I remember well the spot ... it was beneath a huge platanus, in the
ruins of what had been intended for an old fashioned arbour in the
garden.... The summer day had sped onward so fast that notwithstanding
the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the dinner hour. The first time
I could scrape together a few shillings I bought unto myself a copy of
the beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read a book half so
frequently or with half the enthusiasm."
Was it not a nearer contemporary to Percy, and a knight of romance, Sir
Philip Sidney, who said, "I never read the old song of Percie and
Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet"?
For myself I have resolutely refused to identify the word, Platanus,
lest it should not be identical with the spot where I first read my
Percy.
Scott also knew Kelso as the place of his first law practice, and of his
honeymoon. Here flowered into maturity that long lavish life, so
enriched and so enriching of the Border.
Horatio Bonar was minister here for thirty years--I wondered if he wrote
here, "I was a wandering sheep."
While James Thomson, who wrote "The Seasons," but also "Rule,
Britannia"--if he was a Scotsman; perhaps this was an Act of Union--
"Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves!"
was born at a little village nearby, back in the low hills of Tweed, in
1700, seven years before the Union.
_Jedburgh_
From Kelso I took train to the Border town which even the Baedeker
admits has had "a stormy past," and where the past still lingers; nay,
not lingers, but is; there is no present in Jedburgh. It is but ten
miles to the Border; more I think that at any other point in all the
blue line of the Cheviot, is one conscious of the Border; consciousness
of antiquity and of geography hangs over Jedburgh.
It lies, a hill town, on the banks of the Jed; "sylvan Jed" said
Thomson, "crystal Jed" said Burns; a smaller stream than the Tweed, more
tortuous, swifter, rushing through wilder scenery, tumultuous, vocative,
before Border times began--if ever there were such a time before--and
disputatious still to remind us that this is still a division in the
kingdom.
One of the most charming walks in all Scotland--and I do not know of any
country where foot-traveler's interest is so continuous (I wrote this
before I had read the disastrous walking trip of the Pennell's)--is up
this valley of the Jed a half dozen miles, where remnants of old forest,
or its descendants, still stand, where the bracken is thick enough to
conceal an army crouching in ambush, where the hills move swiftly up
from the river, and break sharply into precipices, with crumbling peel
towers, watch towers, to guard the heights, and where outcropping red
scars against the hill mark sometimes the entrance to caves that must
have often been a refuge when Border warfare tramped down the valley.
In Jedburgh we lodged not at the inn; although the name of Spread Eagle
much attracted us; but because every one who had come before us had
sought lodging, we, too, would "lodge," if it be but for a night.
Mary Queen had stayed at an old house, still standing in Queenstreet,
Prince Charles at a house in Castlegate, Burns in the Canongate, the
Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, in Abbey Close, because there was no
room in the inn. I do not know if it were the Spread Eagle then, but the
assizes were being held, Jethart justice was being administered, or,
juster justice, since these were more parlous times, and parley went
before sentence. Scott as a sheriff and the other officials of the
country were filling the hostelry. But Sir Walter, then the Sheriff of
Selkirk, sheriff being a position of more "legality" than with us, and
no doubt remembering his first law case which he had pled at Jedburgh
years before, came over to Abbey Close after dinner, and according to
Dorothy Wordsworth "sate with us an hour or two, and repeated a part of
the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel.'"
Think of not knowing whether it was an hour or two hours, with Scott
repeating the "Lay," and in Jedburgh.
We lodged in a little narrow lane, near the Queen in the Backgate, with
a small quaint garden plot behind; there would be pears in season, and
many of them, ripening against these stone walls. The pears of the
Border are famous. Our landlady was removed from Yetholm only a
generation. Yetholm is the gipsy capital of this countryside. And we
wondered whether Meg Faa, for so she ambitiously called herself, by the
royal name of Scottish Romany, was descended from Meg Merrilies. Mrs.
Faa had dark flashing eyes in a thin dark face, and they flashed like a
two-edged dagger. She was a small woman, scarce taller than a Jethart
ax as we had seen them in the museum at Kelso. I should never have dared
to ask her about anything, not even the time of day, and, in truth, like
many of the Scotch women, she had a gift of impressive silence. All the
night I had a self-conscious feeling that something was going to happen
in this town of Jed, and in the morning when I met Mrs. Faa again and
her eyes rather than her voice challenged me as to how I had slept, I
should not have dared admit that I slept with one eye open lest I become
one more of the permanent ghosts of Jed.
[Illustration: JEDBURGH ABBEY.]
The Abbey is, in its way, its individual way, most interesting of the
chief four of "St. David's piles." It is beautifully lodged, beside the
Jed, near the stream, and the stream more a part of its landscape;
smooth-shaven English lawns lie all about, a veritable ecclesiastical
close. It is simpler than Melrose, if the detail is not so marvelous,
and there is substantially more of it. The Norman tower stands square;
if witches still dance on it they choose their place for security. The
long walls of the nave suggest almost a restoration--almost.
When the Abbey flourished, and when Alexander III was king, he was
wedded here (1285) to Joleta, daughter of the French Count de Dreux.
Always French and Scotch have felt a kinship, and often expressed it in
royal marriage. The gray abbey walls, then a century and a half old,
must have looked curiously down on this gay wedding throng which so
possessed the place, so dispossessed the monks, Austin friars come from
the abbey of St. Quentin at Beauvais.
Suddenly, in the midst of the dance, the King reached out his hand to
the maiden queen--and Death, the specter, met him with skeleton fingers.
It may have been a pageant trick, it may have been a too thoughtful
monk; but the thirteenth century was rich with superstition. Six months
later Alexander fell from his horse on a stormy night on the Fife
coast--and the prophetic omen was remembered, or constructed.
The Abbey was newly in ruin when Mary Queen rode down this way, only
twenty-one years after Hertford's hurtful raid. Court was to be held
here, the assizes of October, 1566, at this Border town. For the Border
had been over-lively and was disputing the authority of the Scottish
queen as though it had no loyalty. Bothwell had been sent down as Warden
of the Marches to quell the marauding free-booters. He had met with
Little Jock Elliott, a Jethart callant, a Border bandit, to whom we can
forgive much, because of the old ballad.
"My castle is aye my ain,
An' herried it never shall be;
For I maun fa' ere it's taen,
An' wha daur meddle wi' me?
Wi' my kuit in the rib o' my naig,
My sword hangin' doun by my knee,
For man I am never afraid,
An' wha daur meddle wi' me?
Wha daur meddle wi' me,
Wha daur meddle wi' me?
Oh, my name is little Jock Elliott,
An' wha daur meddle wi' me?
"I munt my gude naig wi' a will
When the fray's in the wind, an' he
Cocks his lugs as he tugs for the hill
That enters the south countrie,
Where pricking and spurring are rife,
And the bluid boils up like the sea,
But the Southrons gang doon i' the strife,
An' wha daur meddle wi' me?"
And perhaps we can forgive the reiver, since he dealt a blow to Bothwell
that those of us who love Mary have longed to strike through the long
centuries. Bothwell took Elliott in custody, Elliott not suspecting that
a Scot could prove treacherous like a Southron, and was carrying him to
the Hermitage. Jock asked pleasantly what would be his fate at the
assize.
"Gif ane assyises wald mak him clene, he was hertlie contentit, but he
behuvit to pas to the Quenis grace."
This was little promise to little Jock Elliott. He fled. Bothwell
chased. Bothwell fired, wounded Jock, overtook him, and Jock managed to
give Bothwell three vicious thrusts of his skene dhu--"Wha daur meddle
wi' me!"--before Bothwell's whinger drove death into little Jock
Elliott.
Bothwell, wounded, perhaps to death, so word went up to Edinburgh, was
carried to the Hermitage.
Buchanan, the scandalous chronicler of the time--there were such in
Scotland, then, and always for Mary--set down that "when news thereof
was brought to Borthwick to the Queen, she flingeth away in haste like a
madwoman by great journeys in post, in the sharp time of winter, first
to Melrose, and then to Jedworth."
It happened to be the crisp, lovely, truly Scottish time, October, and
Mary opened court at Jedburgh October 9, presiding at the meetings of
the Privy Council, and then rode to the Hermitage October 16. She rode
with an escort which included the Earl of Moray, the Earl of Huntley,
Mr. Secretary Lethington, and more men of less note. For six days the
girl queen (Mary was only twenty-four in this year of the birth of
James, year before the death of Darnley, the marriage with Bothwell, the
imprisonment at Loch Leven) had been mewed to state affairs, and a ride
through the brown October woods, thirty miles there and thirty miles
back again, must have lured the queen who was always keen for adventure,
whether Bothwell was the goal, or just adventure.
[Illustration: HERMITAGE CASTLE.]
The mist of the morning turned to thick rain by night, and the return
ride was made in increasing wet and darkness. Once, riding ahead and
alone and rapidly, the Queen strayed from the trail, was bogged in a
mire, known to-day as the Queen's Mire, and rescued with difficulty.
Next day Mary lay sick at Jedburgh, a sickness of thirty days, nigh unto
death. News was sent to Edinburgh, and bells were rung, and prayers
offered in St. Giles. On the ninth day she lay unconscious, in this
little town of Jedburgh, apparently dead, twenty years before
Fotheringay. "Would God I had died at Jedburgh."
She did not die. Darnley visited her one day, coming from Glasgow.
Bothwell came as soon as he could be moved, and the two made
convalescence together in this old house of Jedburgh, perhaps the
happiest house of all those where the legend of Mary persists. Even
to-day it has its charm. The windowed turret looks out on the large
fruit garden that stretches down to the Jed, very like that very little
turret of "Queen Mary's Lookout" at Roscoff where the child queen had
landed in France less than twenty years before.
Five years later, when Mary was in an English prison, a proclamation was
read in her name at the town cross of Jedburgh, the herald was roughly
handled by the Provost who received his orders from England, and
Buccleuch and Ker of Fernihurst revenged themselves by hanging ten loyal
(?) citizens who stood with the Provost.
Later, a century later, when at the town cross the magistrates were
drinking a health to the new sovereign, a well-known Jacobite came by.
They insisted on his joining in the toast. And he pledged--"confusion to
King William, and the restitution of our sovereign and the heir!" Bravo,
the Borderers!
_Selkirk_
The sentimental journeymen--with whom I count myself openly--may
hesitate to visit Yarrow. It lies so near the Melrose country, and is so
much a part of that, in song and story, that it would seem like leaving
out the fragrance of the region to omit Yarrow. And yet--. One has read
"Yarrow Unvisited," one of the loveliest of Wordsworth's poems. And one
has read "Yarrow Visited." And the conclusion is too easy that if the
unvisitings and visitings differ as much as the poems it surely were
better not to "turn aside to Yarrow," to accept it as
"Enough if in our hearts we know
There's such a place as Yarrow....
For when we're there although 'tis fair,
'Twill be another Yarrow."
There is peril at times in making a dream come true, in translating the
dream into reality, in lifting the mists from the horizon of
imagination. Should one hear an English skylark, an Italian nightingale?
should one see Carcassonne, should one visit Yarrow?
Ah, welladay. I have heard, I have seen. Just at first, because no
dream can ever quite come true, not the dream of man in stone, or of
song in bird-throat, or even of nature in trees and sky and hills, there
is a disappointment. But after the reality these all slip away into the
misty half-remembered things, even Carcassonne, even Yarrow; the dream
enriched by the vision, the vision softened again into dream.
And so, I will down into Yarrow.
Coaches run, or did before the war, and will after the war, through the
pleasant dales of Yarrow and Moffat, dales which knew battles long ago
and old unhappy far off things, but very silent now, too silent; almost
one longs for a burst of Border warfare that the quiet may be filled
with fitting clamour. The coaches meet at Tibbie Shiel's on St. Mary's
and it is to Tibbie's that you are bound, as were so many gallant
gentlemen, especially literary gentlemen, before you.
Selkirk is the starting point. And Selkirk is a very seemly, very
prosperous town, looking not at all like an ecclesiastic city, as it
started to be in the dear dead days of David the saint, looking very
much as a hill city in Italy will look some day when Italy becomes
entirely "redeemed" and modern, and exists for itself instead of for
the tourist. Selkirk is indifferent to tourists, as indeed is every
Scottish town; Scotland and Scotsmen are capable of existing for
themselves. Selkirk hangs against the hillside above the Ettrick, and
its show places are few; the spot where Montrose lodged the night before
the defeat at Philipshaugh, the statue of Scott when he was sheriff,
"shirra," the statue of Mungo Park near where he was given his medical
training, and the home of Andrew Lang.
There is no trace of the "kirk o' the shielings," founded by the
religious from Iona, from which by way of Scheleschyrche came Selkirk.
Nor is there trace of Davis's pile, ruined or unruined, in this near,
modern, whirring city. It is the sound of the looms one remembers in
Selkirk, making that infinity of yards of Scotch tweed to clothe the
world. Selkirk and Galashiels and Hawick form the Glasgow of the Border.
Always industrious, in the time of Flodden it was the "souters of
Selkirk" who marched away to the Killing--
"Up wi' the Souters of Selkirk
And down wi' the Earl o' Home."
These same souters--shoemakers--were busy in the time of Prince Charles
Edward and contracted to furnish two thousand pair of shoes to his
army; but one does not inquire too closely into whether they furnished
any quota of the four thousand feet to go therein.
It was a warm sunny day when I made my pilgrimage up the Yarrow to St.
Mary's. Although Yarrow has always sung in my ears, I think it was
rather to see one sight that I came for the first time to Scotland, to
see
"The swan on still St. Mary's Lake
Float double, swan and shadow."
I rather think it was for this I had journeyed across the Atlantic and
up the East coast route. Such a sentimental lure would I follow. But
then, if that seems wasteful and ridiculous excess of sentiment, let us
be canny enough, Scotch enough, to admit that one sees so many other
things, incidentally.
The "wan waters" of the Yarrow were shimmering, glimmering, in the
morning light as I coached out of Selkirk, and by Carterhaugh.
"I forbid ye, maidens a',
That wear gowd in your hair,
To come or gae by Carterhaugh;
For young Tamlane is there."
These round-shouldered hills, once covered with the Wood of Caledon, and
the Forest of Ettrick, and the Forest of Yarrow, are very clear and
clean in their green lawns to-day, scarce an ancient tree or a late
descendant standing; here and there only gnarled and deformed, out of
the centuries, out of perhaps that "derke forest" of James IV. His son,
the Fifth James, thought to subdue the Border and increase his revenue
by placing thousands of sheep in this forest; and these ruining the
trees have decreased the tourists' rightful revenue. It is because of
this absence of trees that one is perhaps more conscious of the shining
ribbon of river; longer, clearer stretches may be seen in the green
plain:
"And is this--Yarrow? This the stream
Of which my fancy cherished
So faithfully a waking dream?
An image that has perished!
O that some minstrel's harp were near
To utter notes of gladness,
And chase this silence from the air
That fills my heart with sadness!"
About Philipshaugh, two miles from Selkirk, the trees are in something
of large estate, with oak and birch and fir and rowan, making dark
shadows in the fair morning, as the historically minded traveler would
fain have it. For it was there that Montrose met defeat, his small band
against Leslie's many men. All about there lie legends of his fight and
his flight across the Minchmoor and on to the North.
And through here Scott loved to wander. Here he let the Minstrel begin
his Last Lay--
"He paused where Newark's stately Tower
Looks down from Yarrow's birchen bower."
And it was hither the Scotch poet came with Wordsworth, as the English
poet describes it--
"Once more by Newark's Castle gate
Long left without a warder,
I stood, looked, listened, and with Thee
Great Minstrel of the Border."
Nearby, and near the highways, is the deserted farm cottage, the
birthplace of Mungo Park, who traveled about the world even as you and
I, and I fancy his thought must often have returned to the Yarrow.
The driver will point out the Trench of Wallace, a redout a thousand
feet long, on the height to the North; and here will come into the
Border memories of another defender of Scotland who seems rather to
belong to the North and West.
Soon we reach the Kirk of Yarrow, a very austere "reformed" looking
basilica, dating back to 1640, which was a reformed date, set among
pleasant gardens and thick verdure. Scott and Wordsworth and Hogg
have worshiped here, and from its ceiling the heraldic devices of many
Borderers speak a varied history.
[Illustration: NEWARK CASTLE.]
Crossing the bridge we are swiftly, unbelievingly, on the Dowie Dens of
Yarrow.
"Yestreen I dream'd a dolefu' dream;
I fear there will be sorrow!
I dream'd I pu'd the heather green,
Wi' my true love on Yarrow.
"But in the glen strive armed men;
They've wrought me dole and sorrow;
They've slain--the comeliest knight they've slain--
He bleeding lies on Yarrow.
"She kiss'd his cheek, she kaim'd his hair,
She search'd his wounds all thorough;
She kiss'd them till her lips grew red,
On the dowie houms of Yarrow."
Then we come into the country of Joseph Hogg. The farm where he was
tenant and failed, for Hogg was a shepherd and a poet, which means a
wanderer and a dreamer. And soon to the Gordon Arms, a plain rambling
cement structure, where Hogg and Scott met by appointment and took their
last walk together.
Hogg is the spirit of all the Ettrick place. Can you not hear his
skylark--"Bird of the wilderness, blithesome and cumberless"--in that
far blue sky above Altrive, where he died--"Oh, to abide in the desert
with thee!"
And now the driver tells us we are at the Douglass Glen, up there to the
right lies the shattered keep of the good Lord James Douglass, the
friend of Bruce. Here fell the "Douglass Tragedy," and the bridle path
from Yarrow to Tweed is still to be traced.
"O they rade on and on they rade,
And a' by the light of the moon,
Until they came to yon wan water,
And there they lighted down."
_St. Mary's_
And soon we are at St. Mary's Loch--which we have come to see. To one
who comes from a land of lakes, from the Land of the Sky Blue Water,
there must be at first a sudden rush of disappointment. This is merely a
lake, merely a stretch of water. The hills about are all barren, rising
clear and round against the sky. They fold and infold as though they
would shield the lake bereft of trees, as though they would shut out the
world. Here and there, but very infrequent, is a cluster of trees; for
the most part it is water and sky and green heathery hills. The water
is long and narrow, a small lake as our American lakes go, three miles
by one mile; but large as it looms in romance, rich as it bulks in
poetry.
[Illustration: INTERIOR VIEW, TIBBIE SHIEL'S INN.]
Tibbie Shiel's is, of course, our goal. One says Tibbie Shiel's, as one
says Ritz-Carlton, or the William the Conqueror at Dives. For this is
the most celebrated inn in all Scotland, and it must be placed with the
celebrated inns of the world. There is no countryside better sung than
this which lies about St. Mary's, and no inn, certainly not anywhere a
country inn, where more famous men have foregathered to be themselves.
Perhaps the place has changed since the most famous, the little famed
days, when Scott stopped here after a day's hunting, deer or Border song
and story, up Meggatdale; and those famous nights of Christopher North
and the Ettrick shepherd, nights deserving to be as famous as the
Arabian or Parisian or London. The world has found it out, and times
have changed, as a local poet complains--
"Sin a' the world maun gang
And picnic at St. Mary's."
The inn, a rambling white house, stands on a strip between two waters,
added to no doubt since Tibbie first opened its doors, but the closed
beds are still there--it was curious enough to see them the very summer
that the Graham Moffatts played "Bunty" and "The Closed Bed"--and the
brasses which Tibbie polished with such housewifely care.
For Tibbie was a maid in the household of the Ettrick shepherd's mother.
She married, she had children, she came here to live. Then her husband
died, and quite accidentally Tibbie became hostess to travelers, nearly
a hundred years ago. For fifty-four years Tibbie herself ran this inn;
she died in what is so short a time gone, as Scottish history goes, in
1878.
During that time hosts of travelers, particularly, wandered through the
Border, came to this "wren's nest" as North called it. Hogg, of course,
was most familiar, and here he wished to have a "bit monument to his
memory in some quiet spot forninst Tibbie's dwelling." He sits there, in
free stone, somewhat heavily, a shepherd's staff in his right hand, and
in his left a scroll carrying the last line from the "Queen's
Wake"--"Hath tayen the wandering winds to sing."
Edward Irving, walking from Kirkcaldy to Annan, was here the first year
after Tibbie opened her doors so shyly. Carlyle, walking from
Ecclefechan to Edinburgh, in his student days, caught his first glimpse
of Yarrow from here--and slept, may it be, in one of these closed beds?
Gladstone was here in the early '40's during a Midlothian campaign. Dr.
John Brown--"Rab"--came later, and even R. L. S. knew the hospitality of
Tibbie Shiel's when Tibbie was still hostess.
It is a long list and a brave one. In this very dining-room they ate
simply and abundantly, after the day's work; in this "parlour" they
continued their talk. And surely St. Mary's Lake was the same.
Down on the shore there stands a group of trees, not fir trees, though
these are most native here. And here we loafed the afternoon away--for
fortunately we were the only ones who "picnic at St. Mary's." There were
the gentleman and his wife whom we took for journalistic folk, they were
so worldly and so intelligent and discussed the world and the
possibilities of world-war--that was several years ago--until at the
Kirk of Yarrow the local minister, Dr. Borlund, uncovered this minister,
James Thomson, from Paisley. If all the clergy of Scotland should become
as these, austerity of reform would go and the glow of culture would
come.
We all knew our history and our poetry of this region, but none so well
as the minister. It was he who recited from Marmion that description
which is still so accurate--
"By lone St. Mary's silent Lake;
Thou know'st it well--nor fen nor sedge
Pollute the clear lake's crystal edge;
Abrupt and sheer the mountains sink
At once upon the level brink;
And just a trace of silver strand
Marks where the water meets the land.
Far in the mirror, bright and blue,
Each hill's huge outline you may view;
Shaggy with heath, but lonely, bare,
Nor tree nor bush nor brake is there,
Save where of land, yon silver line
Bears thwart the lake the scatter'd pine.
Yet even this nakedness has power,
And aids the feelings of the hour;
Nor thicket, dell nor copse you spy,
Where living thing conceal'd might lie;
Not point, retiring, hides a dell
Where swain, or woodman lone might dwell;
There's nothing left to fancy's guess,
You see that all is loneliness;
And silence aids--though the steep hills
Send to the lake a thousand rills;
In summer time, so soft they weep.
The sound but lulls the ear asleep;
Your horse's hoof-tread sounds too rude,
So stilly is the solitude."
[Illustration: ST. MARY'S LAKE.]
Across the water is the old graveyard of vanished St. Mary's kirk. And
it was the low-voiced minister's wife--a Babbie a little removed--who
knew
"What boon to lie, as now I lie,
And see in silver at my feet
St. Mary's Lake, as if the sky
Had fallen 'tween those hills so sweet,
And this old churchyard on the hill,
That keeps the green graves of the dead,
So calm and sweet, so lone and wild still,
And but the blue sky overhead."
We sat in the silences, the still silent afternoon, conscious of the
folk verse that goes--
"St. Mary's Loch lies shimmering still,
But St. Mary's kirkbell's lang dune ringing."
Suddenly, over the far rim of the water, my eye caught something white,
and then another, and another. And I knew well that were I but nearer,
as imagination knew was unnecessary, I might see the swan on still St.
Mary's Lake, and their shadow breaking in the water.
CHAPTER IV
THE EMPRESS OF THE NORTH
I suppose the Scotsman who has been born in Edinburgh may have a
pardonable reluctance in praising the town, may hesitate in appraising
it; Stevenson did; Scott did not. And I suppose if one cannot trace his
ancestry back to Edinburgh, or nearly there, but must choose some of the
other capitals of the world as his ancestral city, one might begrudge
estate to Edinburgh.
I have none of these hesitations, am hampered by none of these half and
half ways. Being an American, with half a dozen European capitals to
choose from if I must, and having been born in an American capital which
is among the loveliest--I think the loveliest--I dare choose Edinburgh
as my dream city. I dare fling away my other capital claims, and all
modification, ever Scotch moderation, to declare without an "I think" or
"they say," Edinburgh is the most beautiful, the most romantic, the
singular city of the world.
Those who come out of many generations of migration grow accustomed to
choosing their quarter of the world; they have come from many countries
and through nomadic ancestors for a century, or two, or three. And
perhaps they, themselves, have migrated from one state to another, one
city to another. Every American has had these phases, has suffered the
sea change and the land. Surely then he may adopt his ancestral capital,
as correctly as he adopts his present political capital.
It shall be Edinburgh. And while Constantinople and Rio and Yokohama may
be splendid for situation, they have always something of foreign about
them, they can never seem to touch our own proper romance, to have been
the setting for our play. Edinburgh is as lovely, and then, the chalice
of romance has been lifted for centuries on the high altar of her
situation.
Edinburgh is a small city, as modern cities go; but I presume it has
many thousands of population, hundreds of thousands. If it were Glasgow
numbers would be important, fixative. But Edinburgh has had such a
population through the centuries that to cast its total with only that
of the souls now living within her precincts were to leave out of the
picture those shadowy and yet brilliant, ever present generations, who
seem all to jostle each other on her High street, without respect to
generations, if there is very decided respect of simple toward gentle.
Edinburgh is, curiously, significantly, divided and scarce united, into
Old Town and New Town. And yet, the Old Town with its ancient _lands_ so
marvelously like modern tenements, and its poverty which is of no date
and therefore no responsibility of ours, is neither dead nor deserted,
and is still fully one-half the town. While New Town, looking ever up to
the old, looking across the stretch to Leith, and to the sea whence came
so much threatening in the old days, and with its memories of Hume and
Scott who are ancient, and of Stevenson, who, in spite of his immortal
youth, does begin to belong to another generation than ours--New Town
also, to a new American, is something old. It has all become Edinburgh,
two perfect halves of a whole which is not less perfect for the
imperfect uniting.
There is no city which can be so "observed." I venture that when you
have stood on Castle Hill--on the High Street with its narrow opening
between the _lands_ framing near and far pictures--on Calton Hill--when
you have been able to "rest and be thankful" at Corstorphine Hill--when
you have climbed the Salisbury crags--when you have mounted to Arthur's
Seat and looked down as did King Arthur before there was an
Edinburgh--you will believe that not any slightest corner but fills the
eye and soul.
There is, of course, no single object in Edinburgh to compare with
objects of traveler's interest farther south. The castle is not the
Tower, Holyrood is a memory beside Windsor, St. Giles is no Canterbury,
St. Mary's is not St. Paul's, the Royal Scottish art gallery is meager
indeed, notwithstanding certain rare riches in comparison with the
National. But still one may believe of any of these superior objects, as
T. Sandys retorted to Shovel when they had played the game of matching
the splendours of Thrums with those of London and Shovel had named Saint
Paul's, and Tommy's list of native wonders was exhausted, but never
Tommy--"it would like to be in Thrums!" All these lesser glories go to
make up the singular glory which is Edinburgh.
_The Castle_
And there is the castle. Nowhere in all the world is castle more
strategically set to guard the city and to guard the memories of the
city and the beauty.
For the castle is Edinburgh. It stood there, stalwart in the plain,
thousands and thousands of years ago, this castle hill which invited a
castle as soon as man began to fortify himself. It has stood here a
thousand years as the bulwark of man against man. Certain it will stand
there a thousand years to come. And after--after man has destroyed and
been destroyed, or when he determines that like night and the sea there
shall be no more destruction. Castle Hill is immortal.
[Illustration: _Edinburgh Castle_]
Always it has been the resort of kings and princes. First it was the
keep of princesses, far back in Pictish days before Christian time, this
"Castell of the Maydens." From 987 B. C. down to 1566, when Mary was
lodged here for safe keeping in order that James might be born safe and
royal, the castle has had royalties in its keeping. It has kept them
rather badly in truth. While many kings have been born here, few
kings have died in its security; almost all Scottish kings have died
tragically, almost all Scottish kings have died young, and left their
kingdom to some small prince whose regents held him in this castle for
personal security, while they governed the realm, always to its
disaster.
There is not one of the Stewart kings, one of the Jameses, from First to
Sixth, who did not come into the heritage of the kingdom as a baby, a
youth; even the Fourth, who rebelled against his father and won the
kingdom--and wore a chain around his body secretly for penance. And
these baby kings and stripling princes have been lodged in the castle
for safe keeping, prologues to the swelling act of the imperial theme.
History which attempts to be exact begins the castle in the seventh
century, when Edwin of Deira fortified the place and called it Edwin's
burgh. It was held by Malcolm Canmore, of whom and of his Saxon queen
Margaret, Dunfermline tells a fuller story; held against rebels and
against English, until Malcolm fell at Alnwick, and Margaret, dead at
hearing the news, was carried secretly out of the castle by her devoted
and kingly sons.
After Edward I took the castle, for half a century it was variously
held by the English as a Border fortress. Once Bruce retook it, a
stealthy night assault, up the cliffs of the west, and The Bruce razed
it. Rebuilt by the Third Edward, it was taken from this king by a clever
ruse planned by the Douglass, Black Knight of Liddesdale. A shipload of
wine and biscuits came into harbour, and the unsuspecting castellan,
glad to get such precious food in the far north, purchased it all and
granted delivery at dawn next morning. The first cart load upset under
the portcullis, the gate could not be closed, the cry "A Douglass," was
raised, and the castle entered into Scottish keeping, never to be
"English" again until the Act of Union.
Henry IV and Richard II attempted it, but failed. Richard III entered it
as friend. For three years it was held for Mary by Kirkcaldy, while the
city was disloyal. Charles I held it longer than he held England, and
Cromwell claimed it in person as part of the Protectorate. Prince
Charles, the Third, could not take it, contented himself with the less
castellated, more palatial joys, of Holyrood; a preference he shared
with his greatest grandmother.
To-day perhaps its defense might be battered down, as some one has
suggested, "from the Firth by a Japanese cruiser." But it looks like a
Gibraltar, and it keeps impregnably the treasures of the past; as
necessary a defense, I take it, as of any material treasure of the
present.
If you are a king you must wait to enter; summons must be made to the
Warder, and it must be certain you are the king; even Edward VII, most
Stewart of recent kings had to prove himself not Edward I, not English,
but "Union." If you are a commoner you know no such difficulties.
First you linger on the broad Esplanade where a regiment in kilts is
drilling, perhaps the Black Watch, the Scots Greys. No doubt of late it
has been tramped by regiments of the "First Hundred Thousand" and later,
in training for the wars.
As an American you linger here in longer memory. For when Charles was
king--the phrase sounds recent to one who is eternally Jacobite--this
level space was a part of Nova Scotia, and the Scotsmen who were made
nobles with estates in New Scotland were enfeoffed on this very ground.
So close were the relations between old and new, so indifferent were the
men of adventuring times toward space.
Or, you linger here to recall when Cromwell was burned in effigy, along
with "his friend the Devil."
You pass through the gate, where no wine casks block the descent of the
portcullis, and the castle is entered. There are three or four points of
particular interest.
Queen Margaret's chapel, the oldest and smallest religious house in
Scotland, a tiny place indeed, where Margaret was praying when word was
brought of the death of Malcolm in battle, and she, loyal and royal
soul, died the very night while the enemies from the Highlands, like an
army of Macbeth's, surrounded the castle. The place is quite authentic,
Saxon in character with Norman touches. I know no place where a thousand
years can be so swept away, and Saxon Margaret herself seems to kneel in
the perpetual dim twilight before the chancel.
There is Mons Meg, a monstrous gun indeed, pointing its mouth toward the
Forth, as though it were the guardian of Scotland. A very pretentious
gun, which was forged for James II, traveled to the sieges of Dumbarton
and of Norham, lifted voice in salute to Mary in France on her marriage
to the Dauphin, was captured by Cromwell and listed as "the great iron
murderer, Muckle Meg," and "split its throat" in saluting the Duke of
York in 1682, a most Jacobite act of loyalty. After the Rising of the
Forty Five this gun was taken to London, as though to take it from
Scotland were to take the defense from Jacobitism. But Sir Walter Scott,
restoring Scotland, and being in much favour with George IV, secured the
return of Mons Meg. It was as though a prince of the realm has returned.
Now, the great gun, large enough to shoot men for ammunition, looks,
silently but sinisterly, out over the North Sea.
[Illustration: MONS MEG.]
History comes crowding its events in memory when one enters Old
Parliament Hall. It is fitly ancestral, a noble hall with an open
timbered roof of great dignity, with a collection of armour and
equipment that particularly re-equips the past. And in this hall, under
this roof, what splendour, what crime! Most criminal, the "black dinner"
given to the Black Douglasses to their death. Unless one should resent
the dinner given by Leslie to Cromwell, when there was no black bull's
head served.
By a secret stair, which commoners and Jacobites may use to-day,
communication was had with the Royal Lodgings, and often must Queen Mary
have gone up and down those stairs, carrying the tumult of her heart,
the perplexity of her kingdom; for Mary was both woman and sovereign.
The Royal Lodgings contain Queen Mary's Rooms, chiefly; the other rooms
are negligible. It is a tiny bedchamber, too small to house the eager
soul of Mary, but very well spaced for the niggard soul of James. One
merely accepts historically the presence of Mary here; there is too much
intertwining of "H" and "M." No Jacobite but divorces Darnley from Mary,
even though he would not effect divorce with gunpowder. King James I,
when he returned fourteen years after to the place where he was VI, made
a pilgrimage to his own birth-room on June 19, 1617. I suppose he found
the narrow space like unto the Majesty that doth hedge a king.
Mary must have beat her heart against these walls as an eagle beats
wings against his cage. She never loved the place. Who could love it who
must live in it? It was royally hung; she made it fit for living, with
carpets from Turkey, chairs and tables from France, gold hangings that
were truly gold for the bed, and many tapestries with which to shut out
the cold--eight pictures of the Judgment of Paris; four pictures of the
Triumph of Virtue!
Here she kept her library, one hundred and fifty-three precious
volumes--where are they now? "The Queen readeth daily after her dinner,"
wrote Randolph, English envoy, to his queen, "instructed by a learned
man, Mr. George Buchanan, somewhat of Lyvie."
And I wondered if here she wrote that Prayer which but the other day I
came upon in the bookshop of James Thin, copied into a book of a hundred
years back, in a handwriting that has something of Queen Mary's quality
in it--
"O Domine Deus!
Speravi in te;
O care mi Iesu!
Nunc libera me:
In dura catena,
In misera poena
Desidero te;
Languendo, gemendo,
Et genuflectendo
Adoro, imploro,
Ut liberes me!"
Her windows looked down across the city toward Holyrood. Almost she must
have heard John Knox thunder in the pulpit of St. Giles, and thunder
against her. And, directly beneath far down she saw the Grassmarket.
Sometimes it flashed with gay tournament folk; for before and during
Mary's time all the world came to measure lances in Edinburgh.
Sometimes it swarmed with folk come to watch an execution; in the next
century it was filled in the "Killing Time," with Covenanter mob
applauding the execution of Royalists, with Royalist mob applauding the
execution of Covenanters; Mary's time was not the one "to glorify God in
the Grassmarket."
At the top of the market, near where the West Bow leads up to the
castle, was the house of Claverhouse, who watched the killings. At the
bottom of the market was the West Port through which Bonnie Dundee rode
away.
"To the Lords of Convention, 'twas Claverhouse spoke,
Ere the king's crown go down there are crowns to be broke,
So each cavalier who loves honour and me,
Let him follow the bonnet of Bonnie Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can,
Come saddle my horses and call up my men,
Fling all your gates open, and let me gae free,
For 'tis up with the bonnets of Bonnie Dundee."
And to-day, but especially on Saturday nights, if you care to take your
life, or your peace in hand, you can join a strange and rather awful
multitude as it swarms through the Grassmarket, more and more drunken as
midnight comes on, and not less or more drunken than the mob which
hanged Captain Porteous.
It is a decided relief to look down and find the White Hart Inn, still
an inn, where Dorothy and William Wordsworth lodged, on Thursday night,
September 15, 1803--"It was not noisy, and tolerably cheap. Drank tea,
and walked up to the Castle."
The Cowgate was a fashionable suburb in Mary's time. A canon of St.
Andrews wrote in 1530, "nothing is humble or lowly, everything
magnificent." On a certain golden gray afternoon I had climbed to
Arthur's Seat to see the city through the veil of mist--
"I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn
On Lammermuir. Harkening I heard again
In my precipitous city beaten bells
Winnow the keen sea wind."
It was late, gathering dusk and rain, when I reached the level and
thinking to make a short cut--this was once the short cut to St.
Cuthbert's from Holyrood--I ventured into the Cowgate, and wondered at
my own temerity. Stevenson reports, "One night I went along the Cowgate
after every one was a-bed but the policeman." Well, if Scott liked to
"put a cocked hat on a story," Stevenson liked to put it on his own
adventures. The Cowgate, in dusk rain, is adventure enough.
Across the height lies Greyfriar's. The church is negligible, the view
from there superb, the place historic. One year after Jenny Geddes
threw her stool in St. Giles and started the Reformation--doesn't it
sound like Mrs. O'Leary's cow?--the Covenant was signed (Feb. 28, 1638)
on top of a tomb still shown, hundreds pressing to the signing, some
signing with their blood. The Reformation was on, not to be stopped
until all Scotland was harried and remade.
I like best to think that in this churchyard, on a rainy Sunday, Scott
met a charming girl, fell in love with her, took her home under his
umbrella, and, did not marry her--his own romance!
Because no king shall ever wear the crown again, nor wave the scepter,
nor wield the sword of state, the Regalia, housed in the Crown Room, and
guarded from commoner and king by massive iron grating, is more
interesting than any other appanage of royalty in the world. The crown
which was worn by Bruce, and which sat rather uneasily on the very
unsteady head of Charles II at what time he was crowned at Scone and was
scolded, is of pure gold and much bejeweled. The scepter, made in Paris
for James V, carries a beryl, come from Egypt three thousand years ago,
or, from a Druid priest in the mist of time. The sword was a gift
from Pope Julius to James IV; in those days the Scottish sovereign was
surely the "Most Catholic Majesty."
[Illustration: GREYFRIARS' CHURCHYARD.]
England has no ancient regalia; hers were thrown into the melting pot by
Cromwell. The Protector--and Destructor--would fain have grasped these
"Honours," but they were spirited away, and later concealed in the
castle. Here they remained a hundred and ten years, sealed in a great
oak chest. The rumour increased that they had gone to England. And
finally Sir Walter Scott secured an order from George IV to open the
chest (Feb. 4, 1818).
It was a tremendous moment to Scott. Could he restore the Honours as
well as the country? There they lay, crown of The Bruce, scepter of
James V, sword of Pope and King. The castle guns thundered--how Mons Meg
must have regretted her lost voice!
And still we can hear the voice of Scott, when a commissioner playfully
lifted the crown as if to place it on the head of a young lady
near--"No, by God, no!" Never again shall this crown rest on any head.
That is assured in a codicil to the Act of Union. And--it may be that
other crowns shall in like manner gain a significance when they no
longer rest on uneasy heads.
The view from the King's bastion is royal. Where is there its superior?
And only its rival from Calton Hill, from Arthur's Seat. The Gardens lie
below, the New Town spreads out, the city runs down to Leith, the Firth
shines and carries on its bosom the Inchkeith and the May; the hills of
Fife rampart the North; the Highlands with Ben Lomond for sentinel form
the purple West; and south are the Braid hills and the heathery
Pentlands--the guide has pointed through a gap in the castle wall to the
hills and to the cottage at Swanston.
"City of mists and rain and blown gray spaces,
Dashed with the wild wet colour and gleam of tears,
Dreaming in Holyrood halls of the passionate faces
Lifted to one Queen's face that has conquered the years.
Are not the halls of thy memory haunted places?
Cometh there not as a moon (where blood-rust sears
Floors a-flutter of old with silks and laces)
Gilding a ghostly Queen thro' the mist of tears?
"Proudly here, with a loftier pinnacled splendour
Throned in his northern Athens, what spells remain
Still on the marble lips of the Wizard, and render
Silent the gazer on glory without a stain!
Here and here, do we whisper with hearts more tender,
Tusitala wandered thro' mist and rain;
Rainbow-eyes and frail and gallant and slender,
Dreaming of pirate isles in a jeweled main.
"Up the Canongate climbeth, cleft a-sunder
Raggedly here, with a glimpse of the distant sea,
Flashed through a crumbling alley, a glimpse of wonder,
Nay, for the City is throned in Eternity!
Hark! from the soaring castle a cannon's thunder
Closeth an hour for the world and an æon for me,
Gazing at last from the martial heights whereunder
Deathless memories roll to an ageless sea."
_High Street_
If the Baedeker with a cautious reservation, declares Princes Street
"Perhaps" the handsomest in Europe, there is no reservation in the
guide-book report of Taylor, the "Water Poet," who wrote of the High
Street in the early Sixteen Hundreds, "the fairest and goodliest streete
that ever my eyes beheld." Surely it was then the most impressive street
in the world. Who can escape a sharp impression to-day? It was then the
most curious street in the world, and it has lost none of its power to
evoke wonder.
A causeway between the castle and Holyrood, a steep ridge lying between
the Nor' Loch (where now are the Princes' Gardens) and the Sou' Loch
(where now are the Meadows, suburban dwelling) the old height offered
the first refuge to those who would fain live under the shadow of the
castle. As the castle became more and more the center of the kingdom,
dwelling under its shadow became more and more important, if not secure.
The mightiest lords of the kingdom built themselves town houses along
the causeway. French influence was always strong, and particularly in
architecture. So these tall _lands_ rose on either side of the long
street, their high, many-storied fronts on the High Street, their many
more storied backs toward the Lochs. They were, in truth, part of the
defense of the town; from their tall stories the enemy, especially the
"auld enemy," could be espied almost as soon as from the castle. And the
closes, the wynds, those dark tortuous alleys which lead between, and
which to-day in their squalor are the most picturesque corners of all
Europe, were in themselves means of defense in the old days when cannon
were as often of leather as of iron, and guns were new and were little
more reaching than arrows, and bludgeons and skene dhus and fists were
the final effective weapon when assault was intended to the city.
The ridge divides itself into the Lawnmarket, the High Street, and the
Canongate; St. Giles uniting the first two, and the Netherbow port, now
removed, dividing the last two.
The Lawnmarket in the old days was near-royal, and within its houses
the great nobles lodged, and royalty was often a guest, or a secret
guest. The High Street was the business street, centering the life of
the city, its trade, its feuds--"a la maniére d'Edimborg" ran the
continental saying of fights--its religion, its executions, its burials.
The Canongate, outside the city proper and outside the Flodden wall and
within the precincts of Holyrood, therefore regarded as under the
protection of Holy Church, became the aristocratic quarters of the later
Stewarts, of the wealthy nobles of the later day.
I suppose one may spend a lifetime in Edinburgh, with frequent days in
the Old Town, wandering the High Street, with the eye never wearying,
always discovering the new. And I suppose it would take a lifetime, born
in Old Town and of Old Town, to really know the quarter. I am not
certain I should care to spend a lifetime here; but I have never and
shall never spend sufficient of this life here. It is unsavoury of
course; it is slattern, it is squalid, danger lurks in the wynds and
drunkenness spreads itself in the closes. If the old warning cry of
"Gardey loo!" is no longer heard at ten o' the night, one still has need
of the answering "Haud yer hand!" or, your nose. Dr. Samuel Johnson,
walking this street on his first night in Edinburgh, arm in arm with
Boswell, declared, "I can smell you in the dark!" No sensitive visitor
will fail to echo him to-day. There are drains and sewers, there is
modern sanitation in old Edinburgh. But the habits of the centuries are
not easily overcome; and the Old Town still smells as though with all
the old aroma of the far years. Still, it is high, it is wind-swept--and
what of Venice, what of the Latin Quarter, what of Mile End, what of the
East Side?
But there is still splendour and power, bequeathed as Taylor said, "from
antiquitie to posteritie," in spite of the decline and the decay. If the
palace of Mary of Lorraine on Castle Hill is fallen and the doorways are
in the Museum--Mary who was mother to Mary Queen, and contemporary
worthy to Catherine of Medici--there are still, at the end of the long
street, Moray House and Queensberry House. Moray is where Cromwell
lodged in 1648, and gave no hint of what was coming in 1649; if he had,
history might have been different; to-day Moray House is the United Free
Church Training college! Queensberry House is where lived those
Queensberry marquises of fighting and sporting renown, and where the
Marquis lived who forced through the Act of Union--"There ended an
old song"; and now it is the Refuge for the Destitute!
[Illustration: MORAY HOUSE.]
There is still beauty shining through the dust and the cobwebs; here a
doorway with bold insignia and exquisite carving, leading to--nowhere;
here a bit of painting, Norrie's perhaps, or a remnant of timbered
ceiling; and everywhere, now as then--more now than then, since sanitary
destruction has had its way here and there--glimpses of the city and the
moors and the mountains.
It is invidious to compare, to choose from these closes. Each has its
history, its old habitations, its old associations, its particular
picturesqueness; Lady Stair's, Baxter's, Byer's, Old Stamp Office, White
Horse, and many more.
Through this street what glory that was Scotland has not passed and what
degradation, what power has not been displayed and what abasement? To
see it now, filled with people and with marching troops in honour of the
visiting king, is to get back a little of ancient history, of greater
glory. It lends itself to such majesty, dull and deserted as it is for
the most part.
When the King came to Edinburgh following on his coronation, making a
pilgrimage of his realm, he came to St. Giles, as has come every
sovereign of Scotland, from Malcolm who may have worshiped in the Culdee
church, to George in whose honour the chapel of the Thistle and the Rose
was unveiled.
"For noo, unfaithfu' to the Lord
Auld Scotland joins the rebel horde;
Her human hymn-books on the board
She noo displays,
An' Embro Hie Kirk's been restored
In popish ways."
On a Sunday morning I hurried to St. Giles to see the trooping of the
colours. (Later, listening to Dr. White, in a recently built reformed
church on Princes Street, I heard a sermon from the text, "You shall see
the king in all his beauty." But, no mention of King George! It was even
as it was in the old days.)
In truth it was a brave sight to find the High Street thronged with
people, and the regiments marching down from St. Giles to Holyrood. The
king did not enter town till next day. (I saw, with some resentment,
over the door of a public house, the motto, "Will ye no come back
again?") But, somehow, so many kings gone on, the play was rather better
staged with the sovereign not there. I learned then how gorgeous the
old days must have been with their colour and glitter and flash.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF ST. GILES.]
I suppose there was a tall _land_ where in my day stood and still stands
Hogg's hotel, just above the Tron Kirk; the _lands_ on the south side
the High burned a century ago. But, to the American gazing down on
ancient memories and present sovereignties, there was a wonderful
courtesy shown by the hotel. I had interrupted their quiet Sabbath; it
can still be quiet in Edinburgh notwithstanding that a tram car carried
me on my way hither. The dining-room of this hotel looked out on the
High, and it was breakfast time for these covenanting-looking guests
from the countryside. But I, an invader, was made welcome and given the
best seat on the balcony; a stranger and they took me in. Sometime I
shall take up residence in this Latin Quarter, and if not in Lady
Stair's Close, then in Hogg's hotel. The name sounds sweeter if you have
just come up from Ettrick.
Nor did I miss the King. For
"I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cry'd--'La Belle Dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!'"
It was the Belle Dame, it was the Queen, I saw most often on the High
Street, riding to and fro from the time of the "haar" on her return
from France, till that last terrible night and the ride to Loch Leven.
After that you may visit the John Knox house if you will, and read for
your edification its motto. "Lyfe God aboune al and yi nicht-bour as yi
Self," and buy a book or two in its book shop. I took particular
pleasure in buying a girlish picture of Mary Queen, and a book of the
poems of Robert Fergusson, neither of which would have pleasured John.
After that you may look at the "I. K." in the pavement, and realize that
Dr. Johnson's wish for Knox has been fulfilled--"I hope in the highway."
After that you may look on the heart stamped in the pavement near St.
Giles, where once stood the Heart of Midlothian, the Old Tolbooth.
There is only one other memory of High Street and of Scotland that for
me equals that of Mary. It is Montrose. Up the Canongate comes the
rumbling of a tumbril, like the French Revolution. And out of the high
_lands_ there look the hundreds of Covenanting folk, triumphant for the
moment. And on the balcony of Moray House, within which the marriage of
Lady Mary Stewart to the Marquis of Lorne has just been celebrated,
there stands the wedding party, and among them the Earl of Argyle. Up
the street comes the cart. And within it clad like a bridegroom--"fyne
scarlet coat to his knee, trimmed with silver galoons, lined with
taffeta, roses in his shoon, and stockings of incarnet silk"--stands the
Marquis of Montrose, the loyalest Scotsman that ever lived.
[Illustration: JOHN KNOX'S HOUSE.]
After the field of Kylsyth, after the field of Philipshaugh, and the
flight to the North and the betrayal, he has been brought back to
Edinburgh, to a swift and covenanting sentence, and to death at the
Tron.
His eyes meet proudly those of Argyle who has deserted his king and who
thinks to stand in with the Covenant and with the future. It is the eyes
of Argyle which drop. And Montrose goes on.
His head is on the picket of the Netherbow Port. His four quarters are
sent to the four corners of the kingdom, Glasgow, Perth, Aberdeen,
Inverness.
But the end is not yet. The tables turn, as they turned so often in
those unstable times. It is Argyle who goes to the scaffold. Charles is
king, the Second Charles. There is an edict. The body of Montrose is dug
up out of the Boroughmoor. It is buried in Holyrood. The four quarters
are reassembled from Glasgow and Perth and Aberdeen and Inverness. A
procession fairly royal moves from Holyrood to St. Giles. At the
Netherbow it pauses. The head is taken down from the pike. The body of
Montrose is whole again. An honourable burial takes place in the
cathedral sanctuary.
Even though when search was made at the restoring of the church and the
erection of the effigy the remains could not be found, there has been
that justification by procession and by faith, that justification of
loyalty that we remember when we remember Montrose--
"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch,
To gain or lose it all."
_Holyrood_
Holyrood, ruined as it is, empty as it is, spurious as it is, still can
house the Stewarts. Nowhere else are they so completely and splendidly
Stewart. It is the royalest race which ever played at being sovereign;
in sharp contrast with the heavier, more successful Tudors; crafty
but less crafty than the Medici; amorous but more loyal than the
Bourbons.
[Illustration: JAMES GRAHAM, MARQUIS OF MONTROSE.]
Never did kings claim sovereignty through a more divine right--and only
one (whisper sometimes intimates that he was not Stewart, but
substitute; but he left a Stewart descent) failed to pay the penalty for
such assertion. It was the splendour which was Stewart while they lived,
the tragedy that was Stewart when they came to die, which makes them the
royal race.
There were born in Holyrood not one of them, unless it be James V. But
almost all of them were married in Holyrood, held here their festive
days, and, not one of them died in Holyrood. It is their life, the vivid
intense flash of it, across those times that seem mysterious, even
legendary in remembered times north of the Border. Life was a holiday to
each of the Stewarts, and he spent it in the palace and in the pleasance
of Holyrood.
The Abbey, with the monastery which was attached to it, begins far back
before the Stewarts. It was founded by David I, the abbey-builder.
Legend has it that he went a-hunting on a holy day, and straying from
the "noys and dyn of Bugillis," a white stag came against him. David
thought to defend himself, but a hand bearing a cross came out of the
cloud, and the stag was exorcised. David kept the cross. In dream that
night within the castle he was commanded to build an abbey where he had
been saved, and the hunting place being this scant mile and a quarter
from the castle--then a forest where now it is treeless--David placed
this convenient abbey where it has stood for six centuries, defying fire
and war and reformation, until the citizens of Edinburgh ravaged it when
the roof fell in in the middle of the eighteenth century.
There is a curious feeling when one crosses the Girth stones at the
lower end of the Canongate. It is a century and more since this was
sanctuary. But it is impossible to step across these stones, into the
"Liberty of Holyrood," and not wonder if there may not perhaps be some
need in your own soul of sanctuary. Thousands and thousands of
men--"abbey lairds" as they were pleasantly called--have stepped across
this line before me, through the centuries. Who am I to be different,
unneedful? May I not need inviolate sanctuary? May it not be that at my
heels dogs some sinister creditor who will seize me by the skirts before
I reach the boundary beyond which there is no exacting for debt? A
marvelous thing, this ancient idea of sanctuary. It made an oasis of
safety in a savage world. Surely it was super-christian. And here, at
Holyrood, as the medieval statute declares, "qukilk privelege has
bene inviolabie observit to all maner of personis cuman wythin the
boundes ... past memorie of man." What has the modern world given
itself in place of ancient sanctuary? Justice, I suppose, and a jury
trial.
[Illustration: HOLYROOD PALACE.]
But, once across the Girth, one becomes, not a sanctuarian, but a
Stewart.
The situation is a little dreary, a little flat. And the palace, as a
palace, is altogether uninteresting to look on. It is not the building
of David or of the earlier Stewarts. But of that Merry Monarch who
harboured so long in France, when England was determining whether it
would be royal or republican, and Scotland was determining whether it
would be covenanted or uncovenanted. The Merry Monarch was ever an
uncovenanted person, not at all Scottish, although somewhat like the
errant James--whose errancy was of his own choosing. Charles had
acquired a French taste at the court of his cousin, Louis the Grand. So
the new Holyrood was built in French baronial style. And no monarch has
ever cared to inhabit it for any length of time. Only King Edward VII,
who would have been a happy successor to James, but Edward was very
studious in those days of 1859, when he lodged here and studied under
the direction of the Rector of the Royal High School. Still I can but
think that it was in this Stewart place that Edward developed his
Stewartship.
There is not a stone to speak of the magnificence, of the strength, of
David. The Abbey was burned and burned again, by Edward and Richard the
Second, and entirely rebuilt when the Stewarts were beginning to be
splendid and assured. Over the west doorway, high-arched and
deep-recessed, early English in its technique, Charles I, who was
crowned here in 1633, caused the stone to be placed.
"He shall build ane House for my name and I will stablish the
throne of his kingdom forever."
The tablet still stands above the doorway. But Charles is lying for his
sins in a vault at St. George's chapel at Windsor far in the south,
having paid his penalty on the scaffold in Whitehall. And the House is
in ruins, "bare ruined choir," where not even "the late birds sing."
Although Mendelssohn in speaking of the impression the Abbey made on
him, does say, "I think I found there the beginnings of my Scotch
symphony."
This "magnificent Abbey-Kirk of Halirude" was no doubt very splendid;
although in architectural beauty it cannot compare with Melrose, not
even the great east window with its rich quatrefoil tracing. But what
scenes have been staged in that historic drama, that theatrical piece,
we call the history of the Stewarts!
Before the high altar, under that east window, when James I was kneeling
before God in prayer, there appeared the Lord of the Isles, come
repentant from burning Inverness and other rebellion, to kneel before
the king, his own sword pointed at his breast.
Before this altar James II was married to Mary of Gueldres. James III
was married to Margaret of Denmark, who brought the Orkneys as her
dower. James IV was married to Margaret Tudor, the union of the "Thistle
and the Rose." James V was not married here, he went to France for his
frail bride, Magdalene, who lived but seven weeks in this inhospitable
land, this hospitable Holyrood. She was buried in Holyrood chapel, only
to be dug up and tossed about as common clay when the Edinburgh citizens
made football of royal skulls.
The two sons of James VI, Henry who should have been king and who might
have united royalist and commoner had fate granted it, and Charles who
was to become king, were both christened here. James VII, brother to
Charles II, restored this Chapel Royal and prepared it for the Roman
ritual. James VIII was never here, or but as a baby. Charles III--did
the Bonnie Prince in that brief brilliant Edinburgh moment of his, ever
kneel before this then deserted altar and ask divine favour while he
reasserted the divine right of kings?
Here--or was it secretly, in Stirling?--the Queen--one says The Queen
and all the world knows--gowned in black velvet, at five o'clock on a
July morning, was married to her young cousin, Henry Darnley. A marriage
that endured two long terrible tumultuous years.
Here--or was it in the drawing-room?--at two o'clock on a May morning,
the Queen was married to Bothwell, by Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney,
not with mass as she had been wed to her boy-cousin, but with preaching
as she wed the Bishop's cousin. And "at this marriage there was neither
pleasure nor pastime used as use was wont to be used when princes were
married." So says the Diurnal Occurents of Scotland. A marriage that
endured a brief, perhaps happy, tragedy-gathering month.
And the Queen beautiful was destroyed, by the Reformation, like an
Abbey.
[Illustration: JAMES IV.]
The bones of Darnley were ravaged by the citizens of Edinburgh out of
the ruins of this chapel. Or were they carried to Westminster by that
unroyal son who was so laggard in caring for the remains of his queenly
mother? I hope that Darnley does not rest beside her. For I think those
exquisite marble fingers of the effigy in Henry VII's chapel, looking I
fain believe as those of Mary looked, tapering, lovely, sinister, would
not so fold themselves in prayer without unfolding through the long
centuries.
In the old palace the most glorious days were those when James IV was
king. As the most glorious days of Scotland were those which are almost
legendary. The palace still had the grandeur that was Norman and the
grace that was early English under David. Its front, towered and
pinnacled, suggesting more fortress security than this dull château,
opened upon a great outer court that lay between the palace and the
walls. Coming down the Canongate from the castle it must have looked
very splendid to James. And yet he did not care to remain in it long.
All the Stewarts had errant souls, and they loved to wander their
kingdom through. It presented ample opportunity for adventure; scarce a
Stewart ever left Scotland. That last Prince, who flashed across
Scotland in one last Stewart sword thrust--"My friends," he said in
Holyrood the night before Prestonpans, "I have thrown away the
scabbard"--was but treading in the steps of his royal forebears, the
royal fore-errants.
In the days of James IV--we say it as one should say in the days of
Haroun al Raschid, and indeed Edinburgh was in those early years of the
Fifteen Hundreds the Bagdad of the world, and her days as well as her
nights were truly Arabian--the world must have looked much as it does on
the pleasant morning when we make our royal entry into Holyrood.
The Abbey grounds, a regal area then, and still a regality, were rich
with woodland and orchard, and terraced and flowered into southern
beauty. The red crags of the Salisbury ridge rose bold above as they do
to-day, and crowning the scene the leonine form of Arthur's Seat above
the green slopes, the lion keeping guard against the invading lion of
England! I think James must often have climbed to that height to look
forth over his domain, over his city, to watch the world, as King
Arthur--whom he did not resemble--did legendary centuries before.
It was a busy time in Edinburgh; men's hands and wits were working. In
Leith, then as now the port, then as now a separate burgh, there was
much shipping and much building of ships; King James dreamed of a navy,
and he had an admirable admiral in Sir Anthony Wood. In the castle there
was the forging of guns, the "seven sisters of Brothwick," under
direction of the king's master gunner, while Mons Meg looked on, and
perhaps saw the near terrible future when these sisters of hers should
be lost at Flodden.
In the city there was the splendid beginning of that intellectual life
which has ever been quick in Edinburgh. It was a joyous time; witness
the account from the lord High treasurer--
"On the 11th of February, 1488, we find the king bestowing nine pounds
on gentil John, the English fule; on the 10th of June we have an item to
English pipers who played to the king at the castle gate, of eight
pounds eight shillings; on the thirty-first of August Patrick Johnson
and his fellows, that playit a play to the king, in Lithgow, receives
three pounds; Jacob the lutar, the king of bene, Swanky that brought
balls to the king, twa wemen that sang to his highness, Witherspoon the
foular, that told tales and brought fowls, Tom Pringill the trumpeter,
twa fithelaris that sang Grey Steill to the king, the broken-bakkit
fiddler of St. Andrew's, Quhissilgyllourie a female dancer, Willie
Mercer who lap in the stank by the king's command."
Oh, a royal and democratic and merry time. It was Flodden that made men
old, that tragic climax to this splendour.
"In the joyous moneth tyme of June," in the pleasant garden of the
town-house of the great Earl of Angus, looking down on the still waters
of the Nor' Loch, and across the woods and moors to the glittering blue
Firth, there sat the pale stripling, Gavin Douglass, third son of
Douglass, Archibald Bell-the-Cat, late in orders at Mony musk, but now
come up to St. Giles as prior in spite of his youth, and more absorbed
in poetry than men.
"More pleased that in a barbarous age
He gave rude Scotland Virgil's page,
Than that beneath his rule he held
The bishopric of fair Dunkeld."
Here I would dispute Scott. After all, Dark Ages are not always as dark
as they look to those who come after. And if the "Dark Ages" of Europe
were brilliantly luminous in Moslem capitals, Bagdad and Cordova, so
"rude Scotland" was more polished under James IV than England under
Henry VII, or France under Louis XII.
As Gavin has recorded in "The Palice of Honour," he had interview with
Venus in her proper limbo, and she had presented him with a copy of
Virgil, bidding him translate it. And so, quite boldly, before any
Englishman had ventured, and all through the winter, forgetful--except
when he wrote his prefaces of
scharp soppis of sleit and of the snypand snaw
he had worked over his translation, from the Latin into the Scottish,
and now it was nearly ready "to go to the printer," or more like, to be
shown to the king. In sixteen months he had completed thirteen books;
for he had added a book of Maphæus Vegius, without discrimination.
He was certain of the passage _facilis descensus Averni_, for Gavin was
Scotch, the time was Stewart. It ran in this wise--
"It is richt facill and eithgate, I tell thee
For to descend, and pass on down to hell,
The black zettis of Pluto, and that dirk way
Stand evir open and patent nicht and day.
But therefore to return again on hicht
And heire above recovir this airis licht
That is difficul werk, thair labour lyis,
Full few thair bene quhom hiech above the skyis,
Thare ardent vertue has raisit and upheit
Or zit quhame equale Jupiter deifyit,
Thay quhilkie bene gendrit of goddes may thy oder attane
All the mydway is wilderness unplane
Or wilsum forest; and the laithlie flude
Cocytus, with his drery bosom unrude
Flows environ round about that place."
But he was not quite certain that he had been splendid enough, and
daring enough, in his application of the royal lines--
"Hic Cæsar et omnis Iuli
Progenies, magnum caeli ventura sub axem."
So he had sent for his friend, William Dunbar, Kynges Makar, laureate to
the sovereign. And Dunbar was never loath for a "Flyting," a scolding.
He had them on every hand, with every one, and not only those he held
with "gude maister Walter Kennedy," and published for the amusement of
the King and his Court. It was a more solemn event when the future
Bishop of Dunkeld summoned him. Though Gavin was fifteen years younger
than William, he was more serious with much study, and under the shadow
of future honours, and then, too, he was a Douglass.
So Dunbar came, striding up the Canongate between the tall inquisitive
houses--even he found them "hampered in a honeycaim of their own
making"--a very handsome figure, this Dunbar, in his red velvet robe
richly fringed with fur, which he had yearly as his reward from the
King, and which I doubt not he preferred to the solemn Franciscan robe
he had renounced when he entered the King's service.
James was away at Stirling. James was a poet also. Surely, on internal
evidence, it is the Fourth James and not the Fifth, who wrote those
charming, and improper poems, "The Gaberlunzieman" and "The Jolly
Beggar."
"He took a horn frae his side, and blew baith loud and shrill,
And four and twenty belted knights came skipping o'er the hill.
"And he took out his little knife, loot a' his duddies fa';
And he was the brawest gentleman that was amang them a'."
"And we'll gang nae mair a roving,
So late into the night;
And we'll gang nae mair a roving, boys,
Let the moon shine ne'er so bright."
Dunbar, official Makar, would fain secure the criticism of young Gavin
on this joyous lament he had writ to the King in absence--
"We that here in Hevenis glory ...
I mean we folk in Paradyis
In Edinburgh with all merriness."
And perhaps the young Gavin and the old Dunbar in their common
fellowship of poetry, would drink a glass of red wine in memory of
friends passed into death's dateless night--_Timor Mortis conturbat me_.
"He has Blind Harry and Sandy Traill
Slaine with his schour of mortall haill....
In Dunfermelyne he had done rovne
With Maister Robert Henrisoun."
And Dunbar, who was so much more human than Gavin, if older, would quote
those immortal new lines of Henryson--
"Robene sat on gude grene hill
Kepand a flok of fe,
Mirry Makyne said him till,
Robene, thow pity on me."
While Gavin, so much elder than his looks, and mindful of Scottish as
well as of Trojan history, would quote from Blind Harry in the name of
Wallace--
"I grant, he said, part Inglismen I slew
In my quarrel, me thocht nocht halff enew.
I mowyt na war but for to win our awin (own).
To God and man the rycht full weill is knawin (known)."
Then Dunbar would wrap his rich red robe about him--I hope he wore it on
ordinary days, or were there any when James the Fourth was king?--and
stride back, through the Canongate to Holyrood, back to the court, where
he would meet with young David Lindsay, of a different sort from young
Gavin Douglass. And they would chuckle over "Kitteis Confessioun," a
dialogue between Kitty and the curate, which Lindsay had just
written--and would not Dunbar be gracious and show it to the King?
Quod he, "Have ye na wrangous geir?"
Quod scho, "I staw ane pek o' beir."
Quod he, "That suld restorit be,
Tharefore delyver it to me."
Quod he, "Leve ye in lecherie?"
Quod scho, "Will Leno mowit me."
Quod he, "His wyfe that sall I tell,
To mak hir acquentance with my-sell."
Quod he, "Ken ye na heresie?"
"I wait nocht quhat that is," quod scho.
Quod he, "Hard he na Inglis bukis?"
Quod scho, "My maister on thame lukis."
Quod he, "The bischop that sall knaw,
For I am sworne that for to schaw."
Quod he, "What said he of the King?"
Quod scho, "Of gude he spak naething."
Quod he; "His Grace of that sall wit,
And he sall lose his lyfe for it."
Perhaps Warbeck was listening, Perkin Warbeck who pretended to be Duke
of York, pretended to the English crown. So Scotland harboured him, and
Holyrood was hospitable to him. James married him to Lady Jane Gordon,
and for years, until he wearied of it, maintained a protectorate over
this pinchbeck Pretender.
I am certain that Dom Pedro de Ayala did not linger in the court to
gossip with Dunbar, or with the hangers-on. Dom Pedro had come up from
Spain on a strange ambassadorial errand, to offer to James in marriage a
Spanish princess, knowing well that there might be no Spanish princess
(Maria was betrothed to Portugal); but no doubt believing that there
ought to be, since James was slow in marrying, and surely a Spanish
princess would best mate this royalest of the Stewarts. Dom Pedro better
liked the extravagant kingly court at Holyrood than the niggardly court
at Windsor. He wrote home to Ferdinand and Isabella, "The kingdom is
very old, and very noble, and the king possessed of great virtues, and
no defects worth mentioning." No defects! Certainly not. James had the
qualities of his defects, and these were royal. James could speak--not
keep still--in eight languages, and could and did say "all his prayers."
So Dom Pedro reports to his Most Catholic Majesty.
When he was thirty years old, this King Errant married, not the
hypothetical daughter of Spain, but the substantial youthful Margaret
Tudor, aged fourteen. The Scottish king would none of the alliance for
years; James preferred hypothetical brides and errant affairs. But
the English king saw the advantage and pressed it. He had united the
roses, red and white, of England; he would fain join the thistle to the
rose.
[Illustration: MARGARET TUDOR, QUEEN OF JAMES IV.]
So James, in August, 1503, journeyed out to Dalkeith, whither Margaret
had come. He returned to "hys bed at Edinborg varey well countent of so
fayr a meetyng." A few days later, Margaret made her entry into
Edinburgh, James having met her, gallantly dressed in "a jacket of
crimson velvet bordered with cloth of gold." Leaving his restive
charger, "mounting on the pallefroy of the Qwene, and the said Qwene
behind hym, so rode throw the towne of Edinburgh." Their route lay
through the Grassmarket up to the Castle Hill, and down the High Street
and the Canongate, to the Abbey. Here they were received by the
Archbishop of St. Andrews. Next day they were married by the Archbishop
of Glasgow, the Archbishop of York joining in the solemn and magnificent
celebration.
It is the most splendid moment in Edinburgh history, within the Abbey
and the palace, and within the city. The Town Cross ran with wine, the
high _lands_ were hung with banners and scarlet cloth, and morality
plays were performed before the people. In the palace there was a royal
scene. And our friend, William Dunbar, Kynges Makar, read his allegory
of "The Thrissl and the Roiss," which is still worth reading, if Chaucer
is worth reading.
But, at night, in the royal apartment, the night before the wedding,
perhaps in the fragment of the old palace which remains, the gallant
king played to the little princess upon the virginal; and then, on
bended knee and with unbonneted head, he listened while she played and
sang to him. Out of the dark of the time it is a shining scene; and out
of the splendour of the moment it brings a note of tenderness.
Another decade, another August, and the Boroughmoor (where now run the
links of Burntland) was covered with the white of a thousand tents,
Scotland was gathered for war, the "ruddy lion ramped in gold" floated
war-like over all, and James and all Scotland prepared to march down to
Flodden, heeding not the warning which had sounded at midnight in
ghostly voice at the Town Cross; a warning no doubt arranged by
Margaret, never a Stewart, always a Tudor. And--all Scotland was turned
into a house of mourning.
Half a century later the history of Scotland came to a climax, and Mary
Stewart came to Holyrood; that queen who then and ever since held half
the world in thrall, like another Iseult. The covenanted world has
rejected her, as no doubt it would reject Iseult.
Shrouded in a gray "haar" from off the North Sea, rising like a Venus
out of the mists of the sea, Mary Stewart, Dowager of France, Queen of
Scotland, Heiress of England, came unto her own. And, her own received
her, and, received her not.
The castle hanging high in air no longer hung there. The palace lying
low on the plain was not there, on that August 19, 1561. There was
nothing but what was near at hand; Mary could not see a hundred feet
into her kingdom. In truth she arrived at port a week before the ship
was expected--and Mary also flashed through her kingdom; witness the
ride across the Marches to the Hermitage, and the ride through the North
to punish Huntley. Hers was a restless soul, a restless body.
On her return to the kingdom she was accompanied by a great retinue,
three of her French uncles of Guise and of Lorraine, her four Maries,
and many ambassadors. It was a suspended moment in the world, the sixth
decade of the sixteenth century. And nowhere were affairs in such
delicate balance, or so like to swing out of balance as in Scotland;
where religion, sovereignty, feudalism, morality, were swaying dizzily.
So all the world sent their keenest ambassadors to observe, to foresee
if possible, to report.
Yet Mary rode through the mists.
"Si grand brouillard," says the Sieur de Brantome, that gossipy
chronicler, and Mary and her French courtiers and Scotch Maries, rode
through the "haar," from Leith up whatever was the Leith Walk of that
day to Holyrood.
The palace must have rung with French chatter, of these wondering and
inquisitive and critical folk; for all the cultured world was French in
those days, and Mary and her Maries had been only five or six when they
left stormy Scotland for the pleasant smiling land of France.
Not for long was she permitted to believe she had brought France back
with her and there was no reality in Scotland but as she made it.
Reformation pressed in upon her, even through the windows of this turret
where again she seems to listen to that prophetic and pious serenade,
Scottish protestant psalms accompanied by fiddles and sung to a French
Catholic queen. "Vile fiddles and rebecks," complains Brantome,
hesitating to call vile the mob of five hundred gathered in the Scotch
mists; but they sang "so ill and with such bad accord that there could
be nothing worse. Ah, what music, and what a lullaby for the night!"
The rooms of Mary are still inclosed, the walls still stand about them,
and a romantic care withholds the ravages of time from those tapestries
and silken bed hangings, dark crimson damask, which Mary drew about her
on that night of her return. And here hangs a picture of Queen
Elizabeth, authentic, Tudoresque, which did not hang here when Mary
returned; but what dark shadow of Elizabeth lurked behind these
hangings! The very guard to whom you protest the picture understands--"I
think it an insult to her memory."
It is here that Queen Mary still reigns. All the old palace was burned,
carelessly, by Cromwell's soldiers, at what time men were caring nothing
for palaces, and less for royalty. But, fate was royal, was Jacobite,
and this gray turret of the northwest corner a building of James V on a
foundation of James IV--perhaps where he had listened in the evening to
Margaret and her virginal--was saved from the wrath of the Commonwealth.
Within these very walls Mary played on the virginal, perhaps on the
rebeck, and many sought to know her stops--"you can fret me, yet you
cannot play upon me."
Here she was loved, as she still is loved. Here she made love, the
mystery!--as always. Here she flashed those bright eyes on courtiers and
commoners and straightway these fell into bondage--the Stewarts never
drew the line of division. Here those eyes battled with John Knox as he
met her in Dialogues, as John has faithfully recorded. And here those
bright eyes filled with a storm of tears at his denunciation; but Knox
felt their power. Here she met Darnley, in the chapel married him, and
Knox called after dinner to declare that the Reformation did not
approve. Here by the very stairs of the turret Darnley led the murderers
on Rizzio, from his private apartments to hers. (I find it fit that Ker
of Fawdonside, one of the murderers, should have married later the widow
of Knox.) Mary was held here a prisoner; they would "cut her into
collops and cast her over the wall" if she summoned help. But Mary could
order that the blood stains of the fifty-six wounds of Rizzio should
remain "ane memoriall to quychen her revenge." They quicken our thought
of Mary to-day--if we accept them. From Holyrood Mary went to Kirk o'
Field on a Sunday night in February to visit Darnley who lay "full
of the small pox." He had come back from Bothwell castle on Mary's
urging; but he had gone to Bothwell to escape her revenge for Rizzio.
She returned to Holyrood--"the Queen's grace gang and with licht torches
up the Black Friar's Wynd"--where the wedding festivities of a member of
her household were in progress. And, I doubt not, devoted to Mary as I
am, that she was the merriest of the company.
[Illustration: _Bothwell Castle_]
Then the dark.
Then, at two in morning, an explosion that shook all Edinburgh, that
astonished the world, that still reverberates through the world.
Then--the dark.
A marriage, at two in the morning, a flight to Borthwick, a meeting at
Carberry, one more night in Edinburgh, in a house as mean as that of
Kirk o' Field, a day at Holyrood, and a forced ride with ruffian nobles,
Lindsay and Ruthven on each hand, to Loch Leven, thirty miles in the
night of June 16, 1567--and Edinburgh and Holyrood and the Crown of
Scotland know her no more.
"Helen's lips are drifting dust,
Ilion is consumed in rust."
And Mary. And Holyrood.
There is one more Holyrood scene descending from this. On a Saturday
evening, March 26, 1603, the son of Mary, the King of Scotland, supped
with the Queen, perhaps in that small supper room where Rizzio was
supping with a queen; and they had retired. "The palace lights were
going out, one by one." And Sir Robert Carey, three days out from
London, clattered into the courtyard, the King was roused, Sir Robert
knelt before him--
"Queen Elizabeth is dead, and Your Majesty is King of England!"
James I of England, James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, son of Darnley,
son of the ninth generation from Bruce, The Bruce. The "auld enemy" is
finally defeated; and to borrow again from Rosaline Masson, "the lights
of Holyrood went out, one by one."
In the long picture gallery of this dull modern palace, nothing of which
either Mary or James ever saw, there hangs a series of portraits, one
hundred pictures of Scottish kings, painted under order of Charles II in
1680, by the Fleming, DeWitt, who agreed to furnish the pictures in two
years for one hundred and twenty pounds. They begin with Fergus I, 330
B. C. They are the kings who passed before the prophetic vision of
Banquo. Enough to frighten Macbeth!
One brief brilliant ghost of Stewart glory returns. In this gallery was
held the ball of Prince Charles Edward, described in "Waverley."
And after this theatric moment, and after the Prince had defeated the
"royalists" at Falkirk, Hardy's dragoons slashed these pictures of
Scottish kings, since the Prince they could not reach.
_Princes Gardens_
There are certain public places of beauty where the beauty is so
enveloping that the place seems one's very own, seems possessed. That, I
take it, is the great democratic triumph, in that it has made beauty a
common possession and places of beauty as free to the people as is the
air.
Chief of these is Princes Street Gardens.
I could, in truth I have, spent there days and half-days, and twilights
that I would willingly have lengthened to midnights, since the northern
night never quite descends, but a romantic gray twilight veils
everything, and evokes more than everything. For any lengthened visit in
Edinburgh I dare not inhabit a hotel room on the Garden side, since all
my time would be spent at the window. For a shorter visit, such a room
lengthens the day, defies the closed gate of the Gardens.
It was from such a window as this, "From a Window in Princes Street"
that Henley looked forth--
"Above the crags that fade and gloom
Starts the bare knee of Arthur's Seat;
Ridged high against the evening bloom
The Old Town rises, street on street;
With lamps bejeweled, straight ahead,
Like rampird walls the houses lean,
All spired and domed and turreted,
Sheer to the valley's darkling green;
Ranged in mysterious array,
The Castle menacing and austere,
Looms through the lingering last of day;
And in the silver dusk you hear,
Reverberated from crag and scar,
Bold bugles blowing points of war."
Princes Street is, I believe, not a mile long, a half-mile the part
which is gardened. It is the loveliest street in the world. It seems
infinite instead of half-mile.
Of course to the loyal American that praise is received half-way. For he
remembers Riverside Drive with the majesty of the Hudson, North Shore
Drive with the shoreless infinity of Lake Michigan, Summit Avenue with
the deep gorge of the Upper Mississippi, Quebec and its Esplanade.
But even these "handsome streets" cannot match Princes for history and
beauty in one, for the old and the new, for the Old Town and the New
Town.
[Illustration: PRINCES STREET.]
Princes Street, to speak briefly of its geography, is a broad
thoroughfare, with a medley of buildings on the north side, but uniform
in gray stone, where hotels and shops furnish the immediate life of the
city. There are electric cars running the full length of the street; and
it is the only street I know which is not spoiled through the presence
of these necessary carriers.
There are cabs, and there are sight-seeing cars, from which in high
advantage, and in half a day, you can see everything in Edinburgh.
Yes, actually. I who speak to you have done it, partly for the
greed of seeing it steadily and seeing it whole, and partly for the
comment of these Scotch coach drivers and guards, who are not merely
Scottish but the essence of Scotland. I shall never forget how
an American traveler--of course they are all Americans in these
tally-hos--commenting on the driver's remark that the "Old Queen" wanted
to build a palace where Donaldson's Hospital now stands and she was
refused--"but she was the Queen!" Nevertheless, asserted Mr. Sandy
Coachman, "She was refused." Not so in the old days of Queenship.
The entire life of Edinburgh, of Scotland, streams through this broad
straight street.
On the opposite side lie the Gardens, stretching their way parallel with
the street, a wide, green-lawned, tree-forested purlieu, terraced and
flowered, with a "sunken garden" near the Castle-side, through which
trains are conveyed. The smoke, so much lamented, does often rest with
grace and gray loveliness in the hollows of the place, so that one does
not miss the waters of the Nor' Loch that once flowed here as moat.
Above rises the castle in greater majesty than from any other point.
Down from the castle runs the ridge of the High Street, and the high
_lands_ with flags of washing hanging out the windows which answer the
flags red and leoninely rampant, on the buildings of Princes Street. The
crown of St. Giles and the spire of the Tronkirk hanging above all.
To the west is St. John's, where in the graveyard Raeburn is buried; and
old St. Cuthbert's, where in the graveyard De Quincey is buried. There
are Raeburns in the Royal gallery which stands on the island dividing
the Gardens, and there are many Raeburns here and there, in private
rooms of banks and other institutions, rare Raeburns with that casual,
direct, human look he could give men and women. The galleries are worth
a visit both for their best, and for their not-best. There are statues
of famous Scotsmen on the terraces, and of course the Scott monument,
beautifully Gothic, and as sacred as a shrine.
There are goods to be bought in the shops, pebbles and cairngorms in
jewelry and kickshaws of that ilk; rugs and plaidies, sashes and ties,
and Scott and Stevenson books bound in the Royal Stewart silk. Unhappy
the traveler who has not provided himself beforehand with a tartan.
Almost every one can if he will. And there is always the college of
heraldry to help one out. Or the audacity of choosing the tartan you
like best; an affront, I assure you, to all good Scots. For however
unlovely a Scotch tartan may be in the eyes of the world--nominations
are invidious--in the eyes of the clansman there is nothing so "right"
as his own particular tartan. He would not exchange it for a Douglass or
a Stewart.
These tartans have exerted a very marked effect on the Scottish sense of
taste. On Princes Street you may not find such richly dressed women as
on Regent Street, but the harmony of colouring will please you better.
While no doubt this is due to the fact that for several hundred years
the Scottish taste has had the benefit of intimate association with the
French, it can also be traced to the longer centuries during which
tartans have brought an understanding of colour harmonies. Because there
has been this love of colour, there has come with it vanity. With vanity
there has come that rare ability of the women of the race to maintain a
unity, a harmony, a complete relationship between skirts and waists.
There is no country in Europe where the "act of union" at the feminine
waistline is so triumphant as in Scotland, particularly in Edinburgh.
The universal American achievement has been equaled in Europe only in
Scotland.
There are teashops which invite you in, when the wind sweeps too
harshly, or the rain beats itself into more than a Scotch mist, or even
when the sun shines too hot. There is a garden tea place on top of a
high hotel which confronts the Castle. Even in this Far North there is
much open air dining, and more especially open air tea-ing. I am not
certain that Dr. Johnson would have much cared for this modern tea room,
where he might review the world. It seems that he drank much tea when
he was the guest of Boswell, especially when he was the guest of Mrs.
Boswell, in James Court the other side the Gardens. "Boswell has
handsome and very spacious rooms, level with the ground on one side of
the house, and the other four stories high." And Boswell says of
Johnson, "My wife had tea ready for him, which it is well known he
delights to drink at all times, particularly when sitting up late." From
this roof tea garden one can see James's Court at the top of the Mound,
although the Boswell lodgings are burned down. And one can almost see
Holyrood, where tea was introduced by James VII.
After you have shopped and had your tea, and the past retakes
possession, you will return to the green valley of the Gardens, to
forget the clang of the tram cars, to look up at the great Castle Hill,
green until it meets the buff-coloured stone and the buff-coloured
buildings that seem to grow out of the stone, if it is a clear day;
while the ramparts seem temporarily to have blossomed with red
geraniums, if red coats are leaning over the edge.
A clear day in Edinburgh is possible. I have spent a month of such days,
and have longed for the mists, a touch of them, that the castle might
turn to a purple wonder, and the deep blue shadows sink over it, and
the gray precipice of the High Street look higher than ever. Gray is in
truth the colour of Edinburgh, "the gray metropolis of the North." But
it is never a dreary gray, never a heavy gray like London. There the
gray is thick, charged with soot; one can rub it from his face. In
Edinburgh the gray is luminous, a shifting playing colour, with deep
shadows turning to deep blue, with rifts or thinnings of the cloud,
through which yellow and brown glimmers make their way.
Above all, Edinburgh is never monotonous. That is perhaps its charm, a
something that every feminine city knows; Edinburgh is feminine, and
Paris, and Venice, and New Orleans.
And there hangs the castle, sometimes in midair--
"Hast thou seen that lordly castle, that castle by the sea?
Golden and red above it the clouds float gorgeously."
Sometimes standing stalwart and stern, a challenge to daring, a
challenge to history. That farther edge of the Castle Hill as it is
silhouetted against the west sky--if you walk around on Lothian Street
you can see the full face of the Rock--has invited many an adventurer,
both from within and without.
It was down that steep hill that the sons of Margaret carried their
queen mother, when the hosts of Donalbane were besieging the place, and
a Scotch "haar" rolling in from the sea and shutting off the castle
enabled the little procession to pass safely with its precious burden,
and swiftly down to the Queen's ferry, and across to Dunfermline.
Up the face of that Rock when The Bruce did not hold this stronghold
there stole in the night of a thirteenth century winter--it must have
been much colder, even in Edinburgh, in the thirteenth century--a picked
band of men; picked by Randolph afterward Earl of Moray, and led by
Frank, who, years before when he had been a soldier in the castle
garrison and night leave was forbidden, used to make his way down this
cliff to visit a bonnie lassie in the West Bow. Now, on a wind-swept
night, which can be very windy around that castle profile--the wind has
not abated since the thirteenth century--Frank led the remembered way. I
wonder if he remembered the lassie. But his footing was sure. Once, it
is true, the sentinel seemed to have discovered them. But it was only
the boast the sentinel makes to the night when he makes his last round.
The men huddled against the face of the Rock. Then they moved onward.
The ladders were too short to reach the rampart. Two were bound
together. The men over, the cry "A Moray!" rings in the castle. Scotland
has won it again.
Another century, and James III is king. This least royal of the
Stewarts, jealous of his more royal brother, locked the Duke of Albany
in the castle, and felt secure. But the Duke had friends. A French
clipper came into Leith. It brought wine to Albany, and the wine cask
contained a rope. Inviting his guardians to sup with him, he plied them
with heated wine, perhaps drugged wine, then, the dagger. Albany's
servant insisted on going down the rope first. It was short, he fell the
rest of the distance. Albany hurried back for the sheets from his bed,
made his safe way down. He carried the servant man all the way to
Leith--he had just "whingered" the guard--found the boat, and safety,
and France.
Up the Rock, in Covenanting days, stole Claverhouse, the Bonnie Dundee,
to a secret conference with the Duke of Gordon, hoping to win him away
to Stewart loyalty and the North.
I cannot remember that any of Scott's characters went this way. He
thought it "scant footing for a cat." But Stevenson knew the way.
Perhaps not actually, but he sent more than one of his characters up
or down the Rock--St. Ives with a rope that was long enough to reach.
[Illustration: JOHN GRAHAM OF CLAVERHOUSE, VISCOUNT DUNDEE.]
_Calton Hill_
Perhaps the best view of Edinburgh--only perhaps, for each view differs,
and you have not seen the whole city unless you have seen it from the
various vantage points--is that from the Calton Hill. For a very good
reason. The Hill itself is negligible enough, although it is impossible
to understand Edinburgh, to understand Scotland, unless you have looked
on the architectural remnants on this Hill, and considered them
philosophically. But, as Stevenson said--"Of all places for a view, the
Calton Hill is perhaps the best; since you can see the castle, which you
lose from the castle, and Arthur's Seat, which you cannot see from
Arthur's Seat." An excellent reason, which also places the castle and
Arthur's Seat.
Calton Hill does not tower so high over the city as these other two
points; one may still look up to Arthur's Seat, one may look across to
the castle. Yet, the city lies near. Yet, the country rolls out to the
Firth, and out to the Pentlands. Perhaps a gray-sea haze dulls the far
edge of the far Kingdom of Fife. Perhaps a blue haze hangs over the
Pentlands. Perhaps a smoke-cloud makes a nearer sky for the town itself,
this Auld Reekie. Not only perhaps, but very probably. There are clear
days in Edinburgh. They are to be treasured. There is no air more
stimulating in all the world. October sometimes slips into the other
months of the year, fills the air with wine, clears the air of filament.
But, not often, not often for the tourist from beyond seas who makes
Edinburgh in the summer. But still it is possible from Calton Hill to
catch the farthest glory of the encircling hills, and the near glory of
the ever glorious city.
The Hill itself is a place of monuments, and a very pretentious place.
Also, very absurd. I suppose it is possible to be of two minds about the
remnant of the Parthenon which stands so conspicuously on the highest
plateau, a construction dating back to that royal time when George the
Fourth came to this northern capital, and was--alas!--received as though
he were Bonnie Prince Charlie himself; and was received--again alas!--by
Sir Walter clad in a Campbell plaid, and as loyal to the Regent, the
florid Florizel, as he had been to Prince Charles in the "Waverleys."
Because of all these loyalties this never finished monument, with its
twelve columns and architrave spread above, looks sufficiently pathetic,
and sufficiently absurd. "A very suitable monument to certain national
characteristics," said a later Scots writer, who perhaps never ceased
being a Jacobite.
There are monuments; one to Dugald Stewart, and the visitor not
philosophical is apt to ask, Who was Dugald Stewart? There is a memorial
to Burns whose friend Willie that brewed a peck o' malt lies in the Old
Calton burying ground near by. Hume lies there, too, and Dr. John Brown,
and Stevenson's dead.
"There on the sunny frontage of a hill,
Hard by the House of Kings, repose the dead,
My dead, the ready and the strong of word.
Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive;
The sea bombards their founded towers; the night
Thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificers
One after one, here in this grated cell,
Where the rain erases and the dust consumes,
Fell upon lasting silence."
There is a monument to Lord Nelson. And looking as though he belonged
there is a bronze figure of Abraham Lincoln.
All this lies about, with casual sheep cropping the grass.
But, there lies the city. And there lies the country.
To the south rises Arthur's Seat, the lion. The much castellated jail,
is beneath you, another absurd elaborate building, a castle after
castle-days. Farther a-city lies Holyrood, with the ruined abbey, the
Queen Mary wing, and the scarlet patch of the sentinel moving to and fro
and guarding all this vanished greatness. Nothing more appeals than this
sentinel-watch of the ghosts of the past.
Turn but a little and the Old Town lies before you, the castle splendid,
still the guardian, the long ridge of the High Street with its jagged
buildings that from here rise almost to the purple edge of the hilly
Pentland background, with the spire of the Tolbooth and the crown of St.
Giles breaking against the sky. And down at the foot of the vantage Hill
stretches Princes Street with the Scott monument rising athwart the haze
of city and sky.
From the north edge of Calton there is a more empty panorama, but still
significant. Now it is bound in with tenements high and thick, but in
the golden days it was a steep hillside leading down to a jousting
ground. Tradition has it that Bothwell launched his horse down its
almost-precipice, and so entered the tilting ground, while ladies'
bright eyes rained influence and gave the prize; but most glowing were
the eyes of Mary.
Beyond, the suburbs fill in the two miles that stretch to Leith, and to
the Firth, glittering out to the far sea.
At night, if you have no fear of hobgoblins or of hooligans, Calton Hill
is an experience. It is a still place, the silence the greater because
the city lies so near, and looks so busy with its twinkling lights. A
gulf of gloom lies between. The night is velvet black, a drop curtain
against which is thrown the star-pricked map of the city. One can well
believe how the young Stevenson, in those romantic days when he carried
a lantern under his jacket, used to climb this hill venturesomely, and
with the dog in "Chanticler," exclaim, "I shall never forget the first
night I lapped up the stars." It is something to lap stars from the
black pool which is Edinburgh by night.
If you have, happily, lived in a high city, Boston, Seattle, Duluth,
Denver, St. Paul, San Francisco, with water and land combined, you, too,
have lingered upon a heaven-kissed hill on such a night as this, and
Edinburgh seems native.
Scott, of course, must have known Calton Hill, although Salisbury Crags
under Arthur's Seat, with its more feasible promenade, better appealed
to him when he was writing the "Waverleys." There is an American who has
written of the Hill, a young inland American whom the gods loved to an
early death. I remember hearing Arthur Upson talk of days and nights on
the Calton, and his sonnet catches the note--
"High and alone I stood on Calton Hill
Above the scene that was so dear to him
Whose exile dreams of it made exile dim.
October wooed the folded valleys till
In mist they blurred, even as our eye upfill
Under a too-sweet memory; spires did swim,
And gables, rust-red, on the gray sea's brim--
But on these heights the air was soft and still,
Yet, not all still; an alien breeze will turn
Here, as from bournes in aromatic seas,
As round old shrines a new-freed soul might yearn
With incense of rich earthly reveries.
Vanish the isles: Mist, exile, searching pain,
But the brave soul is freed, is home again."
CHAPTER V
THE KINGDOM OF FIFE
From Edinburgh as I looked out on the Forth from every vantage point, I
was conscious of the hills of Fife ever backing in the prospect. And I
kept repeating to myself the old rhyme of the witches--
"The Thane of Fife had a wife,
Ah, where is she now!"
I determined to set sail and find not the wife, but the kingdom.
It is a continuing splendour, this name--the Kingdom of Fife. Than the
thing nothing could be less royal, more democratic. For Fifeshire is
given over to farm lands and coal fields and treeless stretches, and the
fringe of Fife is made up of fishing villages "a hodden gray plaid wi' a
gowden fringe," said a King Jamie. It lies there, separate from
Scotland, although very Scottish, between the firths of the Forth and
the Tay, with the Ochil hills a barrier on the landside. The separating
firths are now connected with Scotland by great bridges, over which the
trains pass with reluctance. And the wind is always blowing in Fife, a
cold, stern, relentless, Calvinistic wind, off the North Sea. Not by
every wind of doctrine but by a disciplining Calvinistic wind is this
Kingdom swept into conformity.
There is no end of castles and of historic memories lying like pebbles
upon the seashore of the Firth. Pick up any sea shell--I do not remember
seeing any, so combed have these beaches been from the memory of
man--and it will whisper a tale in your ear.
But there is for me but one pilgrimage to be made in Fifeshire, to
Kirkcaldy; to the place, not of Ravenscraig Castle, nor because Adam
Smith and political economy were here born twins, nor because Carlyle
taught here for two years, nor because Edward Irving preached here;
their dwellings and schools and graves can be seen. But because Marjorie
Fleming was born here, passed to and fro, from Granton to Burntisland,
in those brief beautiful nine years that were granted to her, and to us,
and lies buried in the old kirkyard of Abbotshall.
Perhaps you do not know Marjorie. She was the friend, the intimate
friend of Sir Walter Scott. And I can but think how large and void the
world was a century ago, in that Charles Lamb was living in London when
Marjorie was living in Kirkcaldy, and was dreaming of his "Dream
Children," when he might have known this most precious child, fit to be
the friend of Lamb as she was of Sir Walter.
Other men who have loved her with a tenderness which can belong but to
the living child, immortally living, are Dr. John Brown who wrote the
wonder book about her fifty years ago, through which most of us have
claimed Marjorie as our own, and Mark Twain, who only a month before he
died--and joined her--wrote as tenderly and whimsically of her as he
ever wrote of any child or any maid. Among such august company we almost
hesitate to enter, but surely at this distance of time we may lay our
love beside that of the great men who found Pet Marjorie one of the most
precious human treasures the world has ever held.
She was but a little girl, and only nine years all told, when the last
day came to her a hundred and more years ago, December 19, 1811. The
first six years she lived in Kirkcaldy, "my native town which though
dirty is clene in the country," Marjorie wrote this from Edinburgh a
little patronizingly, and Marjorie was never strong on spelling. The
next three years she lived with her aunt in the Scottish capital, where
she wrote those journals and letters which have kept her memory warm to
this day. In July of 1811 she returned to the town by the North Sea, and
in December she was gone.
In the morning of the day on which I made my pilgrimage I went up to the
Parliament buildings in the Old Town, looked them about, saw the lawyers
pacing to and fro, as Stevenson had paced, but not for long--the
absurdity of it!--and then down the hill in the shadow of three men.
"One November afternoon in 1810"--(the year in which the "Lady of the
Lake" was published) "three men, evidently lawyers, might have been seen
escaping like school boys from the Parliament House, and speeding arm in
arm down Bank Street and the Mound, in the teeth of a surly blast of
sleet." They were Lord Erskine, William Clerk--and the third we all
know; what service of romance has he not performed for us! As the snow
blattered in his face he muttered, "how it raves and drifts! On-ding o'
snaw--aye, that's the word, on-ding." And so he approached his own door,
Castle Street, No. 39. There, over the door, looking forth on the world,
is his face to-day, looking up Young Street.
Then, as he grew restless and would awa, I followed him through Young
Street up to No. 1, North Charlotte Street. It is a substantial
building, still of dignified and fair estate; neighbourhoods are not
transformed in a Scots century as they are in America. But it carries no
tablet to tell the world that here Marjorie lived. It was here that at
the age of six she wrote her first letter to Isa Keith. It was here that
Marjorie saw "regency bonnets" and with eyes of envy; as indeed she
envied and desired with the passionate depths of her nature all lovely
and strange things. Here she read the Newgate calendar, and found it a
fascinating affair--Marjorie less than nine! And here that Isabel Keith,
her adored cousin, would not permit the little bookworm to read much of
lovers or to talk of them. Marjorie says very gravely, "a great many
authors have expressed themselves too sentimentally," but Isa was never
able quite to cure Marjorie of her interest in love.
That evening Sir Walter carried her, through the "on-ding o' snaw," in a
shepherd's plaid, over to Castle Street. I walked through the narrow
stone-lined thoroughfare on a hot July morning--and I could feel the
cold and snow of that winter a century back, and see the strong, lame,
great man, carrying the wee wifie in the neuk of his plaid, to the warm
firelight of his castle. Marjorie and he would romp there the evening
long. She would hear him say his lessons, "Ziccoty, diccoty, dock," or
"Wonery, twoery, tickery, seven," while Marjorie "grew quite bitter in
her displeasure at his ill behaviour and stupidness."
Then they would read ballads together; and then "he would take her on
his knee, and make her repeat Constance's speeches in King John till he
swayed to and fro sobbing his fill. Fancy the gifted little creature,
like one possessed, repeating--
"'For I am sick, and capable of fears,
Oppressed with wrongs, and therefore full of fears;
A widow, husbandless, subject to fears;
A woman, naturally born to fears.'"
I walked out through what used to be fields, and is now much suburban
dwelling, toward Braehead.--"I am going to-morrow to a delightful place,
Braehead by name, where there is ducks, cocks, bubblyjocks, 2 dogs, 2
cats and swine which is delightful"--to Ravelston--"I am at Ravelston
enjoying nature's fresh air. The birds are singing sweetly, the calf
doth frisk and nature shows her glorious face."
Ravelston is still a place of delight, with its great cliffs breaking
the surface of the park and a deep-lying lake with dark woodlands. I
wish Marjorie might have known the ballad by Sydney Dobell; it has the
magic quality she would have felt.
"Ravelston, Ravelston,
The merry path that leads
Down the golden morning hill,
And through the silver meads;
"She sang her song, she kept her kine,
She sat beneath the thorn,
When Andrew Keith of Ravelston
Rode thro' the Monday morn.
"Year after year, where Andrew came,
Comes evening down the glade,
And still there sits a moonshine ghost
Where sat the sunshine maid.
"She makes her immemorial moan,
She keeps her shadowy kine;
O Keith of Ravelston
The sorrows of thy line!"
In the late afternoon I took tram for Leith, changing of course at
Pilrig, because Leith remains haughtily aloof from Edinburgh and
emphasizes it through this break at the boundary. "When we came to
Leith," says Boswell, "I talked perhaps with too boasting an air, how
pretty the Frith of Forth looked; as indeed, after the prospect from
Constantinople, of which I have been told, and that from Naples, which I
have seen, I believe the view of the Frith and its environs from the
Castle-hill of Edinburgh is the finest prospect in Europe, 'Aye,'
replied Dr. Johnson, 'that is the state of the world. Water is the same
everywhere.'"
And so, down to the pier, stopping on the way to look at a New Haven
fishwife in her picturesque costume, which she has worn ever since the
Danes came over. Yes, and looking for a suitable piece of earth for
Queen Magdalene to kiss, "Scottis eard!" Well, if not here, there is
Scottis eard worthy elsewhere.
I asked for the ferry to Burnt-is-land. The conductor of the tram
looked, yes, and laughed. Burnt-island, he dared, _dared_ to repeat. And
so, I took ferry from Granton to--Burnt-island.
It is a long journey across the Firth. Far down the waters rises the
bold rock of the Bass, around which I had sailed a day before, looking
for a landing for some one more ponderous than solan geese or kittie
wake, and not finding it; although I was told that from Canty
bay--excellent Scots name--the innkeeper will row you o'er, and you may
walk where James I was waiting for the boat which should carry him to
safety in France, and getting instead the boat which carried him to
prison in England. Still I like to remember that Henry IV declared in
explanation that he "could speak very good French" himself, if that were
what they were sending Scottish Jamie o'er the water for; Henry who had
years of the Hundred Years' War behind him.
[Illustration: TANTALLON CASTLE.]
The rock is rent by a cavern running clean through. It's quite a
terrific place, and seven acres of benty grass must have seemed small
refuge for the Covenanters who were lodged here numerously in Killing
Time.
On the mainshore, the Lothian, rises Tantallon Castle, where Marmion
dared to beard Angus Bell-the-Cat. It still looks pretty tremendous, and
still stands, like the Coliseum. "Ding doon Tantallon? Build a brig to
the Bass!" runs the proud proverb.
But we are on our way across the Firth. There was a certain magic about
it on my day of pilgrimage. The north shore lay sparkling in the late
afternoon sun, blue shimmering land against a clear blue sky, the thin
rim of the continent playing here and there with opalescent colour where
man had builded village or castle, or where man had not destroyed the
ancient green. The south shore lay vague and gray, and growing darker,
against the falling afternoon, while the Lammermuirs stood up in paler
dusk in the background, and the sun blazed behind them. And all about
the Firth glittered like an inland lake, a Great Lake. I thought of how
the Roman galleys and Norse fleets had come this way, and looked and
departed. And how kings had brought their armies here, and looked,
perhaps besieged, and departed. And how time and time and time again,
French fleets had sailed in here to help their continuing ally,
Scotland. And how kings had sailed out from here to France, and how
Scots knights had sailed out from here for France, the Crusades,
anywhere that promised adventure. And here Saxon Margaret had sailed in
to be Scotland's queen. And here Scottish Mary had sailed in to be
Scotland's queen, and not to be. Far out in the offing the sun shone
golden upon the brown sails of a single fishing boat, tacking to catch a
homing wind, a ghost where once had sailed the war and merchant fleets
of nations.
At Burntisland I did not pause to visit Rossend Castle where Mary is
supposed to have had her affair with Chastelard; certainly not. Nor at
Kinghorn, where Alexander III, within a few months after he had married
in haunted Kelso, and within a few hours perhaps after he had drunk the
blude red wine in Dunfermline, came galloping by this way, the horse
stumbled, the king fell, and
"Quhen Alysandyr oure King was dede
That Scotland led in luve and le ...
Succoure Scotland and remede
That stands in perplexite."
_Kirkcaldy_
If Kirkcaldy was a "lang toun" in the olden days, it is longer to-day,
stretching from Linktown to Dysart, and broadening inland to Gallatown,
where they make the famous Wemyss pottery. To-day Kirkcaldy makes
linoleum and jute and engineering works, and it is the center of a
string of fishing villages, a "metropolitan borough system," hundreds of
boats fishing the North Sea with KY marked as their home port, when
their sailor men make home in any of these picturesque and smelling
villages, St. Monan, Pittenweem, Cellardyke, Crail where Mary of
Lorraine landed, Largo where Sir Andrew Wood the admiral lived, and
where Alexander Selkirk lived what time he did not live as Crusoe in
Juan Fernandez, and Anstruther--
"Wha wad na be in love
Wi' bonny Maggie Lauder,
A piper met her gaen to Fife
And speired what wast they ca'd her....
I've lived in Fife
Baith maid and wife
These ten years and a quarter,
Gin ye should come to Anster Fair
Speir ye for Maggie Lauder."
There is also some castellated splendour, Ravenscraig, and Wemyss on the
site of the castle of MacDuff, then of Fife, this Wemyss being the
ill-fated place where Mary first met Darnley.
Abbotshall kirkyard is at the right of the railway station as the train
pulls in to Kirkcaldy. In his book of Scotch pilgrimages when William
Winter was on his way to St. Andrews, past Kirkcaldy, he wrote "gazing
as I pass at its quaint church among the graves." I suppose he did not
know what grave.
But first I would find where she had lived. Kirkcaldy is close set
against the sea. Here on winding High Street, I found the house in which
she had lived, standing much as it did no doubt a hundred years ago,
except for a new coat of tan on the stone. From those upper windows
Marjorie looked out on the coach going away toward Edinburgh. The
ground floor is occupied by a book store, where I could buy no book
about Marjorie. Under a window you enter the archway and find yourself
in a little green-grassed court, which is all that is left of Marjorie's
garden. The house proper fronted the garden in that comfortable
excluding way which British people still prefer for their places of
habitation. It is still occupied as a dwelling, and the nursery still
looks as it did in Marjorie's day, and the drawing-room, where she wrote
that letter to Isa Keith--"I now sit down on my botom to answer all your
kind and beloved letters." The door of the nursery was open. I
remembered those last days, when lying ill, her mother asked Marjorie if
there was anything she wished. "Oh, yes, if you would just leave the
room door open a wee bit, and play 'The Land o' the Leal,' and I will
lie still and think and enjoy myself."
"I'm wearin' awa', Jean,
Like snaw wreaths in thaw, Jean,
I'm wearin' awa',
To the Land o' the Leal."
The kirkyard lies on the outskirts of the town. It was a beautiful place
as the Scotch sun sank behind the Fife hills and the Firth. The
organist was playing and the music drifted out through the narrow
lancet windows when I found the little white cross marked "Pet
Marjorie," and the old gray tombstone with its simple token, "M. F.
1811."
For a hundred years then she has been lying there. But Marjorie has
become one of the immortal dream children of the world. I laid my fresh
flowers beside another's which had withered, and went my ways into the
dusk.
_St. Andrews_
Past Kirkcaldy the road leaves the sea and runs northward through
meadows between fields which have the look of centuries-old cultivation,
at peace like the fields and villages of the English Midland, to St.
Andrews.
"St. Andrews by the Northern Sea,
A haunted town it is to me!
A little city, worn and gray,
The gray North Ocean girds it round;
And o'er the rocks, and up the bay,
The long sea-rollers surge and sound;
And still the thin and biting spray
Drives down the melancholy street,
And still endure, and still decay,
Towers that the salt winds vainly beat.
Ghost-like and shadowy they stand
Dim mirrored in the wet sea-sands.
"St. Leonard's Chapel, long ago
We loitered idly where the tall
Fresh-budded mountain ashes blow
Within thy desecrated wall;
The tough roots rent the tombs below,
And April birds sang clamorous,
We did not dream, we could not know
How hardly Fate would deal with us!
"O broken minster, looking forth
Beyond the bay, above the town,
O winter of the kindly North,
O college of the scarlet gown!"
Small wonder St. Andrews is the ecclesiastical capital of Scotland, and
smaller wonder, remembering the Calvinistic wind, that here happened the
brunt of the fight between the old faith and the new.
It is a clean and seemly town, with much historic memory and much
present day dignity, a small gray town, "the essence of all the
antiquity of Scotland in good clean condition," said Carlyle. Its
ancient sights the cathedral and the castle; its living sight the
university and the golf links.
The town stands on a promontory, three long streets converging on the
cathedral and castle lying in ruins. The cathedral, a hundred years in
the building, and very splendid in its wealth of detail, its vastness
of space like that of York or Amiens, was dedicated in the days of The
Bruce, with the king present to endow it with a hundred marks "for the
mighty victory of the Scots at Bannockburn, by St. Andrew's, the
guardian of the realm." For three hundred years its wax tapers lighted
the old rites according to which The Bruce worshiped; he was not
covenanted. Then the torch of the reformation was applied to it, the
torch of the flaming tongue of John Knox.
To-day there are three towers left of the five--Dr. Johnson hoped that
one which looked unstable on the day of his visit, would "fall on some
of the posterity of John Knox; and no great matter!" There are massive
walls. There is no roof between us and the sky, which, after all, does
shelter the true faith, and if one misses the chanting of the monks
echoing through these arches, under this roofless space, there is the
moan of the sea, sobbing at the foot of the crag, the sea which is of no
faith and never keeps faith. And if one misses the scarlet robes of
Cardinal Beaton as he swept through these aisles in splendid procession
with all the gorgeous trappings of his retinue, there are mosses and
wild flowers to give glows of colour--one must content himself. Those
were evil days, whatever the faith; there was not much division in
matters of conduct; there may have been in matters of morals.
[Illustration: ST. ANDREWS CASTLE.]
The castle stands stalwart on the rock promontory washed by the ocean,
and the ocean breaks angrily at its base like a creature robbed over
long of its prey. It is not the castle in which the Cardinal lived, but
it was built soon after, and wrecked so thoroughly, and looks so very
ancient, that one would fain believe; and the guide will tell, unless
you prevent him, that it was at these windows that the Cardinal sat at
his ease and witnessed the entertainment of the auto da fe of the
non-conformist, George Wishart, burned alive on March 28, 1542; about
the time Philip the Second was burning heretics in the Old Plaza at
Madrid, and a little before Queen Mary spouse to Philip, was burning
them in England. And it was only two months later, May 29, when workmen
were strengthening the castle at the orders of the Cardinal against this
very thing that happened, that the reformers made their way in, killed
the Cardinal, and hung him "by the tane arm and the tane foot," from the
very balcony where he had sat to enjoy Wishart's burning. A very
barbarous time. As Wishart had lain in the Bottle Dungeon months before
his burning, so Beaton lay in the dungeon in salt, seven months before
his burial.
John Knox joined the reformers, holding the town until it was taken by
the French fleet--"defended their castle against Scotland, France, and
Ireland all three"--surrendering to Strozzi, Prior of Capua, a Knight of
Rhodes; so was the great world made small in those days by errant
knights and captains and hired mercenaries. The French captain entered,
"and spoiled the castle very rigorously," lest it should be "a
receptacle for rebels." All this in the time of the Regency of Mary of
Lorraine.
Knox was taken and sent to the galleys for a year. Then he returned, and
was frequently in St. Andrews, preaching in the town kirk, founded,
perhaps, by the confessor of Saint Margaret, preaching here some of his
last sermons. "I saw him everie day of his doctrine go hulie and fear,"
wrote James Melville, "with a furrning of martriks about his neck, a
staff in the an hand," and lifted up to the pulpit "whar he behovite to
lean at his first entrie; bot or he had done with his sermont, he was so
active and vigorus, that he lyk to ding that pulpit in blads and fly out
of it." The pulpit held. And so did the doctrine of Knox.
The square tower of St. Regulus, a pre-Norman bit of architecture,
perhaps Culdee, stands southeast of the cathedral. Dr. Johnson was
indignant with Boswell that he missed it. This with the many other
towers of church and college make St. Andrews a towered town.
There is an air, an atmosphere, in St. Andrews; it is an academic town,
serene, certain of itself, quiet, with wide streets and gray stone
buildings. It is full of dignity, full of repose, as a northern Oxford
combined with a northern Canterbury should be. There is a spell of
ancientry over the gray old walls, but it is unbroken ancientry; if
there is a bar sinister, the present generation has forgotten it.
And, of course--oh, not of course, but primarily--there is golf. There
is golf everywhere in Scotland. The golf ball and not the thistle is the
symbol of Scotland to-day, and from the Tee at St. Andrews the Golf Ball
has been driven round the world. James VI, careful Scot, recognized golf
as an industry, and granted letters patent in 1618 for the manufacture
of golf balls--the old leather, feather-stuffed sphere--to James
Melville and William Berwick.
Edinburgh is ringed about with golf courses, public and private. So is
Scotland. The Firth of Forth is continuous with them, from North
Berwick where the fleeting traveler is as certain to see golf balls as
he is to see the Bass, up to St. Andrews. The Links of Leith are the
most historic, for it was on these that Charles I was playing when news
came of the Irish rebellion--and all that it led to. And here, his son,
later James II, played against two English noblemen who had declared
they could beat him, and James, cannily--true Scot!--chose the best
player in Scotland, one Paterson an Edinburgh cobbler--and gave him the
wager, and doubled it, out of which Paterson built for himself Golfer's
_Land_ in the Canongate. The Links of the Forth are not a golf course,
although there may be some who assert that they were once an ancient
course, say, for King Arthur and his Knights.
Sealand, shoreland, it seems, makes the ideal golf course, the soil
growing with short crisp grass that makes a springy and slippery turf,
and makes a keen game; the inlander, of course, and the American
inlander, may not understand that golf can never quite be golf,
certainly never be the true Scottish rite, unless it is played near the
sea, with the tang of the sea and of golf entering into one's
blood--and, preferably at St. Andrews.
At St. Andrews golf is a business, a sublimated business; or better, an
education. Degrees are taken in it quite as high and requiring as
thorough a training as at the University. It is to St. Andrews that the
good golfer goes when he dies. And he aspires to go there before.
Or, rather at St. Andrews golf is a religion. Half the stories told of
golf are, as might be expected of a game which came to its flowering in
Scotland, religious, or irreligious. And one of the best of them is told
in Stewart Dick's book on "The Forth." A Scots minister was playing and
playing rather badly, and expressing himself in words if not in strokes.
(Only those of you who have read "Sentimental Tommy" will understand
that unconsciously I have played on the word "stroke!") The minister
exclaimed bitterly as he emerged from his unholy battle with the
bunker--is Bunker Hill, perhaps a hazard in golf?--"Ah maun gie it up!
ah maun gie it up!" "What!" cried his partner alarmed, "gie up gowf?"
"Naw, naw," returned the minister, "gie up the meenistry."
Perhaps to amend again, golf at St. Andrews is life. And in their death
they are not divided. The graveyard near the Abbey, with stones hoary
from the sixteenth century, is renowned to-day because it contains the
graves of good golfers, Allan Robertson, old Tom Morris, and young Tom
Morris, the greatest golfer since Paterson, dead at the pathetic age of
24; after that comes a man's best golfing years, that is, for his
pleasure. Young Tom's grave is marked by an elaborate monument with an
inscription that befits a king.
CHAPTER VI
TO THE NORTH
One leaves Edinburgh for the North--the haunted North--as in a royal
progress. The train moves out of the Waverley station, and through the
Gardens, under the very shadow of Castle Rock.
And it moves through the scant few miles of country, richly cultivated,
suburban fairly, yet there are level wheatlands, and country cottages
and orchards; it is southern, English, these few miles down to the
Forth.
"The blackbird sang, the skies were clear and clean,
We bowled along a road that curved its spine
Superbly sinuous and serpentine
Thro' silent symphonies of summer green,
Sudden the Forth came on us--sad of mien,
No cloud to colour it, no breeze to line;
A sheet of dark dull glass, without a sign
Of life or death, two beams of sand between,
Water and sky merged blank in mist together,
The Fort loomed spectral, and the Guardship's spars
Traced vague, black shadows on the shimmery glaze:
We felt the dim, strange years, the gray, strange weather,
The still, strange land, unvexed of sun or stars,
Where Lancelot rides clanking thro' the haze."
To every one comes this sense of strange years and a strange land, even
at Queensferry, even to Henley.
The inn, where we have all put up in imagination, with Scott, and again
with Stevenson, lies under the bridge, as though it would escape the
quick curious gaze from these iron girders so high above what Scott ever
dreamed or Davy Balfour. And then, the train creeps out over this modern
audacity, this very ugly iron spanning of the river. Fortunately we are
upon it and cannot see its practical, monstrous being, "that monster of
utility," as Lord Rosebery called it. He should know its phrase, since
it is ever present in the view from his Dalmeny Park, lying east of the
Bridge and south of the Forth.
This is precisely where Queen Margaret was ferried to and fro a thousand
years ago. The monks who had charge of the ferry took from the toll
every fourth and every fortieth penny--a delightful bit of geometric
finance. Who could calculate and who would dispute the calculation, of
fourth and fortieth?
_Dunfermline_
"The King sits in Dunfermline toun
Drinking the blude-red wine."
Because of such lines as these I would cross far seas, merely to have
been, if far lonely destructive centuries after, in the very place of
their being.
For Dunfermline is surely a very kingly name for a king's town, and
"blude-red" wine is of such a difference from mere red, or blood-red
wine. What wonder that Alexander III, of whom it is written, went to his
death over at Kinghorn in such a tragic way!
But the king who forever sits in Dunfermline is that Malcolm of the
eleventh century who brings hither something more than legend yet
something as thrilling, as "authentic" as legend. Malcolm is the son of
Duncan, in Shakespeare's play, and in history.
"The son of Duncan
From whom this tyrant holds the due of birth,
Lives in the English court; and is received
Of the most pious Edward with such grace
That the malevolence of fortune nothing
Takes from his high respect."
Malcolm, after "the deep damnation of his taking off," fled from the red
wrath of Macbeth and into the far prophecy of Banquo, to the court of
Edward the Confessor. There perhaps he met Margaret; or perhaps not,
since she was grand-niece to the Confessor, and Malcolm was a
middle-aged man when this first royal Scottish romance occurs. When he
returned he built himself a castle here on the safe north side of the
Forth; if ever any place were safe in that eleventh century. He waited
here the coming of Margaret, and she came, the first Margaret of
England.
It was the first year after the Conquest, and Princess Margaret with her
brother and sister were fleeing to her mother's people in Bohemia. They
were wrecked far north in the Firth of Forth--which thereby becomes part
of the legendary coast of Bohemia. She landed at St. Margaret's Hope,
the first bay to the west of North Queensferry. Malcolm saw her from his
high tower--and they were married--and they lived happily ever after,
and richly for a quarter of a century; and they live immortally now.
Their history is certain, but it reads like a romance. It may be read,
very exquisitely set forth, in "The Tides of Spring," a one-act drama
by Arthur Upson, the young American poet whose sonnet on Calton Hill I
have just quoted; a poet who went to his death so tragically and so
beautifully in Lake Bemidji in Minnesota, a few years ago.
The story in the play, of Malcolm and Margaret, is all apple blossoms
and spring tides; it is very lovely. Margaret has met Malcolm before,
and destiny brings her to Scotland and to the king. It is a beautiful
beginning to a long enduring love story that through all the reality of
history shows a tender devotion from this stern northern king to the
saintly queen from the Saxon South.
They safeguarded themselves and their royal flock in Edinburgh, but they
lived in Dunfermline. Margaret knew a richer and a more religious life
than Malcolm, and she it was who laid the foundations of the kingdom, in
court and church. "Whatever she refused, he refused also; whatever
pleased her, he also loved, for the love of her," says her confessor.
English Margaret, unlike the later English Margaret of Alexander III,
did not find the North "a sad and solitary place"; and unlike the
English Margaret of James IV she was saintly, a white pearl in this wild
red time.
Malcolm and Margaret became the father and mother of a royal brood,
four kings of Scotland, and of Queen Matilda of England--surely Banquo
saw clearly on that terrible night; his prophecy began with a royal
rush.
But who would not live a lovely and pleasant life in this well-placed
royal burg, serene upon her hill? Rich green fields spread down to the
Forth, the red network of the bridge lifts itself into view, far to the
left sweeps the Firth out to North Berwick Law and the Bass, and
Edinburgh swims in the haze against the leonine mountain that is ever
her guard.
The Abbey gives the town its special dignity. There is nothing left of
the church built by Queen Margaret--where she robbed the box of the
money the king had just given at mass if she found the poor requiring
more immediate help. But this ancient nave built by Margaret's son David
is so very ancient that one could well spare the accurate historic
knowledge that it is a generation too late for emotion. There are
ponderous round pillars that could have sustained all the history we
require of them, high casements, a bare triforium, altogether a Davidic
place, a simplicity, a truth about it, that we would not dispute.
The new church was built a century ago over the old, and the ancient
nave is like an aisle in the new. Certain details, like the little
Norman doorway, once walled-up in the time of Knox, reward us with their
preserved beauty.
The tombs of Malcolm and Margaret are without the wall. Malcolm perhaps
is there; they carried bodies far in those days of material
resurrection, and would have brought Malcolm from Northumberland. But
Margaret, canonized next century, was too precious to remain in Ultima
Thule, so Spain carried her away--and who knows where she rests?
But within, before the high altar--or shall we say since this is a
reformed place, before the pulpit?--rests the body of The Bruce. It is
no doubt The Bruce. For Dunfermline was forgotten in rebellious times,
and the tombs were undisturbed. Even in the North transept there rest
the bones of eleven kings earlier than The Bruce.
Yes, it is very certain The Bruce, wrapped in gold cloth in the
thirteenth century, his heart only missing and lying at Melrose. Scott
who was everywhere and investigating everything saw the tomb opened and
pronounced--King Robert Bruce. One could wish the great letters about
the modern tower looking like an electric sign, were "reformed." But
here within the quiet, to stand at the very spot where is the dust of
so mighty a man, mighty in valour, mighty in sovereignty--I find it a
more substantial emotion than I have felt in the Invalides.
Ancientry preserves its unbroken descent outside the church. The mother
of Wallace is buried here, and the thorn he planted to mark her grave
still flourishes, to the ninth century after.
The people who sit in Dunfermline town have not too much concern for
King Robert and King Alexander. Nor do they do much sitting, these busy
industrious Dunfermliners. They are living their own lives, and making
for themselves profit through the generosity of a later fellow citizen.
Dunfermline is a center of great coal fields, and center of the Scotch
linen making. So the town is modern, looks modern, and the people move
briskly. If they know you are a tourist on ancient errand bent, they
look curiously. You come from so far to recapture ancient life, when you
might have so much modern life in your own country.
They know what America means. For Andrew Carnegie is their fellow
citizen, or would be had he not become an American. Seventy years ago he
was born in a cottage toward which the Dunfermline folk look with the
attention we show the Abbey. And Carnegie has not only given a library
to Dunfermline--yes, a library--Malcolm could not read Margaret's books,
but he had them richly bound and bejeweled and kissed them in reverence
of her. But the Laird has given a technical school, and the Pittencrieff
Glen, which is a lovely pleasure ground with the scant stones of
Malcolm's palace above, and a trust of two million and a half dollars,
which the wise town corporation is busy utilizing for the advancement of
Dunfermline town.
_Loch Leven_
And on to Loch Leven. I cannot think that any one can come upon this
castle without emotion. Or he should never come to Scotland.
It is a famous fishing lake, a peculiar kind of trout are abundant,
twenty-five thousand taken from it each year; rather I have given the
round numbers, but an exact toll of the fish taken is required by law,
and for the past year it was, with Scottish accuracy, something more or
something less than twenty-five thousand. The lake is controlled
altogether by an anglers association. No boat can row on it, no
fisherman can cast his line, but by permission.
There is a small shop in Edinburgh where tickets and tackle can be
taken, and much advice from the canny Scot who keeps the shop, and who
would make your fishing expedition a success. "I don't know what your
scruples are," he ventured, "but if ye want the Loch Leven boatmen to be
satisfied, I'd advise ye to take wi' a bit o' Scotch. A wee bit drappie
goes a long wa."
"Just a wee deoch and doris!"
We remembered Harry Lauder, and wondered if we could say "It's a braw
bricht moon licht nicht." Or would those redoutable boatmen ken that we
were but pretending to Scotch and even suspect our "Scotch"?
They did not.
The Green hotel is an excellent place to stay, kept by a Scotchman who
knows that in America every one knows every one else. We slept in
feather beds, and we inspected the collection of "stanes," one of the
best I have ever seen in Scotland, a great variety, some of them natural
boulders, some wood with iron weights--someday I must brave the rigours
of a Scotch winter and see them curl on Duddingston or on Leven. And I
should like to see Bob Dunbar of St. Paul, champion curler of America,
measure his skill against the champion of Scotland.
And, of course, there was talk with the Scot host. "So ye're American.
Well, maybe ye ken a mon that lives in Minn'apolis. He's twa sisters
live here; and he's built a hoose for them." It happened that we did ken
of this man, who came from Kinross to Minneapolis with only his Scotch
canniness, and has built the Donaldson business into one of the great
department stores of America.
And next day, after we had slept on feather beds, we had our fishing in
Loch Leven, with thousands of wild swan disputing our possession; a big
boat, with big oars, sweeps, one man to each oar, one a loquacious
fellow with no dialect (he might as well have been English), and the
other taciturn with a dialect thick as mud or as Lauder's. And we caught
two of the twenty-five thousand odd which were credited to that year.
As the train came alongside Loch Leven on its way to Kinross station,
suddenly I felt Mary as I never have realized her, before or since.
There across the lake lay St. Serf's isle, and there rose the keep of
the old castle. And over that water, as plainly--more plainly, than the
fishing boats that lay at their ease--I saw her take boat on a still
evening, May 2, 1568, at half past seven o'clock from prison--to
liberty--to prison!
I was not mistaken. She who was with me saw it, as distinctly, as
vividly. Perhaps it was that all our lives this had been to us one of
the great adventuring moments--for which we would exchange any moment of
our lives. We were idolaters always, Mariolaters. And now we know that
places are haunted, and that centuries are of no account; they will give
up their ghosts to those who would live in them.
"Put off, put off, and row with speed,
For now is the time and the hour of need,
To oars, to oars, and trim the bark,
Nor Scotland's queen be a warder's mark;
Yon light that plays 'round the castle moat,
Is only the warder's random shot;
Put off, put off, and row with speed,
For now is the time and the hour of need.
"Those pond'rous keys shall the kelpies keep,
And lodge in their caverns, so dark and deep,
Nor shall Loch Leven's tower and hall
Hold thee, our lovely lady, in thrall;
Or be the haunts of traitors sold,
While Scotland has hands and hearts so bold.
Then onward, steersman, row with speed,
For now is the time and the hour of need.
"Hark! the alarum bell has rung,
The warder's voice has treason sung,
The echoes to the falconets roar,
Chime sweetly to the dashing shore;
Let tower, hall, and battlement gleam,
We steer by the light of the taper's gleam,
For Scotland and Mary on with speed,
Now, now, is the time and the hour of need!"
Because of that experience, because of the feeling I have for Queen
Mary, I have never landed upon St. Serf's island. It has happened, quite
without my making intentional pilgrimage, that I have been in many
places where Queen Mary has been; and willingly I have made my
accidental pilgrimages of loyalty. I have stood in the turret at Roscoff
where she landed when only five, hurried from Scotland that she might
escape sinister England; in the chapel in Notre Dame where she was
married to the Dauphin; in the château at Orleans where she lived with
him much of that brief happy French life she loved so dearly; in the two
small garret chambers where she lodged in Coventry; in Hardwick Hall,
where Bess of Hardwick was her stern jailer; at Fotheringay where
nothing remains of that ensanguined block but a low heap of stones which
the grass covers; in Peterborough where she found her first resting
place; in Westminster her last final resting place; and in many and many
a haunted place of this Scottish land.
And just before starting north I made a little journey to Linlithgow
which lies twenty miles west of Edinburgh. The palace overlooks a quiet
blue loch, a blue smiling bit of water, on which much royalty has looked
forth, and on which the eyes of Mary first looked. There, in the
unroofed palace of Linlithgow, in the "drawing-room," in December, 1542,
was born that queen who ever since has divided the world.
"Of all the palaces so fair
Built for the royal dwelling,
In Scotland far beyond compare
Linlithgow is excelling.
And in the park in jovial June
How sweet the merry linnet's tune,
How blithe the blackbird's lay."
It was the dower-house of Scottish queens, and hither James V brought
Mary of Lorraine after he had married her at St. Andrews. (I wondered if
there was any haunting memory of Margaret of Denmark who sat here sewing
when the nobles raged through the palace seeking the life of James III.
Or of Margaret of England as she sat here waiting for James IV to return
from Flodden.)
[Illustration: DRAWING-ROOM, LINLITHGOW PALACE, WHERE QUEEN MARY WAS
BORN.]
Of the regency of Mary of Lorraine, when James V died and Mary was a
baby, Knox spluttered that it was "as semlye a sight (yf men had eis)
as to putt a sadill upoun the back of ane unrowly kow." Knox did not
pick his language with any nicety when he said his say of women and the
monstrous regiments of them. And to his Puritan soul there could come no
approval of the love affairs of Mary of Lorraine, such as that one sung
by the Master of Erskine, who was slain at Pinkiecleuch--
"I go, and wait not quhair,
I wander heir and thair,
I weip and sichis rycht sair
With panis smart;
Now must I pass away, away,
In wilderness and lanesome way,
Alace! this woeful day
We suld departe."
And now there is neither Margaret nor Mary, neither regent nor reformer,
palace of neither Linlithgow nor Leven. How the destructions of man have
thrown palaces and doctrines open to the winds of heaven. And how
purifying this destruction. And what precious things have passed with
them, what tears of women have been shed, and how are the mouths of men
become dust.
Loch Leven has one lovely gracious memory of Mary in the days before
everything was lost. She was lodging here, and had sent for Knox to come
from Edinburgh.
"She travailed with him earnestly for two hours before her supper, that
he would protect the Catholic clergy from persecution." Knox slept in
the castle, but "before the sun," as he records, he was awakened by the
sound of horns and of boats putting off to the mainland. For the queen
would go a-hawking.
Presently Knox was roused. The queen would have him join her "be-west
Kinross," to continue the conversation.
The reformer did not rise as early as the queen--the serenity of that
righteous conscience! He rose reluctantly at her summons. His reforming
eyes, no doubt, looked with displeasure on the exquisite beauties of the
unreformed morning, the mists lying soft on the Lomonds, day just
emerging from night.
So he joined her, and they rode together, she on her horse, he on his
hackney.
And the morning came on, and the day was a glory.
Mary warned Knox that a certain Bishop sought to use him, and Knox
afterward acknowledged the value of her warning. She asked him to settle
a quarrel between Argyle and his wife, her half sister, as Knox had done
before. And often no doubt she glanced at her hawk hanging in the high
Scottish sky.
And finally she declared--"as touching our reasoning of yesternight, I
promise to do as ye required. I shall summon the offenders and ye shall
know that I shall minister justice."
And the reformer, softened by the morning, and by Mary's eyes--"I am
assured then that ye shall please God and enjoy rest and prosperity
within your realm."
And Knox rode off. And Mary rode hawking.
The time was not yet come when Mary should say--"Yon man gar me greet
and grat never tear himself. I will see if I can gar him greet."
Or, for Knox to pray--"Oh, Lord, if thy pleasure be, purge the heart of
the Queen's Majestie from the venom of idolatry, and deliver her from
the bondage and the thralldom of Satan."
_Perth_
Perth may be the Fair City, but it is scarce fair among cities, and is
chiefly regarded even by itself as a point of departure, the Gate of the
Highlands. The railway platform is at least a third of a mile long, and
very bewildering to the unsuspecting visitor who thought he was merely
coming to the ancient Celtic capital.
For, very far backward, this was the chief city of the kingdom, before
Scotland had spread down to the Forth, and down to the Border. Even so
recently (?) as the time of James the First it was held the fairest city
in the kingdom. But the assassination of that monarch must have led the
Jameses to seek a safer city in which to be fair.
There is a touch of antiquity about the town. One is shown the house of
the Fair Maid; in truth that being the objective of the casual traveler
signs in the street point the way. It may or may not be. But we agreed
to let Scott decide these things and he, no doubt, chose this house.
Curfew Street that runs by, looking like a vennel--vennel? I am
certain--was inhabited rather by lively boys, and no fair head looked
out from the high window that would have furnished an excellent framing
for the fair face of Catherine Glover.
The North Inch I found to be not an island in the Tay, but a meadow,
where every possible out-door activity takes place among the descendants
of Clans Chattan and Quhele--there is race-course, golf links, cricket
field, football, grazing, washing. I trust the clans are somewhat
evener now in numbers, although there were left but one Chattan to level
the Quheles. Coming from the Chattan tribe I must hope the centuries
since that strifeful day have brought reëxpansion to the Chattans.
Farther up the Inch, onto the Whin, the eye looks across to Scone. The
foot does not cross, for there is nothing left of the old Abbey, not
even of the old palace where Charles II, last king crowned in Scotland,
suffered coronation--and was instructed in the ways of well doing
according to the Covenant. Even the stone of destiny was gone then,
brought from Dunstaffnage, and taken to Westminster.
There is nothing, or only stones, left of the Blackfriar's Monastery in
which James, the poet-king, suffered death. Surely he was born too soon.
As last instead of first of the Jameses, what might he not have done in
the ways of intelligence and beauty, as England's king as well as
Scotland's? Very beautifully runs his picture of Lady Joanna Beaufort,
seen from a window in Windsor--
"The fairest and the freshest flower,
That ever I saw before that hour,
The which o' the sudden made to start
The blood of my body to my heart ...
Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly creature,
Or heavenly thing in form of nature?"
He came back from his enforced habitation in England accompanied by Lady
Joanna as Queen, and determined "if God gives me but a dog's life, I
will make the key keep the castle and the brachen bush the cow." It was
a dog's death the gods gave. The nobles, the Grahams, would not keep the
castle. So in Blackfriars the king was "mercilessly dirked to death,"
notwithstanding that Catherine Douglass--the Douglasses were with James
then--made a bar across the door with her arm where the iron had been
sinisterly removed. A dark scene, with "the fairest flower" looking on.
So, I think it not so ill, even though time delayed over a hundred
years, that John Knox (May, 1559) should have preached such an
incendiary sermon that in three days there was nothing left of Black or
Gray friary but the broken stones.
Nor is there anything left of Gowrie house, where James VI was almost
entrapped and almost slain--"I am murdered--treason--treason"; the jail
stands on its site. Huntington Tower still stands down the Tay; and
there also James very nearly came to his death, at the plotting of the
son of that Ruthven who killed Rizzio and forced Mary to abdicate.
[Illustration: HUNTINGTON TOWER.]
Kinnoul Hill overlooks the town, and furnishes a very fair view of the
Fair City. No doubt it was from this height that the Roman looked
down upon the Tay--
"Behold the Tiber! the vain Roman cried,
Viewing the ample Tay from Baiglie's side;
But where's the Scot that would the vaunt repay,
And hail the puny Tiber for the Tay?"
It is more wonderful to-day to know that salmon weighing seventy pounds
are sometimes taken from this Tay. The river leads down through the rich
Carse of Gowrie, toward Dundee and marmalade. Thither we shall not go;
but it shall come to us.
Ruskin spent his childhood in Perth and did not like it. But Ruskin
liked so little in the world, except--"that Scottish sheaves are more
golden than are bound in other lands, and that no harvests elsewhere
visible to human eye are so like the 'corn of heaven,' as those of
Strath Tay and Strath Earn." That is the way for to admire, for to see;
all, or nothing was Ruskin's way.
Ruskin married in Perth, one of its fairest maids, who lived on the
slope of Kinnoul Hill; and then, unmarrying, the fair lady, looking very
fair in the painted pictures, married a painter who once was very much
about Perth.
Perth is also the "Muirton" of "The Bonnie Brier Bush." So some have
found these environs bonny.
In truth it is a lovely surrounding country. And have you not from
childhood, if you read "Macbeth" as early as did Justice Charles E.
Hughes, thought Birnam and Dunsinane the loveliest names in the world?
Six miles up the Tay through bonny country, stands Dunsinnan Hill; not
so lovely as our Dunsinane; once it was Dunscenanyse! But Shakespeare
always gave words their magic retouching. And once there stood here the
castle of Dunsinane where a certain Lady walked in her sleep, and then
slept. And below, you see Birnam wood--
"Till great Birnam wood
Do come to Dunsinane."
To see that wood wave in the wind is fairly eerie!
Dunkeld is less of a city, more of a memory, exquisite in its beauty,
lodged in a close fold of the Highlands. And you reach it through the
station, cis-Tay, called Birnam!
It is a quiet peaceful place, more like a now quiet Border town. Hither
to this cathedral, the precious remains of Saint Columba were brought by
the MacAlpine. So I suppose they still rest here, that wandering dust,
that missionary zeal. Also, inharmony, here rest (?) the remains of the
Wolf of Badenoch, wicked son of Robert II, and--I am certain the pun has
been ventured before--bad enough. Gavin Douglass of the Vergilian
measure was bishop here, and Mrs. Oliphant has written stories round
about.
"Cam ye by Athole, lad wi' the philabeg?"
We are getting into the Highlands, we are at them, from now on nothing
but philabegs, pibrochs, pipes, tartans and heather, nothing but the
distilled essence of heather--heather ale? the secret was lost when the
Picts were conquered.
CHAPTER VII
HIGHLAND AND LOWLAND
Many ways lead out of Perth, but best of these is the foot-path way,
picked up anywhere in the Highlands. By rail the road leads down to the
sea, past Glamis Castle, built in 1500, where the room is shown in which
Duncan was murdered in 1000, although Shakespeare says it was at
Inverness; and to Kirriemuir, if one would match the "Bonnie Brier Bush"
with "The Window in Thrums." Or by rail the road leads to the lakes of
the West, and to the Highlands of the North.
For one short space I took it northward to the Pass of Killiecrankie,
almost in fear, as a regiment of English mercenaries is said to have
been a-feared in the Forty Five, three-quarters of a century after
Killiecrankie. For here in a last splendid moment, Graham of
Claverhouse, Viscount of Dundee, and sometime Bonnie Dundee, was killed,
the battle having gone gloriously his way, for the glorious cause of
Stewart and _mon droit_--some say by a silver bullet, the devil
having charmed the leaden bullets that were showered against his magic
life; those who say it are Whigs.
[Illustration: GLAMIS CASTLE.]
Always called Bonnie Dundee by those of us who care for romance. To
quote from Samuel Crothers, "And you say they are the same? I cannot
make them seem the same. To me there are two of them: Graham of
Claverhouse, whom I hate, and the Bonnie Dundee, whom I love. If it's
all the same to you, I think I shall keep them separate, and go on
loving and hating as aforetime."
The Pass is lovely enough, on a summer morning, with the sun shining
fair on the Highlands, the blue hills misty in the distance, the trees
thick green on both sides the bending Garry, and not a living thing in
view, nothing which belongs to the Duke of Atholl who owns everything
hereabout, except the air and the beauty and the memory, which I packed
in my Pilgrim's Wallet.
Because the Duke owns the cathedral I did not claim any memory beside
the dust of Bonnie Dundee--
"Fling open the Westport and let me gae free."
And now, to a certain defeat which I suffered near the Pass of
Killiecrankie, when I "cam by Athole." I was without a philabeg. If I
had had it--it sounds so enhearteningly like usquebaugh--I think my
courage would have been great enough to do the thing I had crossed over
seas to do--to walk from Blair Athole through Glen Tilt and between the
great lift of the Cairngorms, to Braemar. I had felt that I owed it to
Scottish ancestors and to those who had lost in the Risings.
I remembered that Queen Mary had longed to be a man. When she had come
into this North to punish Huntley, so the Scottish calendar states, "She
repenteth of nothing, but when the lords and others came in the morning
from the watch, that she was not a man to know what life it was to lie
all night in the fields, or to walk upon the causeway with a jack and a
knapschall (helmet), a Glasgow buckler, and a broadsword." Her father's
errant soul was hers. And once she ventured it, but in fear of her life,
when she fled from the wraith of Darnley, to the scandalizing of the
mongers, "Her Majestie, in mennis claithes, buttit and spurrit, departed
that samin nicht of Borthwick to Dunbar, quhairof no man knew saif my
Lord Duke and sum of his servants, wha met Her Majestie a myll off
Borthwick and conveyed her hieness to Dunbar."
[Illustration: GLEN TILT.]
I added another Scottish defeat. For it was excessively warm that
summer, and Scotland can be as warm and as dry as Kansas. It is thirty
miles, the mountain way. There is no inn. There is possibility--there is
danger--of losing the way. There are no wolves, I suppose, and certainly
no Wolf of Badenoch. But there were the unknown terrors.
So we walked a certain stent into Glen Tilt, enough to know that it is
wild, gloomy, one of the strangest wildest places, Ben-y-Gloe, the
"Mountain of the Mist," rising out of the early morning mist, yet not so
mysteriously or majestically as the Mountain Going to the Sun. But no
valley in our Mountain West has ever seemed more empty. And I suppose
since Pictish time this glen has been deserted. There were deer, red
deer, that thought they were free, and who looked out of their coverts
indifferently. We had not the heart to tell them that they belonged,
body and soul, to the Duke of Atholl. After the Porteous riots, Queen
Caroline, presiding in the place of George who was absent in his
favourite Hanover, threatened "to turn Scotland into a hunting field."
The Duke of Argyle thereupon hinted that he would have to "return to
look after my hounds." Queen Caroline seems sovereign to-day. And
especially on August eleventh, the day before St. Grouse Day, there is
an ominous quiet.
So we returned by way of Coupar Angus--meekly remembering the proverb,
"he that maun to Coupar, maun to Coupar." Here we changed cars, nearly
losing the train, because we were so engrossed in watching the loading
of the luggage, the Scotch porter cheering on his assistant, "we're twa
strong men, haud awa, let's be canny." And in the great gold sunset that
was like the glory of God upon the heavenly Highlands.
We came to Blairgowrie, where we heard in the twilight on the hills
above the town a bird of magic such as I have never heard elsewhere. Was
it a nightingale, or a night lark? It sang like these.
Next morning we took coach across these great hills, by way of Glenshee,
a very lovely way of going, and not to be regretted, in its dashing
splendour of a coach and six--except that it was not a thirty-mile walk.
But it is to be historically remembered, because it is the way Mar's men
came down to the Strath of Tay, and brought the Rising into the
Lowlands. We would go to meet them.
It was a memorable day. Not even the Simplon pass taken on a June day
when the road ran between fresh coach-out-topping walls of glittering
snow can make one forget the road over the Spittal of Glenshee. There
were impossibly purple mountains, indigo-deep, deeper purple than any
hills I have ever seen, so does the ripened heather dye the distances
more deeply. There were rocky glens, great loneliness, a mansion here
and there only just on leaving Blairgowrie, Tullyveolan, of course;
scarce a cottage even on the roadside; once a flock of sheep, near the
Spittal, being worked by Scotch collies, with an uncanny, or, canny,
second sense to get the master's direction. There was lunch at the
Spittal, a one-time Hospice, like that on the Simplon. And I wondered if
the song ran of this lovely little glen set in the midst of so much
primeval world--
"O wharawa got ye that auld crookit penny,
For ane o' bright gowd wad ye niffer wi' me?
Richt fou are baith ends o' my green silken wallet,
And braw will your hame be in bonnie Glenshee.
"For a' the bricht gowd in your green silken wallet
I never wad niffer my crookit bawbee."
The road at the top of the world runs smoothly enough. But when the
Devil's elbow is reached, a tremendous and dangerous turn in the road,
every one dismounts from the coach, and the sight of an adventurous
motor car coming down the turn does not decrease one's sense of peril.
_Braemar_
And then the sight of Braemar, and a consciousness that if you are about
to spend more money at the Fife Arms or the Invercauld than any but
royalty has a right to spend--royalty not having earned it--the
adventure has been worth it.
And to have forgotten but as the coach flashes by to read the tablet--
"Here Robert Louis Stevenson lived in the summer of 1881, and wrote
'Treasure Island.'"
this is to be home again.
Of course our first pilgrimage was to the Invercauld Arms, where we
again set up the standard on the braes of Mar. It was here that Malcolm
Canmore instituted the Highland Gathering which persists to this day.
And here, under cover of the hunt, so did the loyal Jacobites conceal
their intention, the Rising of the Fifteen was planned--and the hunters
became the hunted.
[Illustration: INVERCAULD HOUSE.]
It was evening, it was the Highlands, the great circle of mountains
lay round about. And if King James VIII and III had been defeated these
two hundred years, and dead a lesser time, and our loyalty had always
been to the Prince who came rather to establish his father than himself,
the Fifteen seemed like yesterday. In this remote high corner of the
world anything is possible, even the oblivion of time. It seemed very
vital, that faraway moment, which in truth few persons to-day take into
reckoning; even history recks little of it. But very near in this
illusory twilight--was that the Fiery Cross that glimmered in the
darkness?
"The standard on the braes o' Mar
Is up and streaming rarely;
The gathering pipe on Lochnagar
Is sounding loud and clearly.
The Highlandmen frae hill and glen,
In martial hue, wi' bonnets blue,
Wi' belted plaids and burnished blades,
Are coming late and early.
"Wha' wadna join our noble chief,
The Drummond and Glengarry?
Macgregor, Murray, Rollo, Keith,
Panmure and gallant Harry,
Macdonald's men, Clanranald's men,
Mackenzie's men, Macgilvrary's men,
Strathallan's men, the Lowland men
Of Callander and Airlie."
Next day we met a gentleman we forever call "The Advocate of Aberdeen."
In any event the lawyers of Aberdeen have styled themselves "Advocates"
since so addressed by King James. We did not know that when we named
him, but we preferred it to any Sandy or "Mac" he might legally carry.
Having been informed by him that our name was Lowland and we were
entitled to none of the thrills of the Highlands, we failed to mount
farther than the third stage of the Morrone Hill. The wind blew a gale
from the nor'nor'west, like those better known to us from the
sou'sou'west. It was humiliating to have the Advocate of Aberdeen
instruct us when we returned that if we had gone on we might have proved
our Highland blood.
We did not attempt Ben MacDui, although it may be approached by the
ever-easy way of pony-back, even the queen--not Mary--having mounted it
in this fashion. We were content to master, almost master, its
pronunciation according to the pure Gaelic--Muich Dhui. And then we
learned that by more accurate and later scientific measurement, MacDui
is not the tallest mountain in the kingdom, but Ben Nevis out-tops it.
To make our peace with an almost forfeited fate, we took a dander, that
is, we walked back toward Glen Tilt by the way we had not come. There is
a happy little falls a couple of miles from the town, Corrimulzie,
plunging down a long fall through a deep narrow gorge, but very
pleasantly. We passed white milestone after white milestone, measured in
particular Scottish accuracy--we timed ourselves to a second and found
we could measure the miles by the numbers of our breaths. The forest is
thick and bosky, not an original forest, doubtless. But I was reminded
that Taylor, on his Pennyless Pilgrimage came to Braemar three hundred
years ago, and wrote "as many fir trees growing there as would serve for
masts (from this time to the end of the worlde) for all the shippes,
caracks, hoyes, galleyes, boates, drumiers, barkes, and water-crafte,
that are now, or can be in the worlde these fourty yeeres." He lamented
the impossibility of sending them down to tide water where they might
meet their proper fate.
Only once did we meet a carriage in which we suspected that royalty, or
at least ladies-in-waiting--if Duke's wives who are royal have such
appendages--might be sitting.
And on to the Linn of Dee, which is truly a marvelous place. The
Advocate of Aberdeen when we had asked him why so many of his townfolk
came this way, explained with a sense of possession of the greater Dee,
"we like to see what the Dee can do." Surely it can do it. In these rock
walls it has spent centuries carving for itself fantastic ways, until
not the Dalles of the St. Croix can excel its rock-bound fantasy. Given
time, the Dee can "do" pretty much as it pleases in granite.
The few miles we ventured beyond the Linn were enough to prove that the
way was long, the wind was cold, the minstrel was infirm and old. Had we
walked all the mountain way we should have been much in need of a
"plaidie to the angry airts." This air is very bracing.
But we sang many Jacobite songs in memory of the Risings. "Wha'll be
King but Charlie?" and "Charlie is my Darling," and "Over the sea
Charlie is coming to me," and "Will ye no come back again." And we sang
with particular satisfaction that we were not, after all, to suffer
royal wrongs--surely there is a falling away in the far generations in
the far places, since a King's son could so adventure--
"Dark night cam' on, the tempest roar'd,
Loud o'er the hills and valleys,
An' where was't that your Prince lay down
Who's hame should been a palace?
He row'd him in a Highland plaid,
Which cover'd him but sparely,
An' slept beneath a bush o' broom,
Oh, wae's me for Prince Charlie."
On these braes of Mar, and in these hills and beside these very streams,
the Prince made his adventure--yes, and simply because of that adventure
will be forever remembered by those who believe in the heroic mood.
[Illustration: BALMORAL CASTLE.]
To leave Braemar the road leads down to Ballater, with motor cars to
take it swiftly; past the castles of Mar old and new, where betimes sits
the present Earl of Mar, not conning Risings but writing to the
magazines his idea of a free Scotland, which shall have its Home Rule
like Ireland--which was once Scotland--and which may have it at the
great peace; down through an increasingly pleasant country. Balmoral
Castle looks deserted now of its queen--and when queens desert, places
are much emptier than when kings leave. But "queen's weather" is still
possible here, even though the castle and our way are overshadowed by
Lochnagar, on which we bestow more than passing glance in memory of that
Gordon who was Lord Byron.
"Ah! there my young footsteps in infancy wander'd;
My cap was the bonnet, my cloak was the plaid;
On chieftains long perished my memory ponder'd,
As daily I strove through the pine-cover'd glade;
I sought not my home till the day's dying glory
Gave place to the rays of the bright polar star;
For fancy was cheer'd by traditional story,
Disclosed by the natives of dark Loch na Garr."
And one glance at Lumphanan-- "This Macbeth then slew they there in the
wood of Lumphanan," so runs the old chronicle.
_Aberdeen_
There is no city in Scotland which seems to me to have more personality,
a more distinct personality, than Aberdeen. It is plainly a
self-sufficient city, and both in politics and in religion it thinks for
itself, mindless if its thinking is not that of the rest of the kingdom.
Its provost cannot leave its borders; once he attended a battle, many
and many a year ago, nineteen miles from the city at Harlow, and sad to
say, he was killed. So now the provost remains in the city, he cannot
leave it more than President can leave Republic, or Pope the Vatican.
[Illustration: MARISCHAL COLLEGE.]
In religion, Aberdeen is strongly Episcopalian, where it is not
Catholic. In truth there is a band of Catholicism running across the
country, from Aberdeen to Skye, through the heart of the Highlands. As
might be expected, the Highlands never yielded to the reformatory
methods of John Knox, but remained of the faith.
There is no city that looks so Scottish, and yet so different, as
Aberdeen. It is a dignified and an extraordinarily clean city. After a
rain its granite glitters as though it had been newly cut, and to one
accustomed to smoke-grimed American cities Aberdeen looks as though it
were built this morning, when no doubt much of this granite has a right
to the hoar of antiquity.
Marischal College, founded by the Keiths, who were Earl Marischals,
boasts of being the greatest granite pile in the world, after the
Escorial. Having walked a day through a circumscribed portion of that
Spanish granite, I chose to limit my footsteps in Marischal college.
Only to verify the stone did I enter. And there it stood, over the
doorway of the inner entrance hall, that stone which gives me a certain
ancestral right of hauteur--
Thay half said.
Quhat say thay?
Lat thame say.
Scots are astonishingly fond of mottoes. They carve them, like Orlando's
verse, if not on every tree, on every lintel and over every fireplace;
from _Nemo me impune lacessit_ of the royal thistle race, to every clan
and every cottage.
King's College (1495) is an older foundation than Marischal (1593), and
where once they were rivals, since the Eighteen Sixties they have been
harmonized, and since Mr. Carnegie gave them his benefaction, education
is free in this University of Aberdeen. King's College, if not the next
greatest granite pile, has a stone cross, which is the typical capping
of noble edifice in Scotland; in truth it begins at Newcastle on Tyne
when one enters the English beginning of the Border.
The cathedral of St. Machar's, first founded by the saint who was a
disciple of Columba, was refounded by the saint who was David I--of
course; what a busy saint this was--and looks the part of age, but of
strength rather than arrogance, with its low lying towers.
There is an old town even in the new town, and the contrast is sharp. If
one gets lost, turns suddenly into this old part, it is a curious
experience. The buildings look medieval, French provincial, and the
people look strange and foreign; also they treat you, a foreigner, with
all that curiosity, and something of that disrespect which you, of
course, deserve, having interloped into their sanctuary. The Duke of
Cumberland lived here for six weeks before advancing on Culloden, and
while he did not "butcher" here to deserve his name, his soldiers left
as ugly a fame behind them as Montrose's men, what time he made bloody
assault on the city.
And in Broad Street may be found the house in which George Gordon, Lord
Byron, lived in his school days. In Don Juan, he autobiographically
remembers--
"As 'Auld Lang Syne' brings Scotland one and all,
Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills, and clear streams
The Dee, the Don, Balgownie's Brig's black wall,
All my boy feelings, all my gentle dreams
Of what I then dreamt, clothed in their own pall
Like Banquo's offspring;--floating past me seems
My childhood in this childishness of mine:
I care not--'tis a glimpse of 'Auld Lang Syne.'"
Aberdeen is a sea city, lying between the mouths of the Dee and the Don.
A bridge, dating from 1320, crosses the Don, and Byron steadfastly
avoided it, lest he, a single son, might be found thereon on the single
foal of a mare, and the prophecy be filled, the brig fall down.
One day in a small booth off Union Street I stopped to buy
strawberries--if you pick up southern England in early May and make
Inverness in late August, you can follow red strawberries and red
poppies in the wheat all the way from Land's End to John o' Groat's.
I asked the price of the berries and was told. I asked again,
and again. Finally, not ears but intuition told me. It was a
Scandinavian-Gaelic-English. I remembered that in Edinburgh I had
once asked a policeman the way, and hearing his reply I turned to my
friend--"Wouldn't you think you were in Minneapolis?" For especially
in Aberdeen you are looking to that Norway with which Scotland was so
closely linked, as with all the Scandinavian countries, in the early
centuries, till the Maid of Norway, granddaughter to Alexander III died
on her way to take the crown, and till after Margaret of Denmark brought
the Orkneys and the Hebrides to James III as her dowery.
"To Norroway, to Norroway,
To Norroway o'er the faem;
The King's daughter of Norroway,
'Tis thou maun bring her hame."
And I remember the tragedy of that frustrated journey--
"O forty miles off Aberdeen,
'Tis fifty fathoms deep,
And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens,
Wi' the Scots lords at his feet."
Remembering the sea, which I had not yet seen, I tried to make my way
down to the shore, but Aberdeen is a sea-port, and docks instead of
shore line its sea edge. What I was seeking was rather rocks--
"On the rocks by Aberdeen,
Where the whistlin' wave had been
As I wandered and at e'en
Was eerie--"
And after a visit to the fishmarket, which is a truly marvelous
monstrous place, I set out to find the rocks, toward the south.
There is never a place more rock-bound, more broken into fantastic
shapes, and worn daily and increasingly by the waves, than this east
coast. Neither Biarritz nor Brittany nor Nova Scotia is more broken or
more thunderous in resentment. I have not seen the Magellan straits.
One is constantly conscious of fish on this east coast. The railroads
form the Great East Fish route. I have been coming up in the night from
London and had to hold my breath until we passed these swift fish trains
which have the right of way to the metropolitan market. A little south
of Aberdeen is the village of Findon; whence finnan haddie.
_Dunnottar_
The rocks which were my goal were those just below Stonehaven. At
Stonehaven the French had landed supplies for the Forty Five--as from
Montrose, a few miles farther down the coast, King James had sailed
after the failure of the Fifteen. Fishing vessels lay idly in the narrow
harbour, their tall masts no doubt come "frae Norroway o'er the faem,"
since the trees on the east coast have not increased from that day when
Dr. Johnson found the sight of a tree here equal to that of a horse in
Venice.
Dunnottar stands on a great crag of this coast, against which the sea
has beaten angrily since time and the coast began, against which it
moans and whines at low tide, and then, come high tide, rushes
thunderously in to see what havoc it can work once more.
[Illustration: DUNNOTTAR CASTLE.]
Dunnottar is impregnable. I cannot believe that sixteen inch guns--is it
seventeen, now?--would make impression on this great red crag. I know
they would; after Liege and Namur one knows that modern guns can outlaw
any impregnability of the past. But I do not believe.
The road from Stonehaven runs for two miles over level country, and
then, suddenly, the edge breaks in a sheer cliff.
Across a natural moat of great depth, on a cliff crag, stands the
castle. The road picks its way down perilously; only a mule path, and
that precipitous. Then it crosses the dry bed where once may have hung a
draw bridge, and, entering through a portcullis, it climbs to the
castle, through a winding, tortuous way, sometimes a climb, sometimes a
flight of steps, sometimes open to the sky but ramped sternly on either
side, sometimes through stone canyons; a place impossible to surprise.
Finally you reach the top, the sky.
The top is three acres large.
Far back, no doubt in Culdee times, a church stood there. Because
churches must be sanctuary they took the high places; otherwise why
should one lift prayer to God when the mad sea was continually
contradicting the faith?
Sir William Keith, being a warrior with a warrior's eye, looked on the
place, found it strategically good, and built a tower thereon. He was
excommunicated by the Bishop of St. Andrew's--who did not anticipate the
Lords of the Congregation and the Covenanters. Sir William appealed to
Rome. Rome ordered the ban removed. And ordered Sir William to build a
church on the mainland, beyond the protestantism of the waves.
It began its war history early. In 1297 four thousand English took
refuge here to escape Wallace. Nothing daunted, Wallace scaled the
cliff, entered a window--the proof is there in the window--opened the
gate, let in his men, and slaughtered the four thousand.
Edward III took it, and Montrose besieged it.
Then it swung back into loyal legal possession, and experienced a bit of
history worth the telling. In 1652--Montrose had been dead two
years--the Countess Dowager had taken into safe keeping the regalia of
Scotland. The castle was besieged by those who had killed their king and
would destroy the king's insignia. If the castle should fall the very
symbol of the king's royalty would be melted, as Cromwell melted the
regalia of England. The defense was not strong. At any moment it might
be forced to surrender. But the regalia must be saved.
So the Lady Keith plotted. It was a woman's plot--always there is the
woman in Jacobitism. The wife of the minister at Kinneff paid a visit to
the wife of the governor of Dunnottar; Mrs. Grainger called on Mrs.
Ogilvie. She had been "shopping" in Stonehaven, and was returning to
Kinneff five miles down the sea. When Mrs. Grainger left the castle she
carried with her the crown of Scotland. Sitting on her horse she made
her way through the besieging lines, and her maid followed with the
scepter of Scotland and the sword in a bag on her back. The English
besiegers showed every courtesy to the harmless woman--and to the
Honours of Scotland. Mrs. Grainger carefully buried the treasure beneath
the paving of Kinneff church, and not until her death did she betray
their hiding place to her husband.
Meanwhile Lady Keith sent her son Sir John to France. A little boat
escaping in the night carried him to the French vessel lying off shore,
and the Lady sent forth the rumour that Sir John had carried the regalia
to the King o'er the water, to Charles II at Paris. It was after the
Restoration that the aureate earth at Kinneff was dug up. The women had
saved the Scottish crown for the rightful lawful king.
A dark chapter runs a quarter of a century later. The castle was still
loyal. In truth it was always loyal except in brief usurpations, as all
this corner of Scotland was loyal and royal and Jacobite. In 1675 in
"Whig's Vault" there lodged one hundred and sixty-seven Covenanters as
prisoners, and they lodged badly. Many died, a few escaped, the rest
were sold as slaves. Coming on ship to New Jersey as the property of
Scott of Pitlochry, Scott and his wife died and almost all the
covenanting slaves. Only a few saw the plantations of the New World, and
could resume the worship of their God. The story of Dunnottar is dark.
The castle looks the dark part it played.
In Dunnottar churchyard on the mainland there is a Covenanter's stone,
where "Old Mortality" was working when Scott came upon him. The stone
carries a simple stern legend of heroism--and almost wins one to the
cause.
And yet, there is evidence that in stern Dunnottar life had its moments
other than war and siege. The remnants of the castle are of great
extent; bowling gallery, ballroom, state dining-room, a library, a large
chapel, speak a varied existence. There is a watch tower, a keep,
rising forty sheer feet above the high rock, with ascent by a winding
stair, somewhat perilous after the centuries; but from the Watchman's
seat what a prospect, landward and seaward! What a sense of security in
the midst of peril! And on the farther corner of the giddy height, above
the rock and above the waves dashing far below, I found growing blue
bells of Scotland.
There is one corner of the castle where I fain would inhabit, the
northwest corner that looks down on the sea raging cruelly upon the
rocks that are the first line of defense against the onslaught of the
sea, and that looks far over the North Sea; that sea which is more
mysterious to me and more lovely than the Mediterranean; I have seen it
a beautiful intense Italian blue, with an Italian sky above it. I have
never seen it still, always surging, raging, always cruel. Yet I should
be willing to look out on it for many unbroken days. And to hear the
somber movement of the "Keltic" sonata played upon the rocks.
The Earl Marischal liked the view, whatever his generation. The North
was in his blood, and the sea, even though he was a landsman, spoke
adventure. The Earl's bedroom is almost habitable to-day. Once it was a
place of luxury. The plaster still clings to the walls in places, and
there is a fireplace where still one could light a fire against the
chill of the North. The date above is 1645, when Charles was still king,
and there was no threat of disloyalty. The tablet unites the arms of the
Keiths and the Seatons, the stone divided by a pillar surmounted by two
hearts joined. The Keith motto, _Veritas vincit_, underlines the Keith
shield; but I like better the Seaton motto--_Hazard yit forvard_.
The Earl's library opens out of this. And I doubt not it was richly
stored in the days when the last Lord Marischal won here that mental
habitude which made him equal in wit and wisdom to Voltaire. And no
doubt here sat his mother, loyal Jacobite, steadfast Catholic, sending
her two sons forth to battle for the lost cause of the Stewarts--never
lost while women remember--while she looked forth on these waters and
watched for the return. The story runs in the Jacobite ballad of "Lady
Keith's Lament"--
"I may sit in my wee croo house,
At the rock and the reel fu' dreary,
I may think on the day that is gane,
And sigh and sab till I grow weary....
"My father was a good lord's son,
My mother was an earl's daughter,
An' I'll be Lady Keith again,
That day our king comes o'er the water."
CHAPTER VIII
THE CIRCLE ROUND
The iron road from Aberdeen to Inverness must follow somewhat the road
which gallant Mary took on her way to punish Huntley. There is a bleak
stern look about this country as a whole, but here and there stand
castles, or lie low the ruins of castles, in many a chosen place of
beauty; for harsh as were these lords, and devastating as were their
deeds, life must have had its moments of wonder and of delight. If
Malcolm Canmore destroyed Inverness before the Twelve Hundreds, and the
fat Georges destroyed Inverugie late in the Seventeen Hundreds, and all
through the centuries that stretched between strong men built
strongholds and stronger men took them and made mock of them, still
there must have been gentleness and beauty. There were women, other than
Lady Macbeth; there were young men and maidens noble or common; and I
suppose the glamour of romance, the reality or the illusion of love,
was invented before peace and commerce became the occupations of men.
_Peterhead_
One brief journey I made along the bleak coast up to the town of
Peterhead, which looks nearest to Norroway across the foam, and has a
most uncompromising aspect. Peterhead is a penal town to-day; and it is
one of a string of fishing villages, picturesque as fishing villages
are, except to the nose, "that despised poet of the senses"; and not
picturesque to the people, who lack the colour of fisherfolk in
Brittany. But I wished to see with mine own eyes the ruins of Inverugie.
It is one of the castles belonging to the Lords Marischal. It came to
them in a curious way of forfeiture, an abbot dispossessed or some such
thing, like Dunnottar, but without the appeal to Rome. And one of the
stones of the castle carried the promise, and the threat--
"As lang's this stane stands on this croft
The name o' Keith shall be abaft,
But when this stane begins to fa'
The name o' Keith shall wear awa'."
The last Lord Marischal came hither, late, late, in the Seventeen
Hundreds. He had seen a century move through strife to peace. In person
he had taken part in the Rising of the Fifteen, a young man, but still
hereditary Lord Marischal, and loyal to the Stewart cause. He had taken
no part in the Rising of the Forty Five; he was not "out" on that dark
night. But the sweeping revenge of those English times made the Keiths
attaint and--the stone dropped from its croft. The Lord Marischal and
his brother made the continent their refuge, Paris in particular,
although the activities of the proposed restoration took their Lordships
to Madrid and Rome and Berlin and St. Petersburg.
The younger brother, James, was made a Field Marshal by Catherine of
Russia, and that amorous termagant making love to him in the natural
course of proximity, he discreetly fled, became Field Marshal for
Frederick the Great, and not marrying--whatever the romance of the
Swedish lady--he fell at the battle of Hochkirch in 1758, and lies
buried in the _Garison Kirche_ of Berlin. A statue stands in the
Hochkirch kirche, and in 1868 the King of Prussia presented a replica to
Peterhead. And even so late as 1889, the Kaiser, remembering the Great
King's Field Marshal, named one of the Silesian war units, the Keith
regiment.
There is no statue to the Lord Marischal--_Maréschal d'Ecosse_, always
he signed himself. He was the friend of the wittiest and wisest and
wickedest men of his time, of David Hume, and Voltaire, and Rousseau,
and Frederick the Great. Neither did he marry. Dying at the age of
ninety-two, he was buried in Potsdam. There is no statue to him, there
or here. And Inverugie lies in low ruins.
Hither he came, when attaint was lifted, late in those tottering years.
He drove out to the castle, remembering all it had meant, the long
splendid records of the Earls Marischal, and how the King, James III and
VIII--Banquo saw him also--
"And yet the eighth appears, who bears a glass
Which shows me many more."
James, not pretending but claiming, landed at Peterhead, lodged at
Inverugie, summoned the loyal and they came. The Standard was lifted for
a moment, and then fell.
Breaking into tears the old Lord Marischal realized all, an epoch
closed, a Scotland no longer requiring a Marischal. He left Inverugie,
even this ruin.
All this Northeast territory, no larger than a county in Dakota, bears
these scars of the past.
At Elgin there are the ruins of a cathedral; ruined, not by the English
but by the Wolf of Badenoch, because my Lord Bishop had given a judgment
which did not please my Lord of Badenoch. And the Wolf, his fangs drawn,
was compelled to stand barefooted three days before the great west gate.
At Canossa! Lands and seas and centuries divide--but there is slight
difference.
A scant mile or two to the north of Elgin lies the ruined Spynie Castle
of the Lord Bishop, a great place for strength, with massive keep--and
fallen. "A mighty fortress is our God." Cathedrals, castles, bishops and
lords, all pass away.
_Cawdor_
As we neared one of the last of the Northern stations, we turned to each
other and asked, "How far is't called to Forres?" And suddenly all was
night and witch dance and omen and foretelling. For it is here in the
palace that Banquo's ghost appeared and foretold all that history we
have been meeting as we came northward. And next is the town of
Nairn, which has become something of a city since Boswell found it "a
miserable place"; it is still long and narrow, stretching to the sea
with its fisherfolk cottages and bonneted women like the fisher wives of
Brittany; and stretching to the Highlands at the other end, as King
James said.
[Illustration: SPYNIE CASTLE.]
It was here that Wordsworth heard
"Yon solitary Highland lass,
Reaping and singing by herself; ...
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old unhappy far-off things,
And battles long ago....
The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more."
But one leaves the train with a curious feeling. Of course one may be a
little tired. Arm chair travel and arm chair tragedy have their
advantages. But--Nairn is the nearest point to the blasted heath.
"Where's the place?
Upon the heath,
There to meet Macbeth."
It is not entirely necessary that one should make Nairn and walk out to
The Heath. Any of these northern silent Scottish blasted heaths will
serve. It is as though the witches had made their mysterious
incantations anywhere, everywhere. And if Shakespeare was in Scotland in
1589--as I like to think he was--it is doubtful if he saw The Heath.
Johnson told Hannah More, so she reports, that when he and Boswell
stopped for a night at a spot where the Weird Sisters appeared to
Macbeth, they could not sleep the night for thinking of it. Next day
they found it was not The Heath. This one is, in all faith, apocryphal.
Still, if you come hither toward evening, when
"Good things of day begin to droop and drowse"
it is fearsome enough. Such heaths demand their legend.
"The thane of Cawdor lives
A prosperous gentleman."
Not so prosperous now as when he lived in the life. Shakespeare took
liberties with the Thane. He immortalized him into Macbeth! And Cawdor
Castle, out from Nairn a few paces on the burn of Cawdor, might have
been the very home of Macbeth. It is pleasant, flowery, lovely. But
also, it is stern and looks like a castle for tragedy. But not for
mystery. I did not hear a bird of prey, as some travelers report--
"The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements."
[Illustration: _Cawdor Castle_]
There are iron girded doors and secret apartments; not for Macbeth, but
for Lovat. This Lord of the Last Rising lived secretly for many months
in Cawdor while the Prince was moving restlessly to and fro in the
Islands. But the Prince was only twenty-five, and Lord Lovat was over
eighty. I like to think he was as young and keen to adventure as the
Prince. And I do not like to think of that beheading in the Tower--
"I must become a borrower of the night."
_Inverness_
The four chief cities of Scotland are arranged like a diamond for
excursion and for history. Always Scotland, unlike Gaul, has been
divided into four parts. Places of pilgrimage were Scone, Dundee,
Paisley, Melrose. Places for the quartering of Montrose were Glasgow,
Perth, Aberdeen, Stirling. And now four places are rivals; in trade
somewhat, but Glasgow leads in beauty, but Edinburgh, after all, is
unique in dignity, but Aberdeen is unbending; in the picturesque there
remains Inverness.
The city deserves its honours. (William Black has painted it in "Wild
Eelin.") It has a life of its own. For when I first came to Inverness
there was a cattle fair on, and sheep from all over the kingdom, from
Shropshire and from the Cheviots, came to be judged in Inverness; and
men came with them who looked very modern and capable and worldly and
commercial. It was all like a county fair of Iowa, only more dignified,
with no touch of sideshow. And, of course, there is the Highland
gathering in September, which has become too much like the sideshow, too
much a show, to attract the groundlings, and not a gathering of the
clans. Still--if one must take Scotland in a gulp--this is a very good
chance at Highland colour and sound and remnants of valour.
The town itself is full of pictures. It does not announce itself. There
is a close-built part, looking like a French provincial town, with
gabled houses, and down on the banks of the Ness the women spread their
clothes to dry as they do on a French river bank. There is a new
cathedral, very new, with an angel at the font we remembered William
Winter had liked, so we paid it respectful attention. There is a park
on the Ness to the west, where many islands and many bridges form a spot
of beauty.
And there is Tomnahurich--The Hill of the Fairies--a sudden steep
hill-mound, where Inverness carries its dead--like the Indians who
carried them to Indian mounds high above the rivers of the American
West. The dark yews make it even more solemn; one wonders if the fairies
dare play in these shades. But it is a sweetly solemn place, and we
decided to care not what Invernessians lay buried here if we might sit
on its convenient park benches and look at far rolling Scotland and
think of fairies and of Thomas the Rimer, who, it seems, came hither all
the way from Ercildoune from Melrose to heap this mound for his burial!
The errant Scots!
There remains no stone of Macbeth's Castle to which the gentle Duncan
came--"And when goes hence?" The county buildings--and a jail!--stand on
its site, a most modern pile. Malcolm razed that castle after he had
returned from England, and after Birnam wood had come to Dunsinane. It
was builded again; Inverness was a vantage point. Perhaps that one was
burned by the Lord of the Isles who afterward came to repentance and to
Holyrood. And builded again so that Huntley could defy Mary, and she
could take the castle and order it razed. And builded again so that
Cromwell could destroy it. And builded again as one of the five
fortresses whereby he sought to hold Scotland "Protected." And destroyed
at the Restoration which sought to destroy all the Protectorate had
built. But builded again so it might be destroyed by Prince Charles
Edward. No, I scarce think there is even the dust of the castle of
Macbeth left in Inverness, or incorporated into modern Fort George. The
"knock, knock, knock," which the porter heard at the gate, has battered
down a score of ominous strongholds.
But still
"The castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses."
For all the north of Scotland, away from the east winds, is pleasant and
lovely, with the mean climate that of London, and possible in winter and
summer.
In the grounds there stands a statue of Flora Macdonald looking out to
the West, and carrying the legend--
"On hills that are by right his ain
He roams a lanely stranger."
Could legend be better chosen to compress and carry all that story of
loyalty and courage and devotion?
And so we moved out to Culloden.
It was on a gray wind-swept afternoon that we made our pilgrimage. There
was no sense of rain. It was a hard sky. It spread leaden to the world.
We chose to walk the six mile stretch. Not with comfort or any show of
splendour, not even with a one-horse carriage, would we approach
Culloden.
The road leads over lonely Drumossie moor through a plantation of firs,
to a wild and naked spot--where all that was Scotland and nothing else
was burned out of the world by the withering fire of Cumberland, and the
remnant that would not save itself but fought to the last was cut to
pieces by his order.
I do not suppose that even on a hot sweet afternoon could any one with a
drop of Scotch blood come hither and not feel in his face the rain and
sleet of that seventeenth of April day, 1746. If one comes on that day
the cairn is hung with flowers, white roses of course, for there are
still Jacobites left in the world who have given to no other king their
allegiance. "Pretender!" cried Lady Strange to one who had mis-spoken
in her presence, "Pretender and be dawmned to ye!"
No, it was not the Pass of Thermopylæ, nor a Pickett's charge. Nor was
it even war.
Nevertheless it was one of the brave moments in human history. If
hopeless and even meaningless, does not bravery give it meaning? The
Highlanders--they were the last Jacobites left, as the army of the
Butcher, Cumberland, George Second's fat son swept northward and stopped
for their larder to be well-filled before they went on--had had only a
biscuit, the day before! They were five thousand to the English ten
thousand.
At eleven in the morning the Highlanders moved forward, the pipers
playing brave music, and they recked not that the English had the chosen
ground; theirs was not even a forlorn hope. Not if the Macdonalds, sulky
because they were on the left when since Bannockburn they had been on
the right, had fired a shot would the end have been different.
[Illustration: BATTLEFIELD OF CULLODEN.]
On the battlefield, looking at these mounds, the long trench of the
dead, one realizes that Scotland lies buried here. M'Gillivray, M'Lean,
M'Laughlin, Cameron, Mackintosh, Stuart of Appin--so many brave names.
"The lovely lass of Inverness,
Nae joy nor pleasure can she see,
For e'en and morn she cries, alas!
And ay the saut tear blin's her e'e--
"Drumossie muir, Drumossie day!
A waefu' day it was to me!
For there I lost my father dear,
My father dear, and brothers three.
"Their winding sheet the bluidy clay--
Their graves are growing green to see;
And by them lies the dearest lad
That ever blest a woman's e'e.
"Now wae to thee, thou cruel lord!
A bluidy man I trow thou be;
For mony a heart thou hast made sair
That ne'er did wrong to them or thee."
The small remnant that was left, and was not butchered by Cumberland,
fled to the West. Sometimes one could wish Prince Charles had died at
Culloden! and yet one would not spare the wanderings, or Flora
Macdonald. Thousands of the men fled to America; thousands of Scots in
America to-day can say, "My great grandfather fought at Culloden."
Hundreds of Scots to-day are sent "home" from America to be educated. I
have met in the magnificent Highlands of Montana, Scotchmen, true
Highlanders, who had been sent to Edinburgh university that they might
be Scots, even though they carried "American" blood in their veins.
When Boswell and Johnson came here in 1773, twenty-seven years after the
Forty Five, they found that many of the Highlanders were going to
America, leaving the lairds and the land. One M'Queen of Glenmorison was
about to go.
"Dr. Johnson said he wished M'Queen laird of Glenmorison, and the laird
to go to America. M'Queen very generously answered he should be sorry
for it; for the laird could not shift for himself in America as he could
do."
Small wonder that Prince Charles, knowing of this exodus, and believing
life still held for him its chances, its glories, away from Rome and
even if he was fifty-five, looked longingly over the sea, in 1776,
thinking that he might lead these rebellious colonists, so many of them
of his rebellious people, and reëstablish the House of Stewart in the
New World. Surely Burr, coming with Blennerhasset, thirty years after,
had something of the Stewart in him.
_The Orkneys_
Scotland is divided by a deep geologic cleft. Glenmore, the Great Glen,
runs southwesterly from Inverness to Fort William and Oban, cutting the
country into two parts. One is Scotland; the other is the West, the
Highlands and the Islands. One is known, the other unknown. One has been
prosperous, royal, noble; the other has been wild, independent, chief
and clans holding together. To-day, if the East is strangely quiet, the
West is strangely silent.
In the East you know things have happened; remnants remain, ruined
castles testify; in the West it is as though they had not happened,
those far historic things; castles are heaps of blackened or crumbled
stone; or, if they stand, they stand like prehistoric remnants, and the
clachans are emptied; the Risings, the migrations, the evictions, the
extensions of deer forests and sheep pastures and grouse preserves, the
poverty, yes, and the wandering spirit of the people leading them ever
afar--where always they are Scottish down to the last drop, always
looking toward Home, but ever leaving it empty of their presence.
It is a stranger land, though so lovingly familiar, than any I have ever
been in. I have been in valleys of the Rockies which were not so lonely
as glens in Scotland. When Hood wrote his sonnet on "Silence," beginning
"There is a silence where hath been no sound,"
He went on to a correction--
"But in the antique palaces where man hath been."
He missed the note of glens and valleys where man has been and is not.
From the Great Glen, a series of lochs lying in a geologic "fault," and
connected more than a century ago by a series of locks, excursion may be
had into remote places, so very remote even if they lie but a half dozen
miles in the backward; the farther ones, to the Orkneys, to John o'
Groat's, to Skye, the island of mist and of Prince Charlie and Dr.
Johnson and Fiona McLeod, and vast numbers of places known to those who
seek beauty only.
Three forts were built in the rebellious Seventeen Hundreds to hold this
far country. The forts rather betray history. And they form convenient
places of departure for those who would conquer the Highlands and the
Islands for themselves.
Fort George, near Inverness, is still used as a depot for military
stores and for soldiers. Fort Augustus has been surrendered to the
Benedictines who are gradually developing here a great monastery which
in these silences should rival the monasteries of old--if that may be.
Fort William, most strategic of all, is also strategic for traveler's
descent. Thus is the iron hand that succeeded the bloody hand at
Culloden become rust.
[Illustration: THE OLD MAN OF HOY.]
To the men of old the Orkneys seemed at the back of beyond and a little
farther. Yet, I cannot think how it has reduced the distance to a
comprehensible length if farther ends of the world and endless waters
have been reached; distance is three parts imagination in any event. As
a man thinketh so is distance.
The run up the coast to Scrabster, the port of Thurso, is very much on
the coast, with wild barren land on one side, and wild waste water on
the other; with here and there a resting-place for the eye or mind, like
Skibo Castle for our American Laird of Skibo, Dunrobin Castle for the
magnificent Sutherlands, and on a branch line leading out to the sea the
house of John o'Groat, perhaps the best known citizen above Land's End.
From Scrabster the Old Man of Hoy lifts his hoary head over the seas,
and invites to Ultima Thule, if this be Ultima Thule. And I suppose that
ever since Agricola came up this way the Old Man has sent forth his
invitation. The Romans did not answer it, although Tacitus wrote about
it; and it was left for much later folk to dispute the Picts and take
the islands for themselves.
An archipelago of fifty-six islands lies scattered over the water, with
only half of them inhabited, but not all the rest habitable; if, like
Sancho Panza, you are looking for an island, you will not find the isle
of heart's desire here. The scant inhabited twenty odd are not over
filled with population; these islands are not hospitable to large
numbers, not even of their own. They came to us through Margaret of
Denmark, queen to James III, and were confirmed when Anne of Denmark
came to be queen to James VI.
The sail over the Pentland Firth may be taken on a still day when the
historic waters, as vexed as those of the Bermoothes, lie like glass.
The rage of water, of any water, is not the frequent mood; but always it
is the memorable. Blue above and blue below was the day of our going,
twenty miles past high "continental" shores, like Dunnet's head, and
between the outliers of the Orcadian group, at the end of a summer day
that never ends in this North.
Yet I cannot think how I should ever again approach "Mainland" and the
port of Kirkwall with such indifference to everything except the
exquisite cool softness of this Northern air of mid-summer, with an
indolent interest in the land ahead, hardly quickened into active
interest which is the traveler's right, when we approached Scapa in the
twilight.
I did remember that the Vikings were once here as kings. And when King
Haakon of Norway was returning from the defeat at Largs in the west
where his fleet suffered the blow repeated later against the Spanish
armada, one ship was sucked down into a whirlpool near Stroma. And
Haakon died here of a broken heart. All these seemed like old, far-off
things that are not unhappy. Yet there was a suggestion of fate in the
place; perhaps there always is in a Northern twilight. To approach
Kirkwall after this, will always be to remember the Hampshire, going to
its death in a water more dangerous than that of whirling Stroma, and
Lord Kitchener going with it.
Kirkwall is a pleasant old town; or was, till war made it busy and new.
It lies inland a mile or two across the isthmus, but no doubt stretching
actively down to the south pier at Scapa during the years of the great
war, when all the British fleet hovered about.
The town is gray, like all Scottish towns; nature does these things with
perfect taste. And, in the midst, man has builded for his worship a
church of red sandstone, the Cathedral of St. Magnus, older and in
better condition than churches of Scotland more exposed to the change of
faith; with a long dim interior that speaks the North, with massive
Norman arches; one wonders how the reformed faith can conduct itself in
this dim religious light.
But the Earl's Palace remains a thing of beauty. Earl Patrick builded
it, the son of Robert who was half brother to Mary. If the palace had
been built in Mary's day I should, in truth, have lamented that she did
not come hither after the escape from Loch Leven, instead of going to
defeat at Langside. Mary was valiant, and the stern North was, after
all, in her blood.
But Patrick as "jarl" came a generation later, and he taxed the islands
mercilessly to build this very beautiful palace. The roof is gone, but
the beauty remains, oriel windows, fireplaces, and towers and turrets.
No doubt when "the wind is blowing in turret and tree," Patrick's palace
can be ruined enough. But on a day when the blue sky is sufficient
vaulting, the palace is a place to dream in.
[Illustration: EARL'S PALACE, KIRKWALL.]
Over at Birsay, twenty miles across the Mainland--there are twenty mile
stretches in this Mainland--there is another palace, built by Robert,
himself, who was, incidentally, Abbot of Holyrood as well as Earl of the
Orkneys. The motto-stone declares--
"Dominus Robertus Stuartus
Filius Jacobi Quinti Rex Scotorum
Hoc Opus Instruxit."
"Rex" said Robert, not "regis"; perhaps his Latin knew no better, but
his spirit knew this was right. The nominative agreed with Robertus, not
with Jacobi. Still, the ruler of the Orkneys was a supreme lord at this
remove from king and counselors.
Here and there, but only here and there through the islands, lies
traveler's lure. Motor boats make the run for tourist pleasure, and many
of the "points of interest" can be seen from the waters; particularly
the "brochs," the cairn-like towers of perhaps Pictish building; and the
round tower of St. Magnus on Egilsay, which must date back very far,
perhaps to the time when Columba came hither from Ireland and converted
these people and gave them hints of Irish building.
There are remnants of life earlier than Columba, of faith earlier,
though we know not the faith. The Circle of Bogar, old gray pillar-like
stones, set in purple heather, are comparable with Stonehenge and
Locmariaqueur. Scott found them equal; Scott who had such an admirable
way of finding in Scotland the equal of the world. In "The Pirate" he
describes these stones, indeed he describes these Orkneys in this
accurate guide book which is still "up to date."
To the blood shed and violence of old days has succeeded the quiet
pursuit of agriculture; and instead of the boats that used to sail to
the New World, H. B. C. boats and those to the Plantations, and to
Russia for the Northwest Passage, and to the Arctic for the Pole, are
the quiet boats of the fisherfolk. Except--when war fleets ride at
anchor.
_The Caledonian Canal_
The Great Glen itself is a necessary journey, even though no side trips
be made. I must believe that every one who has ever taken it and written
account, journeyed down this waterway in a Scotch mist; which, of
course, is not a mist at all, but something finite and tangible.
I, myself, went my ways that way. And, of course, those who had come
north the day before me, and those who came south the day after, came
through magnificent clearness, and marvels of marvels, Ben Nevis cleared
of mists to his very crest and beyond, shining splendid and majestic and
out-topping all Scotland, against the brilliant cloud-swept northern
sky! Frankly, I am always tempted to be suspicious when any one tells me
he has traveled the Great Glen and seen it all.
The scenery on both sides is wild, desolate, mountainous, a daring of
nature. There are sheer hillsides where all is revealed; again, there
are wooded hills where the men of the Forty Five might be still lurking.
Dochfour, Ness, Oich, Lochy, are the names of these "great lakes" that
make the chain. There is quality to their names, like Superior, Huron,
Erie, Ontario. But the Scottish chain is sixty miles long and can be
made from morning to evening, with enough of the day left to go through
Loch Linnhe and so to Oban; as one should add, through the St. Lawrence
and so to Quebec. Yet when one has passed from Inverness to Oban the
mind is as full, it has come through as much contact, nay, more, as in
the journey from Duluth to Quebec.
There are ruined castles by the way. Urquhart, looking very picturesque,
especially if the mist is but half come down over the world and the
purple of the distances is of that deep royal purple so characteristic
of the water and mountain distances of this wild west country. Yet the
sunny distances are as much a marvel of colour in their pale blue that
has so much intensity, so much real vivacity. Purple one has learned to
associate with distance; or, since some painter has shown us the
truthful trick. But blue, this particular Scottish blue, I have never
seen elsewhere. It is woven of mists and sunlight in equal proportions.
And so, Urquhart in its ruin, standing romantically on a fir clad
promontory, is most alluring as the boat rounds it on its early way. I
do not know anything of Urquhart. The name rather suggests the middle
name carried by a once famous actress. Somehow I half believe that in
that castle Charlotte Corday may have stabbed Marat. But then, facetious
and unromantic, I wonder at the baths in Urquhart in the old days when
skene dhus served in the place of daggers.
There are other romantic lures in the names which seem to have dropped
so carelessly anywhere. Inverarigaig--which sounds more musical than it
looks on the page--stands at the head of the pass through which The
Prince came after that day at Culloden on his way to the West as
wanderer. Far down the stretch of water rises Mealfourvournie, a rounded
naked hill overlooking the ravine where once the church of Cilles Christ
stood; and once, full of Mackenzies, was set on fire by the Macdonalds,
and all the Mackenzies burned. The act is not singular among the clans.
McLeod of Dare gives it to the Macdonalds and McLeods. And so one comes
to believe the story of a traveler coming on a Highland cottage and
asking if there were any Christians within, got back the reply,--"no,
we're all Macdonalds." Surely Saint Columba was needed in later
centuries than the Sixth.
The Falls of Foyers are across the lake, surrendered now to aluminum
works. And yet Burns wrote of them
"Among the heathery hills and rugged woods
The roaring Foyers pours his moving floods."
Christopher North wrote a better, a prose poem, which sounds somewhat
curiously in American ears. "What a world of waters now comes tumbling
into the abyss! Niagara! hast thou a fiercer roar? Listen--and you think
there are momentary pauses of thunder, filled up with goblin groans! All
the military music-bands of the army of Britain would here be dumb as
mutes--Trumpet, Cymbal and the Great Drum!"
Fort Augustus closes the end of the loch, and here the Benedictines,
black-robed, move in somber file where once the red-coated soldiers
marched.
Five locks raise the steamer fifty feet, into the Highlands. And while
the boat is waiting the rise, here, as at any of the locks, there is
entertainment. Fellow travelers get out to stretch their legs, and that
is amusing enough, tolerantly considered. There are tea houses at every
lock, many of them, sometimes charmingly rose-embowered like the houses
along the Thames. There are pipers who march majestically up and down,
swinging their sporrans, swaying their kilts; one is almost afraid to
give a penny.
And I remember at one of these pausing places where the passengers
remained on the boat, that a very pleasing gentleman who looked as
George Washington may have looked on gala occasions did sing for my
entertainment and that of my fellow passengers; except one fellow
American who expressed her disapproval. Perhaps George Washington did
not dress so gaily; it was just the hat. There was a black coat, white
breeches, crimson waistcoat, blue stockings, silver buckled shoes, and
a cocked hat. And this pleasing gentleman sang to a tune that was no
tune but very cheering, about "the hat me faither wore." And he was so
doing his best, which was very good indeed, that I was forced to get
change for a sixpence--it cannot be ethical, and certainly is not fun to
throw a little silver disk when six large coppers may be thrown. And the
American female fellow passenger said, "Doesn't it seem as though he
could get something nearer a man's job?" Yet he was such a pleasant
person. And they're not common to be met on the highway.
From Fort Augustus on there are memories of the Risings, chiefly of
Prince Charlie, in the glorious before, in the tragic aftermath. He came
hither as conqueror, that mere stripling, belted and plaided as a Royal
Stewart, and retook his kingdom. The coat skirts of Johnny Cope you can
still see in retreat to Inverness, if you look well. From Gairlochy the
way leads to Glenfinnan where he raised his Standard, and the Castle of
Lochiel, ruined because of him. And hither he came, after Culloden. At
Fort Augustus the head of Roderick Mackenzie was presented to the
Butcher as that of Prince Charles, and near Gairlochy, and near
Lochiel--"beware of the day"--is the "cage" of Cluny MacPherson where
he harboured during those days of red pursuit. And the thirty thousand
pounds are yet to be paid for betrayal.
Loch Oich, littlest and highest, with wooded islands and heavily wooded
shores, larches and delicate silver birches, is the exquisite bit of the
way. And here stands Invergarry Castle, which saw Prince Charles when
first he came gallant from the West and Moidart, and saw him when last
he came defeated to the West.
Laggan Avenue runs between Loch Oich and Loch Lochy, a narrow waterway
with soft fir-trees lining the way in a most formal fashion; it has a
peculiar magic when the mist has shut out the rounded hills of the
higher background.
Banavie--to move according to the schedule--is at the top of the locks,
three miles of them, Neptune's staircase, leading down to Fort William
and to the sea. The railroad is the swifter way and breaks the journey,
and passes the ruins of Inverlochy. It is a place to which French and
Spanish merchants came in far days of the Seven Hundreds. But better, a
place where Montrose won a victory.
[Illustration: INVERGARRY CASTLE.]
Here took place (1645) the battle between the Marquis of Montrose and
the Marquis of Argyle, and so splendidly that Montrose and Charles
thought the kingdom was coming back to its own. Montrose had started
through the Great Glen for Inverness, but hearing that the Campbells
were massing at Inverlochy, he turned back, and gave battle. The victory
was so tremendously with the royal Montrose that he wrote a letter to
Charles, then negotiating with the parliamentarians, and Charles
believed so that he broke off the parleying--
"Give me leave, after I have reduced this country, and conquered from
Dan to Beersheba, to say to Your Majesty, as David's general to his
master, 'Come thou thyself, lest this country be called by my name.'"
In five years, the two were both beheaded, one at Whitehall in London,
the other at the Tolbooth in Edinburgh, the Marquis sixteen months later
than the King. "To carry honour and fidelity to the grave."
At Inverlochy looks down the mountain of them all, Ben Nevis, taller
than Ben Muich Dhui, taller than Snowdon or Helvellyn. And from its
vantage point, the Observatory Tower, one may look over all the
territory in many directions whither one proposes to go; the routes can
be planned from this top of Scotland. As Sir Archibald Geikie mapped it
in his glorified geography--
"While no sound falls upon his ears, save now and then a fitful moaning
of the wind among the snow-rifts of the dark precipice below, let him
try to analyze some of the chief elements of the landscape. It is easy
to recognize the more marked heights and hollows. To the south, away
down Loch Linnhe, he can see the hills of Mull and the Paps of Jura
closing the horizon. Westward, Loch Eil seems to lie at his feet,
winding up into the lonely mountains, yet filled twice a day with the
tides of the salt sea. Far over the hills, beyond the head of the loch,
he looks across Arisaig, and can see the cliffs of the Isle of Eigg and
the dark peaks of Rum, with the Atlantic gleaming below them. Farther to
the northwest the blue range of the Coolin Hills rises along the
skyline, and then, sweeping over all the intermediate ground, through
Arisaig and Knoydart and the Clanranald country mountain rises after
mountain, ridge beyond ridge, cut through by dark glens, and varied here
and there with the sheen of lake and tarn. Northward runs the mysterious
straight line of the Great Glen, with its chain of locks. Then to east
and south the same billowy sea of mountain tops stretches out as far as
eye can follow it--the hills and glens of Lochaber, the wide green
strath of Spean, the gray corries of Glen Treig and Glen Nevis, the
distant sweep of the moors and mountains of Brae Lyon and the Perthshire
Highlands, the spires of Glencoe, and thence again to the blue waters of
Loch Linnhe."
This may not be "the roof of the world," but it is a very high gable.
CHAPTER IX
THE WESTERN ISLES
_Oban_
There is something theatrical about Oban, artificial, and therefore
among Scottish towns Oban is a contrast. It is as uncovenanted as--joy!
And it is very beautiful, "the gay and generous port of Oban," as
William Winter calls it, set in its amphitheater of high hills, and
stretching about its harbour, between confining water and hill. An
embankment holds it in, and at twilight the scimeter drawn from the
scabbard of night flashes with light, artificial, but as wonderful at
Oban as at Monte Carlo. One is content to be, at Oban. Quite certainly
Oban has centered its share of Scottish history and romance, history
from the time of the Northmen, romance from the time resurrected by
Scott and continued indigenously by William Black. But in Oban and round
about Oban, one is quite content to take that past as casually as one
takes yesterday.
It is very interesting, very fascinating; one wakes now and then, here
and there, to keen remembrance, to a sensitiveness that so much beauty
could not be only for to-day and of to-day, that men must have come
hither to claim it or dispute possession of it in the beginning of time.
Of course the Stewarts came out of this Island West! But, either because
one has made a round circle of Scotland from out of romantic Edinburgh,
or because one has come from practical Glasgow and is about to make a
round circle of Scotland, Oban has a peculiarly satisfying and yet
undemanding beauty.
It is set for pageantry; life is always, has been always, a procession
at Oban. If ever the history of Scotland is set forth as pageant--I do
not know that this has ever been done, but it should be--it should be
staged at Oban, on the esplanade.
Life moves swiftly through the streets and across the waters. For it is
a place that all the world comes to, in its search for the next
beautiful place. Steamers from the Caledonian Canal and Inverness,
steamers from the Crinan Canal and Glasgow, coaches from the near
country, railroads from the east and north, bring the world to Oban. And
from Oban boats move out on the Firth of Lorne and the Sound of Mull
and through the broken waters of the Hebrides, out into the unbroken
waters of the Atlantic. People come and go, come and go. It is not that
Oban is filled with people. Very often the inns are filled and the
careless traveler may seek eagerly if not vainly for a lodging for the
night, to find his landlady a Campbell of the Campbells.
But there is seldom a feeling of too many people in Oban. They come and
go, night and morning. They do not stay. In the evening the esplanade
may be filled and the crowd very gala; the circle of lights marking the
embankments, steamers lying at their ease after the day's work, looking,
yes, like pirates, retired pirates, rakish, with tapering spars and
brave red funnels, the soft plash of oars out on the bay and the moving
lights of the rowboats, with perhaps--no quite certainly--a piper, or
two or three, dressed in tartan, more like the red and black of the
Campbells in this historic region of Argyle, piping up bravely "The
Campbells are Coming, yoho, yoho."
It is lively in the evening, there is always a touch of pageantry. Yet
Oban is a very good place in which to stay and make the little foot
excursions that penetrate only a few miles into the circumurban
territory. The most constrained walker may find rich foot-interest out
of Oban; nowhere do comfort and beauty and story combine in more
continuous lure. Easy and attainable is Dunolly Castle, much more
attainable than it was in the old days when the Lord of the Isles made
his permanent seat here, and defied the world and the king; more
attainable now than when Scott came this way seeking "copy" and "colour"
and declaring "nothing can be more beautifully wild than Dunolly."
To-day Dunolly is beautiful, but scarcely wildly beautiful; that is, in
comparison with other wild castles of this wild West; and very
attainable, the walk being provided with seats all the way, casual "rest
and be thankfuls," of the municipal corporation.
But beyond Dunolly, four miles of good highway, with Loch Linnhe
breaking magnificently on the eye, and Loch Etive reaching off endlessly
into the deep purple, is Dunstaffnage, which, before Stirling, or Perth,
or Edinburgh, was capital of Scotland and the place of destiny. Very
redoutable it sits on its high crag, as picturesque a castle as there is
in the world--and we are in a land of castles picturesquely set. The
walls above the waters lift themselves in lofty height, and promise to
remain, with their great thickness presented to the consuming world. It
is still towered for strength and scope, and looks its part of royal
residence. Here was found the Stone of Destiny--after Jacob or another
had carried this Jacobite sleeping pillow hither from Palestine. Kenneth
McAlpine, somewhat sacrilegiously, carried the Stone away to Perth. And
Edward sacrilegiously carried it down to Westminster, where George V sat
on it, in 1911, or nearly on it, so as to prove his destined right.
Bruce took the castle from the Lord of Lorne, at what time he was taking
all the castles of Scotland. And even The Bruce in his busy days of
castle-storming, must have paused in this height, at these bastions, to
look over this western world and decide that it was good and should be
added to his Scottish world. Across Loch Linnhe he could see the bens of
Morven and of Appin, and up Loch Etive, Ben Cruachan--even as you and I.
The Highlands and the Islands are still primitive, man dwindles here,
and the world becomes what it was before the Sixth Day.
But The Bruce did not see these brass cannon from a wreck of the Armada,
The Bruce lived too far before that great day to see the coast "strewn
with the ruined dream of Spain." And he was too early for the ancient
ruined Gothic chapel of much austere beauty which stands near.
It is from Pulpit Hill that Oban gives the best view of all the lyric
lay of this water and land world; on a clear day when the wind is from
the west, when sunshine has been drenching the world, and when the sun
is about to sink behind Ben More. Pulpit Hill is a wooded steep bluff to
the east of Oban, at its foot parklike drives and forest-embowered
cottages with their windows open to the sea, with rich roses filling the
air and flaunting fuchias filling the eye. It is an easy climb, even
after a day of Scotch-seeing in the backward of the land.
Here one may sit and meditate on the life and character of David McCrae,
to whom the pulpit is dedicated. Or one may look over the land and
"soothly swear was never yet a scene so fair." Or, to borrow again from
that same Scottish scene painter, and another scene--"One burnished
sheet of living gold."
The eye runs far out over the world, across the Bay of Oban, across the
Island of Kerrera, across the Island of Mull set against the late sky,
and over to Lismore which lies shining and tender against the deepening
purple background of Morven. The sun casts slant rays across the land
and across the bay, bathing the far land in tender lilac, the sea in
steely blue, while Kerrera lies in patches of dark and light, a
farmhouse sharp against a rose mist that rises in shallow places and
quickly fades, leaving all the world purple in hue. Shepherd lads and
shepherd dogs may be seen at this last moment preparing to watch the
flocks by night, and long horned shaggy cattle browse at peace in the
fading light. Flocks of birds fly over, starlings in scattered black
patches, sea swallows poising for prey, and sea gulls resting on the
wave after a weary day. Everything is at peace.
Two longer excursions one must make from Oban; to Loch Awe, to Glencoe.
Each is possible in a day, and yet a night in Glencoe is almost
imperative if one would be played upon by its full tragic compass; and a
lifetime of summers would not exhaust Loch Awe.
The Loch I would visit; because of its beauty; and because of Kilchurn
Castle, which is picturesque in fact as well as in picture, on its
densely wooded island with its broken outline lying against the farther
mountain; because of Ardchonnel Castle, ivy covered, and "it's a far cry
to Loch Awe"; because of Fraoch-Eilean (isle of heather) which is the
island of Ossian's Hesperides; and because, capitally because,
Innishail is the island where Philip Gilbert Hamerton established his
camp through so many summers and through a number of Scottish winters.
[Illustration: KILCHURN CASTLE.]
One must belong, oh, quite to "another generation," to admit any debt of
instruction or pleasure to Philip Gilbert Hamerton. I do not think that
this generation knows him, hardly as a name. But when I was young,
collegiately young, Hamerton was an authority on life and art, and a
preceptor of beauty. And, if one read "The Intellectual Life," then, of
course, one read the rest of him. And so, one came to Loch Awe before
one came to Loch Awe.
To the lake I went quite shamelessly on train. But repenting half way,
over-awed by Ben Cruachan, as who should not be, I left the train at the
"platform" and won the memory on foot. The mountain looks as high and as
mighty as a Rocky, and the white foaming threads of falls, hundreds of
feet high, dashed down the sides in a true "Rocky" splendour; like those
on the Cut bank or the Piegan trails in Glacier Park, yet not quite so
high. I did not climb Ben Cruachan to look on the Atlantic--but I have
not made my last journey to Scotland. On foot and alone, I threaded "the
dark pass of Brandir," and felt in my blood and bone that something in
me ancestral had been there before. Perhaps we inherit where we
hero-worship. In any event, Sir William Wallace went through this defile
in 1300, and King Robert Bruce in 1310, with his faithful friend Sir
James Douglass, fighting John of Lorn (the dead are still heaped beneath
these gray cairns), and going on to take Dunstaffnage. Sir Walter Scott
came here when he sought environ for "The Highland Widow."
On one side is the sheer cliff which guards the foot of Ben Cruachan. On
the other the rapid awesome dash of the River Awe. "You will not find a
scene more impressive than the Brandir Pass, where the black narrowing
water moves noiselessly at midnight between its barren precipices, or
ripples against them when the wind wails through its gates of war."
In the Loch lies the island of Innishail, still green, and not less
solitary than when Hamerton entertained travelers, unaware of his
identity. It still carries old gravestones, for islands in the far days
were the only safe places, safe for the dead as for the living; war and
ravage would pass them by. Throughout this western land you will find
island graveyards, and the procession of quiet boats carrying the dead
to their rest must have been a better expression than can be had by
land.
From here one sees Ben Cruachan to advantage, even as one saw it in 1859
with Hamerton.
"At this moment the picture is perfect. The sky has become an exquisite
pearly green, full of gradations. There is only one lonely cloud, and
that has come exactly where it ought. It has risen just beyond the
summit of Cruachan and pauses there like a golden disk behind a saint's
white head. But this cloud is rose-colour, with a swift gradation to
dark purple-gray. Its under edge is sharply smoothed into a clearly-cut
curve by the wind; the upper edge floats and melts away gradually in the
pale green air. The cloud is shaped rather like a dolphin with its tail
hidden behind the hill. The sunlight on all the hill, but especially
towards the summit, has turned from mere warm light to a delicate,
definite rose-colour; the shadows are more intensely azure, the sky of a
deeper green. The lake, which is perfectly calm, reflects and
reverberates all this magnificence. The islands, however, are below the
level of the sunshine, and lie dark and cold, the deep green Scotch firs
on the Black Isles telling strongly against the snows of Cruachan."
It was even as Hamerton had told me so long ago, a trifle different in
July from what he saw it in December, but equal in magnificence, and the
outlines had not changed in a half-century.
And so I did not hesitate to go with Hamerton to Glencoe, lovely and
lonely and most terrible glen. There is such a thing as being haunted,
the dead do cry for revenge, the evil that men do does live after them.
It is a wide valley, yet closed in by great granite precipices, for safe
guarding against betrayal. The first section of the strath is calm
enough, human, green, habitable, with Loch Leven, a branch of Loch
Etive, sparkling in the sun. The second wide opening is terrible as
massacre, not green, very stern, and wild as Scottish nature, human or
not, can become. Even the little clachan of the Macdonalds seems not to
welcome the world except on suspicion. And that murder, that
assassination (February 14, 1692) when William was king--William who
might have been "great" except for Boyne and Glencoe--still fills the
memory.
Hamerton painted the picture--"In the vastness of the valley, over the
dim, silver stream that flowed away into its infinite distance, brooded
a heavy cloud, stained with a crimson hue, as if the innocent blood shed
there rose from the earth even yet, to bear witness against the
assassins who gave the name of Glen Coe such power over the hearts of
men. For so long as history shall be read, and treachery hated, that
name, Glen Coe, shall thrill mankind with undiminished horror! The story
is a century old now (1859). The human race has heard it talked of for
over a hundred years. But the tale is as fresh in its fearful interest
as the latest murder in the newspapers."
Yet, a half century still later, I have heard those who declared Glencoe
lovely and not terrible. No doubt the generation does not read history
and does not feel story.
We did not go on to the King's House, built in the days of King William,
when roads were being driven through the Highlands in order that they
might be held to a doubtful Stewart sovereignty. For we had read how
Hamerton thought it more than enough to drink a glass here, and we
doubted not he had read of the trials of Dorothy Wordsworth, sheets that
must be dried for hours before the beds could be made, the one egg for
breakfast, and--could we have found that china cup that Dorothy forgot?
Rather, we chose to return down the lake side for another look at the
red roofs of the home of Lord Strathcona, that wizard of the nineteenth
century, who had left Scotland with only his wits and returned from
America with his millions and a title.
_Iona_
There is no pilgrimage which can be taken to any shrine excelling
pilgrimage to Iona. And all the pilgrim way is lined with memory and
paved with beauty.
On almost every promontory stand ruined castles, not so frequent as the
watch towers on the Mediterranean heights, and therefore not so
monotonous. One knows that each of these, as of those, has had its
history, and here one ponders that history, perhaps tries to remember
it, or, tries to evoke it. Dunolly which we visited in the day's drift
from Oban stood up on the right with the city still in view. But it is
when the Firth opens into the Sound that the glory of the water-world of
the West comes on you.
[Illustration: AROS CASTLE.]
The Sound of Mull is, so Sir Walter has said, "the most striking water
of the Hebrides." It is very lovely in this shell-pink light of early
morning, it could not have looked lovelier when Sir Walter estimated it.
The hills begin to stand boldly forth, for the gray mists of the morning
are rising. It is to be a fine day, which here because of its
exception means a brilliant sun-stricken day, and all things clear as
geography. But, at least once, one should see things one wishes always
to keep as material for remembrance and for imagination, not in the mist
dimly, but face to face like this. Or, as the Maid of Lorn in
Ardtornish, when she was led
"To where a turret's airy head
Slender and steep and battled round,
O'erlooked, dark Mull! thy mighty Sound.
Where thwarting tides, with mingled roar
Part thy swarth hills from Morven's shore."
On the left of Mull stands the grim Castle of Duart on its high rock, on
the right on Morven the Castle of Ardtornish, and Aros a little farther
on, and Kinlochalive at the top of the bay of the Loch--mighty were
these lords of the islands, and most mighty the Lord of the Isles.
Perhaps--it has been suggested--Sir Walter overstated the might of the
Lord, the grandeur of the islands, the splendour of those thirteenth
century days. It depends on what light one views them in.
Tobermory is the capital of Mull, and is a place of some resort. Like
all these little capitals it is set in the wilderness world, and what
one would like best to do instead of sailing past them is to stay with
them and go far into the backward. Perhaps traversing Mull as did McLeod
of Dare when he hunted so royally--and in such a moonstruck way; or
David Balfour when he was shipwrecked and walked through Mull; or the
Pennells when they sought to walk through and did not take pleasure in
it. It is the pilgrims who won their goal one chooses to remember--not
the defeated Pennells. And here--I am leaving Mull and Tobermory behind
me, perhaps for always.
Suddenly one sweeps out into the Atlantic! The stretch is wide, oceanic,
although far and away there are islands, black lines thickening here and
there the horizon edge. The sea is exquisitely, deeply blue, like the
Mediterranean at its best.
One passes Ardnamurchan point, the most westerly point of the mainland
of Great Britain, "Cape of the Great Seas"; how one loves the poetic
grandeur, the sufficing bigness of these names, and the faith, and the
limitations back of them; as though there should never be a greater
world with greater seas and mountains in the greater West. To the south
the boat passes Trehinish isles, black gems lying on the sea.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO FINGAL'S CAVE.]
Far out on the horizon lie Col and Tiree, low clouds in the line. "Col,"
I heard the professorial people--from Oberlin--speak the name. "Col! So
that is Col!" they said to each other, "so that is Col off there!"
"Col," I said to myself, "so that is Col." And we all became related
through the great Doctor.
One is bound to Staffa, incidentally, on the way to Iona, and for the
sake of Mendelssohn. Always afterward one is bound to Staffa because of
itself. If only one could have Staffa for one's self. But there are
always fellow travelers, there is no inn, no habitation here, not even a
shepherd's shieling, visible from the water. There are a few sheep, a
shepherd, and so there must be a shieling. To be marooned here--was it
here Stevenson understudied for Bill Gunn, and "cheese, toasted mostly"?
The cave is truly wonderful, a superb cathedral nave, with dark basaltic
columns lifted in marvelous regularity, and arches lifting over with
groining the hand of God.
"Nature herself it seemed would raise
A minster to her Maker's praise."
The broken surfaces of the walls are in mosaic with green sea grasses
and gleaming limpets, and the floor is a shifting thing of surging
waves. The ocean thunders through the narrow gate as it has done since
the time Staffa began, and since Mendelssohn, a mighty organ surge, like
the "Overture to Fingal's Cave," and yet, more than that. To be here
alone, to be the shepherd of Staffa, and come to this cathedral, with
the might and mystery of the night about, and the winds and the sea
making symphony--life will always hold many things in possibility, which
cannot die!
From the top of Staffa, if one flees the passengers a moment, may be
seen the islands lying about whose names are romance, Trehinish, and
Inchkenneth on Mull and Skerryvore, "the noblest of all deep sea light,"
a mere speck on the far Atlantic--what vigils the man must have in the
house of light built by Stevenson's father; and on to the far north and
Skye; and to the near south and Iona.
"Where is Duncan's body?
Carried to Colme-kill,
The sacred storehouse of his predecessors,
And guardian of their bones."
Very definite was Shakespeare about these things. A more modern
antiquarian would have doubted, and sent us wandering from pillar to
post of royal burial places. But not the man who created what he
declared. Icolmkill--Iona--certainly.
That such a little island could have had such a large history. It is so
small a place, yet a beautiful island withal, and with its cathedral,
now alas, "restored" and "reformed," and all its far sounding memories
of Columba.
He came up from the South as we came down from the North, but his voyage
was across the wide seas to unknown goals; while we have the advantage
of having come after him to Iona. And yet, to Columba, valiant
adventuring saint, Iona nor any other place was unknown goal. There was
to him but one purpose in life, one goal. And he found it everywhere.
It was a large life and simple, austere but with unlimited horizon, that
Columba lived here. It is a small exquisite life that is lived here
to-day. Or, perhaps my belief in its proportion and perfection came
because of contact with a certain two persons, man and woman, who had
taken this life to themselves. While being practical in that they sold
exquisite wares, in silver and gold and brass and bronze, each article,
large or little, carrying some Ionian insignia, still they must have a
very beautiful life, ever making things of beauty out of the historic
heritage of this island. It was a large accumulation of jeweled hints
they discovered here, in the ornamentations of the stones of Iona. They
have used them to very lovely ends. And they have lived the life of
memories and of the keen sea air.
One may have forty minutes, or day after day in Iona. And, of course,
the reward and the intimacy is in proportion. It is a quiet fragment of
land, the little village with its white-washed cottages in prim lines,
and its simple cotters, perhaps a little more sophisticated than those
of other western islands because of their continuing contact with a
curious world; and yet these men and women and serious children live
here the year round, and in winter there is no world, and the Atlantic
thunders on the little land as though one beat of the wave would carry
all into the abyss, or smashes on the rough granite coast of Mull across
the strait.
The western shore of the island is cruel, even on a summer day. And if
the "merry men" ran their violent ways on the shore of Mull, there are
other Merry Men just as merry, just as lurking. As McLeod of Dare saw
it--
"Could anything have been more beautiful than this magnificent scene ...
the wildly rushing seas, coming thunderingly on the rocks, or springing
so high in the air that the snow-white foam showed black against the
glare of the sky; the near islands gleaming with a touch of brown on
their sunward side; the Dutchman's Cap with its long brim and conical
center, and Lunga also like a cap with a shorter brim and a higher peak
in front, becoming a trifle blue. And then Col and Tiree lying like a
pale strip on the far horizon; while far away in the north the mountains
of Rum and Skye were faint and spectral in the haze of sunlight. Then
the wild coast around, with its splendid masses of granite; and its
spare grass a brown-green in the warm sun, and its bays of silver sand;
and its sea birds whiter than the clouds that came sailing over the
blue."
On many of these western islands, and the northern, and it is said
particularly on the far northern Shetlands, there are some dark somber
faces remaining over from the Armada. The sea has never been kind; it
breaks the rocks, it breaks men.
There are low-lying hills, the chief is Dun I, there are pasture lands,
and still there are fields of wheat and clover. Just before he died,
Columba was carried out to see the men at work in the fields. No doubt
he lifted his eyes and looked around, on his little island, and the
great sea, and the great world beyond. No doubt he wished he might live
longer and labour farther. St. Columba who carried the Gospel and his
gentle Irish gospel from the sixth century of Ireland into the far North
until it swung round and met in Durham and York the Gospel and the
culture coming up from Rome; and that neither so polished nor so
Christian. Yes, even Columba regretted leaving the world behind him,
though he was going to the other world.
Yes, I am certain he regretted leaving the island world behind him. Did
he not sing of his longing--
"Delightful would it be to me to be in _Uchd Ailiun_
On the pinnacle of a rock,
That I might often see
The face of the ocean;
That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds,
Source of happiness;
That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves
Upon the rocks;
At times at work without compulsion--
That would be delightful;
At times plucking dulse from the rocks;
At times fishing."
Thirteen hundred years ago; and the song is undimmed, and the world has
not faded. The Port of the Coracle on the far side is still open to
boats adventuring across pleasant or perilous seas. The very rock on
which Columba landed, the traveler seeking the subtle transubstantiation
from the past may stand on. And there is the White Beach of the Monks,
where the companions of Columba paced to and fro in those days and in
this lovely land that seems too far away to be believed in.
[Illustration: CATHEDRAL OF IONA AND ST. MARTIN'S CROSS.]
The entire island is the shrine of the Saint, and not only the cathedral
of Iona. In truth this particular church dates from six hundred years
later than Columba, six hundred years backward from us. The crosses that
stand in the cemetery of St. Oran, St. Martin's and the Maclean, the
only two left out of nearly four hundred, cannot date much farther back
than this, or than "gentle Duncan." There is a long line of graves, each
with its aged granite slab, of the kings, Norwegian and Irish and
Scottish, of those early centuries. I do not remember that I saw the one
that speaks of Duncan. But I do remember that the carvings were very
curious and often very fascinating, the "pattern" intricate and
intriguing.
Once the cathedral was a place of magic, an unroofed broken shrine,
where the winds might wander in search of the past, and where the
moonlight might shine through as lovely a casement, tracery as
exquisite, as at fair Melrose. If the generations coming six hundred
years after us are to know of St. Columba, and not to reproach us for
our coöperation with time the vandal, these roofs, this protection, must
be afforded. Still, the gate is so close locked to-day that even Joseph
Pennell could not steal in, and so closely watched that no black lamb or
ram or other hobgoblin could affright Miss Gertrude White or cause her
to cease loving the daring McLeod of Dare.
Yet, if one resolves as did Boswell, to leave the close inspection to
Dr. Johnson, and "to stroll among them at my ease, to take no trouble to
investigate minutely, and only receive the general impression of solemn
antiquity," one will come upon much that is of particular impression,
like the carvings about and on the capitals, with the early grace of the
later Italians; quite worth careful preserving. And here is the altar,
and I doubt not at this very spot--church shrines continue in this
steadfast Scotland--Columba knelt before the God whose worship he had
brought over the seas, and was to carry still farther over land and
seas. There may be one shrine in the Christian world more sacred. But
not more than one. Dr. Johnson is still quite right--"The man is little
to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plains of
Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona."
The storm did not come, although we waited three days for it. Nothing
but calm in the island of Iona, and peace on the deep of the Atlantic;
tender dawns, still high noons, twilights of soft visible gray that
lasted over to the next morning; a land of hushed winds and audible
sounds, the seas lying like glass.
Not even on a Sunday morning when in a coracle, or some such smaller
boat than one usually cares to venture, perhaps a lug, whatever that may
be, we accompanied the clergyman to the mainland of Mull, and watched
the stern sad faces of these far away folk as they listened to a very
simple sermon of an old simple story. I remembered that at Earraid,
Robert Louis Stevenson had been interested in the religious services
held for the workmen who were cutting stone for a lighthouse building by
Thomas Stevenson. From these people religion will go very late, if at
all. Surely men and women need what Columba brought hither, now as ever.
And because of David Balfour I walked a little way into Mull, which
still must look as he saw it, for except for the roadway it looked as
though I were the first who had ever ventured that way since time and
these rough granite heaps began.
"Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
Say, could that lad be I?
Merry of soul he sailed on a day
Over the sea to Skye.
"Mull was astern, Rum on the port,
Egg on the starboard bow;
Glory of youth glowed in his soul:
Where is that glory now?
"Give me again all that was there,
Give me the sun that shone!
Give me the eyes, give me the soul,
Give me the lad that's gone!"
CHAPTER X
THE LAKES
All the world goes to the Trossachs. Yet there are only two kinds of
people who should go, and they are as widely separated as the poles;
those who are content and able to take the Trossachs as a beautiful bit
of the world, like any lake or mountain country which is unsung, and
then they will not take it but merely look at it; and those who know the
Trossachs as theirs, The Trossachs, who can repeat it all from--
"The stag at eve had drunk his fill
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,
And deep his midnight lair had made
In lone Glenartney's hazel shade.
On to
"The chain of gold the king unstrung
The links o'er Malcolm's neck he flung
Then gently drew the golden band
And laid the clasp in Ellen's hand."
Half knowledge is exasperating to those who have whole knowledge; and
half love--half love is maddening, should lead to massacre by those
whose love is all in all.
I cannot remember when I did not know "The Lady of the Lake"--which, of
course, is the Trossachs. It is as though I knew it when I first knew
speech, lisped in numbers and the numbers came. It was the first
grown-up book I ever owned, and I own the copy yet. It is not a first
edition, this my first and only edition. I presume that in those far
away days when it was given to me, "a Christmas gift"--I always chose to
receive it from my Scottish grandmother, though she had been dead thirty
years before I came--I might have had a first edition for a song; but
the preciousness of first editions had not yet become a fetich. Since
then I have looked with respect and affection on that impress of "1810."
I have never looked on it with longing. So much better, that first
edition of mine, an ordinary sage-green cloth-bound book, with
ornamental black and gold title, such as the inartistic Eighties sent
forth; I do like to note that the year of its imprint is the year of my
possession. It has not even a gilt edge, I am pleased to state. The
paper is creamy, the ink is not always clear. And because it went
through one fire and flood, the pages have little brown ripples, magic
marginal notes. There is not a penciled margin in the whole volume.
That, in a book owned by one who always reads with a pencil in hand, is
beyond understanding! And yet it was many and many a year ago, in a
kingdom by the sea. Memory was tremendously active then, not quite the
memory of a Macaulay, but still one reading, or at least one and a half,
was sufficient to thrust the rimes of these two-edged couplets into
unsurrendering possession. Criticism was in abeyance; there is not even
a mark among the notes. I cannot be certain that I read them. Who reads
notes at the age of eight?
I remember how my acquaintance began with "The Lady of the Lake," even
before I read it. In those days there was little literature for
children, and there was prejudice against that which was provided. There
was especial prejudice in my own household. I think my teacher in school
may have shared it. If he were an adult he would read, ostensibly to us,
but for himself, something he could tolerate. Yes, it was he; an
exception in those days, for in the public schools men seldom taught in
"the grades."
He must have been a young man, not more than nineteen or twenty, waiting
to mature in his profession. And Scotch, as I think it now; not only
because his name was Kennedy, but because of his Highland dark eyes and
hair, and because of certain uncanny skill in mathematics--as I thought
who had not even a moiety--and because, oh, very much because, of the
splendid tussle he had--tulzie! that's the word--a very battle royal to
my small terrified fascinated vision, there on the school-room floor,
with the two Dempsey boys, who were much older than the rest of us; they
must have been as old as fourteen! One merited the punishment and was
getting it. The other, with clan loyalty, came to his rescue. And the
Highlander, white to the lips, and eyes black-and-fire, handled them
both.
Oh, it was royal understudy to the combat at Coilantogle ford--
"Ill fared it then with Roderick Dhu
When on the field his targe he threw."
_The Trossachs_
To write a guide to the Trossachs--that has been done and done more than
once; done with much minutiæ, with mathematics, with measurement; to-day
it is possible to follow the stag at eve, and all the rest of it, in all
its footsteps; to follow much more accurately than did even Sir Walter;
to follow vastly more accurately than did James Fitz James.
For, in the first place, the world is not so stupendous a place as it
was in the days of Fitz James, or of Sir Walter. The Rockies and the
Andes have been sighted, if not charted, and beside them the Grampians
look low enough. Yet, fortunately, the situation can never be "beside
them." The most remembering traveler has crossed the seas and buried his
megalomanian American memories, let it be hoped, in the depths of the
Atlantic. Neither Rockies nor Andes carry so far or so rich memories.
Sir Walter has never projected an imaginary Roderick Dhu or a King
errant into any of the majesty or loveliness of those empty lakes and
mountains. I can imagine in what spirit the Pennells came to Loch Lomond
and declared that it "looked like any other lake." Dr. Johnson was quite
right, sir. "Water is the same everywhere," to those who think water is
water.
Of course the traveler should not come upon the land by way of Lomond.
Fitz James came from Stirling. He came to subdue the Highlands. They
were seething in revolt--for no other reason than that Highlanders so
long as they were Highlanders had to seethe and revolt. And if we would
subdue the Highlands or have them subdue us, we must follow the silver
horn of the Knight of Snowdoun when he rode out of Stirling; to subdue,
yes, and to adventure.
Yet perhaps it is better to have possessed Scotland, en tour, and to go
back to Stirling with Fitz James, as a captive, but bearing the golden
ring--
"Ellen, thy hand--the ring is thine,
Each guard and usher knows the sign."
So one leaves Glasgow, the unromantic, threading through its miles of
prosperity and unbeauty, passing Dumbarton where Wallace was prisoner,
passing the river Leven, which ought to interest us, for once its "pure
stream" on his own confession laved the "youthful limbs" of Tobias
Smollett, until the open country is reached and Loch Lomond swims into
sight.
"By yon bonnie banks, and by yon bonnie braes
Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond,
There me and my true love spent mony happy days,
On the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond."
No, the Pennells might criticize "me and my true love." As for us, we
mean to be romantic and sentimental and unashamed and ungrammatical. And
spend mony days; Harry Lauder would spell and spend it, "money."
[Illustration: DUMBARTON CASTLE.]
The lake opens wide and free in the lowland country of Balloch. At the
left lies Glenfruin, the Glen of Wailing, where took place the terrible
clan battle between the MacGregors and Colquhouns, where the MacGregors
were victorious. But as Scott wrote, "the consequences of the battle of
Glenfruin were very calamitous to the family of MacGregor." Sixty widows
of the Colquhouns rode to Stirling each on a white palfrey, a "choir of
mourning dames." James VI, that most moral monarch, let loose his
judicious wrath, the very name of the clan was proscribed, fire and
sword pursued the MacGregors. The Highlanders are dauntless. There still
exist MacGregors and with the MacGregor spirit. And who that heard the
Glasgow choir sing the superb "MacGregors Gathering"--Thain' a
Grigalach--but will gather at the cry, "The MacGregor is come!"
"The moon's on the lake, and the mist's on the brae,
And the Clan has a name that is nameless by day;
Then gather, gather, gather, Grigalach!
Gather, gather, gather.
"If they rob us of name and pursue us with beagles,
Give their roofs to the flame, and their flesh to the eagles,
Then vengeance, vengeance, vengeance, Grigalach!
Vengeance, vengeance, vengeance.
"Through the depths of Loch Katrine the steed shall career,
O'er the peak of Ben Lomond the galley shall steer,
Then gather, gather, gather, Grigalach!
Gather, gather, gather."
There are twenty-four islands marooned in this part of the lake; for
according to the old legend, one of these was a floating island and so
to chain one they chained all. The first island is Inch Murrin, at which
I looked with due respect, for it is a deer park of the present Duke of
Montrose. I know not if he is descended from The Montrose, or from
Malcolm Graeme and Fair Ellen, but let us believe it; it does not do to
smile at the claims of long descent in this persisting Scotland. The
Duke lives in Buchanan Castle, near the lake. Also he owns Ben Lomond.
Also--I read it in "More Leaves" of Queen Victoria's Journal--"Duke of
Montrose to whom half of Loch Lomond belongs."
It was here that Dorothy Wordsworth looked and recorded, "It is an
outlandish scene; we might have believed ourselves in North America."
And so, I knew the Lomond country for my own.
The steep, steep sides of Ben Lomond are in view at the top of the Loch,
but the ballad may well have contented itself with the sides. For I
know one traveler who wished to be loyal to the Ben, and having seen it
in 1889, and not seen it for the thick Scotch mist, returned again in
1911, and had her only day of rain in sailing across Loch Lomond. The
ballad turned into a coronach--
"But the broken heart kens nae second spring
Though resigned we may be while we're greetin'.
Ye'll tak the highway and I'll tak the low way."
It is all MacGregor country, that is to say Rob Roy country. We are
bound for Inversnaid, so was he. All about Lomond he had his ways, Rob
Roy's prison, Rob Roy's cave, Rob Roy's grave, and all. And though there
are other claims hereabout, and although Robert Bruce himself preceded
Robert Roy in the cave, such is the power of the Wizard that it is the
later Robert one permits to inhabit these places.
We remembered that Queen Victoria had preferred the roads to the
steamer. So we left the boat at Rowardennan pier. Not to walk the
pleasant ambling highways, that by some good public fortune run near the
"bonny bonny banks," and, in spite of the Duke of Montrose, make the
lake belong to us, to whom, of course, it does belong, but to walk to
the top of the Ben.
The path, if one keeps the path, and he should, is safe, the gradation
easy; an American is like to smile at the claims of long ascent of a
mountain which is but 3192 feet from the sea to top. But let one wander
ever little from the path, attempt to make a new and direct descent, and
let one of those mists which hang so near a Scotch day actually descend
upon the top of the Ben--it is not the mildest sensation to find one's
foot poised just at the edge of a precipice. It is not well to defy
these three thousand feet because one has climbed higher heights. Ben
Lomond can do its bit. And it can furnish a panorama which the taller
Ben Nevis cannot rival, cannot equal. The Castle Rocks of Stirling and
of Edinburgh, on a clean clear day; nearer, Ben Ledi and Ben Venue,
names to thrill a far remembrance; Ben Cruachan, bringing the Mull
country from near remembrance. And farther across, pale but apparent,
the mountains of Ireland. A marvel of vision.
At Inversnaid one is again with Dorothy Wordsworth. It was here or
hereabouts that William dropped the package of lunch in the water. So
like William! I wonder Dorothy let him carry it. It was here William saw
the Highland Girl, and wrote those lovely lines of her--
"Now thanks to Heaven! that of its grace
Hath led me to this lonely place.
Joy have I had; and going hence
I bear away my recompense.
In spots like these it is we prize
Our memory; feel that she hath eyes....
For I, methinks, till I grow old,
As fair before me shall behold,
As I do now, the cabin small,
The lake, the bay, the waterfall;
And thee, the spirit of them all!"
And now one really begins to thrill. One is really going to Loch
Katrine, to the Trossachs. The road is preferable, five miles of
foot-pleasure, as against the filled coaches with perhaps "gallant
grays," and certainly fellow travelers who quote and misquote the lines.
No, it shall be on foot, up through the steep glen of Arklet water, out
on the high open moor where the Highland cattle browse, with Ben
Voirlich constantly in view, and Ben Venue coming even to meet us; with
William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge walking beside us all the
way. (Dorothy always called it "Ketterine," but then, she came hither
seven years before "The Lady" was published.)
The old Highland fort was a perplexity to the Wordsworths. William
thought it a hospice like those he had seen in Switzerland, and even
later when told it was a fort Dorothy did not quite believe. It was
built at the time of the Fifteen to keep caterans--of which Rob Roy was
one--in subjection. And the American looks with interest because here,
in his youth--which was all he ever had in truth--General Wolfe, who
fell on the Heights of Abraham but won Quebec, commanded the fort of
this Highland height. I could but wonder how the French travelers who
throng these Scotch highways feel when they remember this victor over
Montcalm. Now that they have fought together "somewhere in France," no
doubt they feel no more keenly than an Englishman at Bannockburn.
There is not too much lure to keep one's mind and one's feet from Loch
Katrine. There was a piper on the way, tall and kilted in the tartan of
the MacGregor. (Helen MacGregor, wife of Rob Roy, was born at Loch
Arklet, and across the hill in Glengyle Rob Roy was born, conveniently.)
The piper piped most valiantly. I should like to have set him a
"blawin'" o' the pipes with our piper on the Caledonian loch, something
like the tilt which Alan Breck had with Robinoig, son of Rob Roy.
[Illustration: LOCH KATRINE.]
The road drops down to Stronachlachar. Through the hill defile one
catches the gleam, and quickly "the sheet of burnished gold" rolls
before the eye. It is more splendid than when Dorothy Wordsworth
viewed it, "the whole lake appeared a solitude, neither boat, islands,
nor houses, no grandeur in the hills, nor any loveliness on the shores."
Poor Dorothy! She was hungry and tired, and did not know where she
should lay her head. Later, next day, at the farther end, she loved it,
"the perfection of loveliness and beauty."
As for us, it was early morning, we had breakfasted, fate could not harm
us, and we knew our way. We were approaching it from the direction
opposite to Majesty, the soft gray clouded stillness, early out of the
morning world. But Scott had seen this picture also--
"The summer's dawn reflected hue
To purple changed Loch Katrine blue;
Mildly and soft the western breeze
Just kissed the lake, just stirr'd the trees,
And the pleased lake, like maiden coy
Trembled but dimpled not for joy;
The mountain shadows on her breast
Were neither broken nor at rest;
In bright uncertainty they lie,
Like future joys to Fancy's eye.
The water-lily to the light
Her chalice rear'd of silver bright;
The doe awoke and to the lawn
Begemm'd with dewdrops, led her fawn.
The gray mist left the mountain side,
The torrent show'd its glistening pride,
Invisible in flecked sky,
The lark sent down her revelry;
The black-bird and the speckled thrush
Good morrow gave from brake and bush;
In answer coo'd the cushat dove,
Her notes of peace, and rest, and love."
Here we hit upon a device to possess Loch Katrine, both "going and
coming," to see the lake at dawn, simply as beauty, and then to come
upon it as came Fitz James. With a glass of milk for fast-breaking--we
had had a substantial breakfast at Inversnaid, and this glass was but
for auld lang syne, a pledge of my companion to her early memories--we
set out for "far Loch Ard or Aberfoyle."
I think had we known how very modern is this way which curves about the
west side of Katrine we might have shunned it. Certain the stag would
have done it. He did, you remember; refusing to charge upon Ben Venue,
and thus avoiding the future site of the Water Works of the Corporation
of the City of Glasgow. Perhaps Glasgow is the best equipped
municipality in the world. Yet, what city but Glasgow would have tapped
Loch Katrine to furnish water for Glaswegians!
Our road ran in the deep defile that lies between the two great bens,
Lomond (3192) and Venue (2393). The top of Lomond was clear in the
increasing sunlight, but mists still skirted his feet; while Venue was
mist-clad from base to summit, the thin white veils tearing every now
and then, as they swayed against the pine trees jagged tops, and lifting
and then settling again.
And soon, we were at "far Loch Ard." It is a lovely little bit of water;
we wondered why the stag was not tempted to turn aside hither--but then,
we remembered, the stag did know, did save himself. Fishermen were out
in their boats, and altogether we decided that if the stag did not come
here we should, in the distant time when we should spend a summer in
this Highland peace.
Ard is little, but a large-in-little, a one-act play to Lomond's big
drama. We chose our "seat," and we hoped that the owner of The Glashart
would be gracious when we sent him word of his eviction. Glashart is a
short way above the pass of Aberfoyle where, to our pleasure, the troops
of Cromwell were defeated by Graham of Duchray.
But this time, after twelve miles of walk, come noontide and a keen
appetite, like the stag who
"pondered refuge from his toil"
we were content to house ourselves in the hotel at Aberfoyle. We chose
the one called "Baillie Nicol Jarvie," because this is all Rob Roy
country. In truth we felt at home with the Baillie, and with the Forth
flowing in front of the town, and the old clachan of Aberfoyle marked by
a few stones.
In the late afternoon of this already full day we found there was a
coach leaving for Lake Menteith which would return in the late twilight,
too late for dinner, but Baillie Nicol was kind and we could have supper
on our return. So we were off to Menteith, and to an old memory,
reaching back to the daughter of James Fitz James. But at this far
distance she seemed to belong to an older day.
Menteith is a little lake, a fragment of the abundant blue of Scotland's
waters, and it is surrounded by hills that are heather clad; only the
southern shore is wooded. Near the southern shore lies anchored the
Island of Inchmahone--isle of rest--where once stood a priory, and now
only a few arches keep the shadowy memory in their green covert. The
stones of the dead lie about, for the Isle of Rest was an island of
burial.
Hither came Mary Queen of Scots, when she was five years old, here for
an island of refuge, since the defeat at Pinkie meant that Henry VIII
was nearer and nearer the little life that stood between him and
Scotland's throne--
"O ye mariners, mariners, mariners,
That sail upon the sea,
Let not my father nor mother to wit,
The death that I maun die!"
She came with her four Maries, and together they went to France,
together they made merry and made love at the French court, and, all
unscathed, they returned fifteen years later--
"Yestreen the queen had four Maries,
To-night she'll hae but three;
There was Marie Seton, and Marie Beatoun,
And Marie Carmichael and me--"
It was as though she were lost from the world, as we went back in the
dimming day; almost the only time I have ever lost her since historic
memories came to be my own personal memories. And yet, I knew I should
find her again. Mary is one of the women who do not go into exile once
they have made harbour in the affections.
Next day, half by a hill-road and half by a foot-path, with mountains
whose names were poems evoking the one poem of the region, with the far
view, and with birches closing in the highway now and then, and now and
then opening into a near-far view of glen and stream and strath and
path, we came to--The Trossachs.
It is a walk of perhaps eight miles through a charming memory-haunted
land, lovely certainly, lonely; there were few people to be met with,
but there was no sense of desertion. It was a day of quick clouds,
rushing across a deep blue, compact white clouds which say nothing of
rain, and very vivid air, the surfaces and the shadows being closely
defined. The birch leaves played gleefully over the path as we left the
highway, and that sweet shrewd scent of the birch leaf, as I "pu'd a
birk" now and then, completed the thrill, the ecstasy--if one may be
permitted the extravagance.
"But ere the Brig o' Turk was won
The headmost horseman rode alone,
Alone, but with unbated zeal--"
Here I should take up the thread of the old poem and weave it entire.
But first because I had come adventuring, even like the Gudeman o'
Ballengeich, and taking my chances as they came along, and meeting no
Highland girl and no Fair Ellen, I did seek out lodgings in one of the
cottages which cluster about the foot of Glen Finglas, typical Highland
cottages. Not the kind, I regret and do not regret, which Dorothy
Wordsworth describes with such triumph, where William and Dorothy and
Coleridge put up--"we caroused our cups of coffee, laughing like
children," over the adventure; but still a cottage, with a single bed
room. These cottages, no doubt because artists now and then inhabit them
and because all the world passes by and because they are on Montrose
property, are what the artist and the poet mean by a cottage,
low-browed, of field stone, and rose-entwined.
[Illustration: THE BRIG O' TURK.]
The hurried traveler with no time to spare and no comforts, lodges at
the Trossachs hotel, which aspires to look like a Lady-of-the-Lake
Abbotsford, and is, in truth, of an awesome splendour like some Del
Monte or Ponce de Leon.
There is a parish church--I heard the bell far off in the woods--near
the hotel, but standing mid
"the copsewood gray
That waved and wept on Loch Achray."
It waved gently, and wept not at all that peaceful Sunday morning when
we made our way by path and strath into the dell of peace. The people
coming from the countryside repossess their own, and of course the
tourists are not in the church, or if there, with a subdued quality. The
coaches do not run, and there fell a peace over all the too well known,
too much trodden land, which restored it to the century in which it
truly belongs.
In the late afternoon, under that matchless sky which the wind had swept
clear of even rapid clouds--we were glad we could match it by no other
Scottish sky, and only by the sky which shone down when we first came to
the Lake, that æon ago--and by the scant two miles that lie between the
Brig and the Lake, "stepping westward," we followed the far memory till
it was present.
The road leads through the forest beautifully, peacefully. If on that
early September day no birds sang, still one missed nothing, not even
the horn of the Knight of Snowdoun. The paths twine and retwine, through
this bosky birchen wood, with heather purple, and knee deep on either
side, and through the trees swift glimpses of the storied mountains.
Suddenly the way changes, the ground breaks, rocks heap themselves, a
gorge appears,--it is the very place!
"Dashing down a darksome glen,
Soon lost to hound and hunter's ken,
In the deep Trossachs' wildest nook
His solitary refuge took."
I can never forget the thrill I had in the old schoolroom when Mr.
Kennedy first read the story and I knew that the stag had escaped.
I felt even more certain of it in this wild glen. Surely he must be in
there still. And so I refused to go and find him.
[Illustration: _The Trossachs_]
I could not discover where fell the gallant gray. I mean I was without
guide and could map my own geography out of my own more certain
knowledge. So I chose a lovely green spot--notwithstanding my
remembrance of "stumbling in the rugged dell"--encircled with oak and
birch, the shadows lying athwart it as they would write the legend.
"Woe worth the chase, woe worth the day,
That costs thy life, my gallant gray."
And then, by a very pleasant path, instead of the tortuous ladderlike
way which James Fitz James was forced to take, I came again to The Lake,
splendid in the evening as it had been mysterious in the morning.
"The western waves of ebbing day
Roll'd o'er the glen their level way;
Each purple peak, each flinty spire,
Was bathed in floods of living fire.
But not a setting beam could glow
Within the dark ravine below,
Where twined the path in shadow hid,
Round many a rocky pyramid,
Shooting abruptly from the dell
Its thunder-splintered pinnacle."
No shallop set out when I raised my imaginary horn and blew my imaginary
salute to the lovely isle. There were no boats to hire, on this Sunday,
and I was not Malcolm Græme to swim the space. But there it lay, bosky
and beautiful, a green bit of peace in a blue world. Nothing could rob
me of my memory of Loch Katrine, not even the very lake itself.
_Stirling_
Stirling stands up boldly--in the midst of Scotland.
That is the feeling I had in coming on it by train from the West.
Highlanders coming on it from the North, English coming on it from the
South, must have seen even more conclusively that Stirling rises out of
the midst of Scotland.
I should have preferred to approach it on foot. But then, this is the
only conquering way in which to make one's descent on any corner of the
world one seeks to possess; either on one's own valiant two feet or on
the resounding four feet of a battle charger. Alas, to-day one does
neither. But--there lies Stirling rising from the water-swept plain,
through the gray of a Scotch morning, entirely worthy of being "taken,"
and looking completely the part it has played in Scottish history.
Scotland is curiously provided with these natural forts, the Rocks of
Edinburgh and Dumbarton and Stirling. They have risen out of the plain,
for the defense and the contention of man. And because Stirling lies,
between East and West, between North and South, it has looked down on
more history, seen more armies advance and retreat than--any other one
place in the world?
Standing upon its wind-swept battlements--I can never think that the
wind dies down on the heights of Stirling--one looks upon the panorama
of Scottish history. The Lomonds lie blue and far to the east, the
Grampians gray and stalwart to the north, and on the west the peaks of
the Highlands, Ben Lomond and all the hills that rampart "The Lady of
the Lake." All around the sky were ramparts of low-lying clouds, lifting
themselves here and there at the corners of the world into splendid
impregnable bastions. Stirling looks a part of this ground plan, of this
sky battlement.
Soldiers, from yonder heights!--and you know the rest. From this height
you who are far removed from those our wars, a mere human speck in the
twentieth century look down on seven battlefields. Did Pharaoh see more,
or as much, from Cheops? The long list runs through a thousand years and
is witness to the significance of Stirling.
Here, in 843, was fought the battle of Cambuskenneth, and the Painted
People fell back, and Kenneth, who did not paint, made himself king of
an increasing Scotland.
Here, in 1297, was fought the battle of Stirling Bridge, and William
Wallace with a thousand men--but Scotsmen--defeated the Earl of Surrey
and the Abbot Cressingham with five thousand Englishmen.
Here, in 1298, was fought the battle of Falkirk, and Wallace was
defeated. But not for long. Dead, he continued to speak.
Here, in 1313, was fought the battle of Bannockburn, forty thousand
Scots against a hundred thousand English, Irish and Gascons. And The
Bruce established Scotland Forever.
Here, in 1488, was fought the battle of Sauchieburn, the nobles against
James III, and James flying from the field was treacherously slain.
Here, in 1715, was fought the battle of Sheriffmuir, when Mar and Albany
with all their men marched up the hill of Muir and then marched down
again.
Here, in 1745, Prince Charles experienced one of his great moments; how
his great moments stand forth in the pathos, yes, and the bathos, of his
swift career.
It is a tremendous panorama.
"Scots, wha ha'e wi' Wallace bled!
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led!"
I listened while the guide went through with the battle, which, of
course, is the Battle of Bannockburn. How The Bruce disposed his army to
meet the English host he knew was coming up from the south to relieve
the castle garrison; how they appeared at St. Ninians suddenly, and the
ever-seeing Bruce remarked to Moray, who had been placed in charge of
that defense--"there falls a rose from your chaplet"--it is almost too
romantic not to be apocryphal; and how Moray (who was the Randolph Moray
who scaled the crags at Edinburgh that March night) countered the
English dash for the castle and won out; how in the evening of the day
as King Robert was inspecting his lines for the battle of the to-morrow,
a to-morrow which had been scheduled the year before--"unless by St.
John's day"; they had then a sense of leisure--the English knight Sir
Henry de Bohun spurred upon him to single combat; it is worth while
listening to the broad Scots of the guide as he repeats his well-conned,
his well-worn, but his immortal story--
"High in his stirrups stood the King
And gave his battle-ax the swing,
Right on de Boune, the whiles he passed,
Fell that stern dint--the first, the last,
Such strength upon the blow was put,
The helmet crashed like hazel nut."
And all the battle the next day, until King Edward rides hot-trod to
Berwick, leaving half his host dead upon this pleasant green field that
lies so unremembering to the south of the castle. There is no more
splendid moment in human history, unless all battles seem to you too
barbaric to be splendid. But it made possible a nation--and, I take it,
Scotland has been necessary to the world.
If this is too overwhelming a remembrance, there is an opposite to this,
looking across the level lands of the Carse. The view leads past the
Bridge of Allan, on to Dunblane, near which is the hill of Sheriffmuir.
You can see the two armies in the distance of time and of the plain,
creeping on each other unwittingly--and the guide, too, is glad to turn
to a later and less revered moment--
"Some say that we wan,
Some say that they wan,
And some say that nane wan at a', man;
But o' ae thing I'm sure,
That at Sheriffmuir
A battle there was that I saw, man;
And we ran, and they ran,
And they ran, and we ran,
And they ran and we ran awa', man."
To-day the wind has swept all these murmurs of old wars into the
infinite forgotten. The world is as though MacAlpine and Wallace and The
Bruce and Prince Charles had not been. Or, is it? It looks that way, at
this quiet moment, in this quiet century, and in this country where
there is such quiet; a country with such a long tumult, a country with
such a strange silence. But the rest of the world would never have been
as it is but for the events that lie thick about here, but for the race
which was bred in such events.
"And the castle stood up black
With the red sun at its back."
There is something more dour about Stirling than Edinburgh. It is, in
the first place, too useful. One never thinks of the castle at
Edinburgh as anything but romantic, of the troops as anything but
decorative. Stirling is still used, much of it closed, and it has the
bare, uninviting look of a historic place maintained by a modern
up-keep.
Evidently when Burns visited it he found a ruin, and was moved to
express his Jacobitism--would a poet be anything but a Jacobite?--
"Here Stuarts once in glory reign'd,
And laws for Scotland's weal ordain'd;
But now unroof'd their palace stands,
Their scepter's sway'd by other hands;
The injured Stuart line is gone,
A race outlandish fills their throne--"
Soon after you enter the gate you come upon the dungeon of Roderick Dhu,
and here you get the beginnings of that long song of the Lake, which
lies to the west, when Allan Bane tunes his harp for Roderick--
"Fling me the picture of the fight,
When my clan met the Saxon's might,
I'll listen, till my fancy hears
The clang of swords, the crash of spears!"
You may look into the Douglass room, where James II stabbed the Earl of
Douglass (1452). It is a dark room for a dark deed. And the guide
repeats Douglass's refusal to the king:
[Illustration: _Stirling Castle_]
"No, by the cross it may not be!
I've pledged my kingly word.
And like a thunder cloud he scowled,
And half unsheathed his sword.
Then drew the king that jewel'd glaive
Which gore so oft had spilt,
And in the haughty Douglass heart
He sheathed it to the hilt."
The Douglasses, we see, still thought themselves "peer to any lord in
Scotland here," and the provocation to the Stewart, merely a second
Stewart, must have been great--"my kingly word"! and a "half sheathed"
sword! Perhaps we shall have to forgive this second James about whom we
know little but this affair, who seems as ineffective a monarch as James
the Second of two centuries later.
It is rather with Mary, and with her father and her son, that we
associate Stirling. James V took his commoner title of "the Gudeman of
Ballengeich" from here, when he went abroad on those errantries which
all the Stewarts have dearly loved. At Stirling it seems more possible
that James V did write those poems which, yesterday in Edinburgh I felt
like attributing to James IV. North of the bridge there is a hill, Moat
Hill, called familiarly Hurley Haaky, because the Fifth James enjoyed
here the rare sport of coasting down hill on a cow's skull. The Scot
can derive coasting from "Hurley" and skull from "Haaky"--a clever
people!
Queen Mary was brought to Stirling when a wee infant and crowned in the
old High church, September 9, 1543--and cried all the time they were
making her queen. Surely "it came with ane lass and it will pass with
ane lass." It was from Stirling that she was taken to France, and when
she returned she included Stirling in her royal progress. I cannot think
she was much here. Mary was not dour. Still, historic rumour has her
married here, secretly to Darnley, and, in the rooms of Rizzio! And she
came here once to see her princely son, hurriedly, almost stealthily, as
if she felt impending fate.
That son was much here. Stirling was considered a safer place for James
VI than Edinburgh, and then, of course, it was such a covenanted place.
James was baptized here also, and his Royal Mother was present, but not
Darnley. He refused to come, but sat carousing--as usual--in Willie
Bell's Lodging, still standing in Broad Street, if you care to look on
it. Young James merely looked at the ceiling of the High church, and
pointing his innocent finger at it, gravely criticized, "there is a
hole." James was crowned in the High church, Mary being at Loch Leven,
and the coronation sermon was preached by Knox, who "enjoyed the
proudest triumph of his life." Then, I know, baby James had to sit
through a two or three hour sermon. For once I am sorry for him.
From the courtyard one sees the iron bars in the palace windows placed
there to keep James from falling out--and others from stealing in? And
here in the royal apartments, King James was taught his Latin and Greek
like any other Scots boy, and by that same George Buchanan who was his
mother's instructor--and her defamer. Perhaps he was the author of the
betraying Casket letter; in spite of Froude's criticism based on
internal evidence, that only Shakespeare or Mary could have written it.
I can almost forgive Buchanan, for at one time when James was making
more noise than beseemed a pupil of Buchanan, this schoolmaster birched
him then and there, whereupon the royal tear fell, and the royal yowl
was lifted--and Lady Mar rushed in to quiet this uproarious division in
the kingdom.
The archives of Stirling were once rich in Scottish records. But General
Monk removed them to London when he moved on that capital with the king
also in his keeping. Years and years after, when Scotland demanded back
her records, they were sent by sea, the ship foundered, and sunk--and
we have a right to accept legend as history in this land of lost
records.
One may use Stirling Castle for lovelier ends than history or battle,
for temporal ends of beauty--which is not temporal. Else would the
prospect from these ramparts not linger immortally in the memory and
flash upon the inward eye as one of the most wonderful views in all the
world.
From Queen Mary's Lookout there is the King's Park, with the King's
Knot, the mysterious octagonal mound; it may have looked lovelier when
Mary looked down on its flower gardens and its orchards, but this green
world is sightly.
From the battlements above the Douglass garden there is a magnificent
survey; the rich Carse of broad alluvial land with the Links of the
Firth winding in and out among the fields, shining, and steely,
reluctant to widen out into the sea. The Ochils from the far background,
and nearer is the Abbey Craig, thickly wooded and crowned by the Wallace
monument, which while it adds nothing to the beauty of the scene, would
have made such a commanding watch tower for Wallace. Just below is the
old Bridge which--not this bridge, but it looks old enough with its
venerable five hundred years--divided the English forces. Near by, on
one of the Links, stands the tower of Cambuskenneth Abbey, a pleasant
walk through fields and a ferry ride across the Forth, to this memoried
place, which once was a great abbey among abbeys; I doubt not David
founded it. Bruce once held a parliament in it. Now it is tenanted
chiefly by the mortal remains of that Third James who took flight from
Sauchieburn, and whose ghost so haunted his nobles for years after.
Queen Margaret also lies here, she who sat stitching, stitching,
stitching, while those same nobles raged through Linlithgow and sought
their king. Cambuskenneth--the name is splendid--is but a remnant of
grandeur. But there are a few charming cottages nearby, rose-embowered,
perhaps with roses that descend from those in Mary's garden.
Across to the north is the Bridge of Allan, come to be a celebrated
watering place--
"On the banks of Allan Water
None so fair as she."
Far across to the north is Dunblane, with a restored-ruined cathedral--
"The sun has gone down o'er the lofty Ben Lomond
And left the red clouds to preside o'er the scene,
While lanely I stray in the calm simmer gloamin'
To muse on sweet Jessie the flower o' Dunblane."
In the green nestle of the woods, away to the right, are the battlements
of Doune--
"Oh, lang will his lady
Look frae the Castle Doune,
Ere she see the Earl o' Moray
Come sounding through the toun."
The Bonnie Earl was murdered at Donibristle Castle, on Inverkeithing Bay
across the Forth from Edinburgh, where the King sent his lordship--"oh,
woe betide ye, Huntly"--to do the deed. It was our same kingly James VI,
and I like to think that his life had its entertaining moments, even if
Anne of Denmark did have to look long and longingly down from the
battlements of Doune.
The lookout to the north is called the Victoria--as if to link Victoria
with Mary! But the old queen was proudest of her blood from the
eternally young queen. An inscription on the wall registers the fact
that Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort visited the castle in 1842.
And not any sovereign since until 1914.
[Illustration: DOUNE CASTLE.]
I had reached the city in the mid-afternoon, unconscious of royalty,
that is, of living royalty, as one is in Scotland. It seems that the
king and queen, George and Mary, were making a visit to Stirling.
Consequently there were no carriages at the station--and one must be
very careful how one walked on the royal crimson carpet. Two small boys
who scorned royalty, were impressed into service, to carry bags to the
hotel. But the press of the people was too great. The king and queen had
issued from the castle, were coming back through the town
"The castle gates were open flung,
The quivering drawbridge rock'd and rung,
And echo'd loud the flinty street
Beneath the coursers' clattering feet,
As slowly down the steep descent
Fair Scotland's King and nobles went."
I took refuge in a bank building, and even secured a place at the
windows. For some reason the thrifty people had not rented these
advantageous casements. The king and queen passed. I saw them
plainly--yes, plainly. And the people were curiously quiet. They did not
mutter, they were decorous, there was no repudiation, but--what's a king
or queen of diluted Stewart blood to Scotsmen of this undiluted town?
That afternoon in the castle I understood. An elderly Scotsman--I know
of no people whom age so becomes, who wear it with such grace and
dignity and retained power--looking with me at the memorial tablet to
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, in the west lookout, explained--"It's
seventy years since royalty has been here. Not from that day to this."
It seems that on the old day, the day of 1842, when royalty rode in
procession through the streets of Stirling, the commoners pressed too
close about. It offended the queen; she liked a little space. (I
remembered the old pun perpetrated by Lord Palmerston, when he was with
Queen Victoria at the reviewing of the troops returned from the Crimea,
and at the queen's complaining that she smelled spirits, "Pam"
explained--"Yes, esprit de corps.") So she returned not at all to
Stirling. I could wish King Edward had, the one Hanoverian who has
succeeded in being a Stewart.
The view is almost as commanding from Ladies Rock in the old cemetery,
whither I went, because in the very old days I had known intimately, as
a child reader, the "Maiden Martyr," and here was to find her monument.
There are other monuments, none so historic, so grandiose, so solemn.
The friends of a gentleman who had died about mid-century record that he
died "at Plean Junction." Somehow it seemed very uncertain, ambiguous,
capable of mistake, to die at a Junction out of which must run different
ways.
And one man, buried here, was brought all the way, as the tombstone
publishes, from "St. Peter, Minnesota." It's a historic town, to its own
people. But what a curious linking with this very old town. I thought of
a man who had hurried away from Montana the winter before, because he
wanted to "smell the heather once more before I die." And he had died in
St. Paul, Minnesota, only a thousand miles on his way back to the
heather.
Viewed from below, the castle is splendid. The road crosses the bridge,
skirts the north side of the Rock, toward the King's Knot; a view-full
walk, almost as good, almost, as Edinburgh from Princes Gardens; this
green and pastoral, that multicoloured and urban. The whole situation is
very similar, the long ridge of the town, the heaven-topping castle
hill. Stirling is the Old Town of Edinburgh minus the New Town. And so
we confess ourselves modern. Stirling is not so lovely; yet it is more
truly, more purely Scottish. Edinburgh is a city of the world. Stirling
is a town of Scotland.
CHAPTER XI
THE WEST COUNTRY
_Glasgow_
I cannot think why, in a book to be called deliberately "The Spell of
Scotland," there should be a chapter on Glasgow.
I remember that in his "Picturesque Notes," to the second edition Robert
Louis Stevenson added a foot-note in rebuke to the Glaswegians who had
taken to themselves much pleasure at the reservations of Stevenson's
praise of Edinburgh--"But remember I have not yet written a book on
Glasgow." He never did. And did any one ever write "Picturesque Notes on
Glasgow"?
I remember that thirty years ago when a college professor was making the
"grand tour"--thirty years ago seems as far back as three hundred years
when James Howell was making his "grand tour"--he asked a casually met
Glaswegian what there was to be seen, and this honest Scot, pointing to
the cathedral declared, "that's the only aydifyce ye'll care to look
at."
I should like to be singular, to write of picturesque points in Glasgow.
But how can it be done? Glasgow does not aspire to picturesqueness or to
historicalness. Glasgow is content, more than content, in having her
commerce and her industry always "in spate."
Glasgow is the second city of size in the United Kingdom, and the first
city in being itself. London is too varied and divided in interests; it
never forgets that it is the capital of the world, and a royal capital.
Glasgow never forgets that it is itself, very honestly and very
democratically, a city of Scots. Not of royal Stewarts, and no castle
dominates it. But a city made out of the most inveterate Scottish
characteristics. Or I think I would better say Scotch. That is a
practical adjective, and somewhat despised of culture; therefore
applicable to Glasgow. While Scottish is romantic and somewhat
pretending.
Glasgow is the capital of the Whig country, of the democratic Scotland
of covenanting ancestry. Glasgow is precisely what one would expect to
issue out of the energy and honesty and canniness and uncompromise of
that corner of the world. Historically it belongs to Wallace, the
commoner-liberator. And if Burns is the genius of this southwestern
Scotland, as Scott is of the southeastern, it is precisely the
difference between the regions; as Edinburgh and Glasgow differ.
The towns are less than an hour apart by express train. They are all of
Scotch history and characteristics apart in quality and in genius.
Edinburgh is still royal, and sits supreme upon its hill, its past so
present one forgets it is the past. Glasgow never could have been royal;
and so it never was significant until royal Scotland ceased to be, and
democratic Scotland, where a man's a man for a' that, came to take the
place of the old, to take it completely, utterly. So long as the world
was old, was the Old World, and looked toward the East, Edinburgh would
be the chief city. When the world began to be new, and to look toward
the New World, Glasgow came swiftly into being, and the race is to the
swift.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF THOMAS CARLYLE, BY WHISTLER.]
There is history to Glasgow, when it was a green pleasant village, and
there was romance. It is but a short way, a foot-path journey if the
pleasant green fields still invited, out to Bothwell Castle; splendid
ruin, and, therefore, recalling Mary and Darnley and the Lennoxes, but
not Bothwell. But Landside, where Mary was defeated, is a Glaswegian
suburb, Kelvingrove--"let us haste"--is a prosperous residence
district. The Broomielaw, lovely word, means simply and largely the
harbour of Glasgow, made deliberately out of Clyde water in order that
Glasgow's prosperity might flow out of the very heart of the city.
"Lord, let Glasgow flourish according to the preaching of Thy word," ran
the old motto. It has been shortened of late.
The heart of the city is dreary miles of long monotonous streets, where
beauty is never wasted in grass blade or architecture. George's Square
may be noble, it has some good monuments, but it is veiled in commercial
grime, like all the town. What could be expected of a city that would
name its principal business street, "Sauchieburn," memorializing and
defying that petty tragedy?
There is an art gallery with Whistler's "Carlyle," and a few other
notable pictures (John Lavery's I looked at with joy) to redeem miles of
mediocrity. (Here I should like to be original and not condemn, but
there are the miles.)
There is a cathedral, that "aydifyce" of note, touched almost nothing by
the spirit of "reform"; for the burghers of Glasgow, then as now,
believing that their cathedral belonged to them, rose in their might and
cast out the despoilers before they had done more than smash a few
"idols." Therefore this shrine of St. Kentigern's is more pleasing than
the reformed and restored shrine of St. Giles. The crypt is particularly
impressive. And the very pillar behind which Rob Roy hid is all but
labeled. Of course it is "authentic," for Scott chose it. What unrivaled
literary sport had Scott in fitting history to geography!
There is a University, one of the first in the Kingdom; the city
universities are gaining on the classic Oxford and St. Andrews.
But chiefly there are miles of houses of working men, more humble than
they ought to be. If Glasgow is one of the best governed cities in the
world, and has the best water supply in the world--except that of St.
Paul--would that the Corporation of the City of Glasgow would scatter a
little loveliness before the eyes of these patient and devoted
workingmen.
But what a chorus their work raises. In shipyards what mighty work is
wrought, even such tragically destined work, and manufactured beauty, as
the _Lusitania_!
From Glasgow it is that the Scot has gone out to all the ends of the
earth. If the "Darien scheme" of wresting commerce from England failed
utterly, and Glasgow failed most of all, that undoing was the making of
the town. It is not possible to down the Scot. The smallest drop of
blood tells, and it never fails to be Scottish. Most romantic, most
poetic, most reckless, most canny of people. The Highlander and the
Lowlander that Mr. Morley found mixed in the character of Gladstone, and
the explanation of his character, is the explanation of any Scot, and of
Scotland.
_Ayr_
Always the West is the democratic corner of a country; or, let me say
almost always, if you have data wherewith to dispute a wholesale
assertion. Sparta was west of Athens, La Rochelle was west of Paris,
Switzerland was west of Gesler; Norway is west of Sweden, the American
West is west of the American East. And Galloway and Ayrshire are the
west Lowlands of Scotland.
The West is newer always, freer, more open, more space and more lure for
independence. The West is never feudal, until the West moves on and the
East takes its place. Here men develop, not into lords and chiefs, but
into men. Wallace may come out of the West, but it is after he has come
out that he leads men, in the establishment of a kingdom, but more in a
wider fight for freedom; while he is in the West he adventures as a man
among men, on the Waters of Irvine, in Laglyne Wood, at Cumnock. And a
Bruce, struggling with himself, and setting himself against a Comyn, may
stagger out of a Greyfriars at Dumfries, and, bewildered, exclaim, "I
doubt I have slain the Comyn!" When a follower makes "siccar," and all
the religious and human affronts mass to sober The Bruce, a king may
come out of Galloway, out of a brawl, if a church brawl, and establish
the kingdom and the royal line forever.
If a Wallace, if a Bruce, can proceed out of these Lowlands--and a Paul
Jones!--a poet must come also. And a poet who is as much the essence of
that west country as chieftain or king. Everything was ready to produce
Burns in 1759. William Burns had come from Dunnottar, a silent,
hard-working, God-fearing Covenanter, into this covenanting corner of
Scotland. It was filled with men and women who had grown accustomed to
worshiping God according to their independent consciences, and in the
shelter of these dales and hills, sometimes harried by that
covenanter-hunting fox, Claverhouse--to his defeat; finally winning the
right to unconcealed worship. Seven years gone, and William Burns having
built the "auld clay biggan" at Alloway, he married a Carrick maid,
Agnes Broun, a maid who had much of the Celt in her. And Robert Burns
was born.
It is of course only after the event that we know how fortunate were the
leading circumstances, how inevitable the advent of Robert Burns. Father
and mother, time and place, conspired to him. And all Scotland, all that
has been Scotland since, results from him. It is Scott who reconstructed
Scotland, made the historic past live. But it is Burns who is Scotland,
Scotland remains of his temper; homely, human, intense, impassioned;
with a dash and more of the practical and frugal necessary for the
making of a nation, but worse than superfluous for the making of a
Burns.
Three towns of this Scottish corner contend not for the birth but for
the honours of Burns. If Dumfries is the capital of Burnsland and the
place of his burial, Ayr is gateway to the land and the place of his
birth; while Kilmarnock, weaver's town and most unpoetic, but productive
of poets and poetesses, claims for itself the high and distinct literary
honours, having published the first edition in an attic, and having
loaned its name as title for the most imposing edition, and having in
its museum possession all the published Burns editions.
To follow his footsteps through Burnsland were impossible to the most
ardent. For Burns was a plowman who trod many fields, and turned up many
daisies, and disturbed many a wee mousie, a poet who dreamed beside many
a stream, and if he spent but a brief lifetime in all, it would take a
lifetime, and that active, to overtake him.
"I have no dearer aim than to make leisurely pilgrimages through
Caledonia; to sit on the fields of her battles, to wander on the
romantic banks of her rivers, and to muse on the stately towers or
venerable ruins, once the honoured abodes of her heroes."
He did this abundantly. We have followed him in many a place. But in
Burnsland it were all too intimate, if not impossible. He knew all the
rivers of this west country, Nith, Doon, Ayr, Afton.
"The streams he wandered near;
The maids whom he loved, the songs he sung,
All, all are dear."
He did not apparently know the sea, or love it, although he was born
almost within sound of it; and he sings of it not at all. He knew
the legends of the land. "The story of Wallace poured a Scottish
prejudice into my veins," and he deliberately followed the Bruce legend,
hoping it would enter into his blood and spirit, and something large and
worthy would result. It did, not an epic, but the strong song of a
nation, "Scots wha hae."
[Illustration: _Ayr River_]
His land was the home of Lollards and Covenanters. Independence was in
the blood. It was the land of the "fighting Kennedys," who disputed with
each other, what time they were not furnishing an Abbot of Crossraguel
to dispute with John Knox, or a Gude Maister Walter Kennedy to have a
"flytting" with the Kynge's Makar, William Dunbar. Where Burns secured
his Jacobitism I do not know, but, of course, a poet is by nature a
Jacobite; as he himself said, "the Muses were all Jacobite."
Burnsland is rich in other literary associations. Johannes Scotus is
reckoned to have been born also at Ayr; and there are John Galt, James
Boswell, James Montgomery, Alexander Smith, Ainslie, Cunningham, and the
Carlyles, and Scott in some of his most lively romances. The Book of
Taliessin is written in part of this land, the Admirable Crichton was
born here. It is a close-packed little port-manteau of land. There is
pursuit enough for at least a summer's travel. And, without doubt, there
are as many pilgrims who explore Ayrshire as Warwickshire, and much more
lovingly.
The entrance is by Ayr. And this I think can be made most claimingly,
most fitly, by steamer from Belfast. For one thing, it avoids entrance
at Glasgow. Ayr is still a sea port of some importance; and Ireland,
democratic, romantic, intimate, is a preparation for this similar
country of Galloway and about; both lands are still Celtic.
Ayr looks well from the sea as one comes in, although in the day of
Burns the Ratton-key was a more casual place, and harbour works to
retain the traffic were not yet built. But the town sits down well into
the waterside of its Doon and Ayr rivers, much like a continental town
where fresh waters are precious. There is long suburban dwelling, not as
it was a hundred and fifty years ago.
And Ayr looks out on the sea with a magnificent prospect from any of her
neighbouring segments of coast, with ruined castles set properly, with
the dark mass of romantic Arran purple across the waters, with Ailsa
Rock evident, and to a far-seeing eye the blue line of Ireland whence
we have come.
There is small reason for staying in Ayr, unless for a wee bit nappie in
Tam o' Shanter's inn, which still boasts itself the original and only
Tam and hangs a painting above the door to prove itself the starting
point, this last "ca' hoose," for Alloway.
To Alloway one may go by tram! It sounds flat and unprofitable. But the
gray mare Meg is gone, has followed her tail into the witches night. And
if it were not the tram it would be a taxi. And what have witches and
warlocks to do with electricity, in truth how can they compete with
electricity?
"Nae man can tether time or tide;
The hour approaches Tam maun ride;
That hour, o' night's black arch the keystane,
That dreary hour he mounts his beast in;
An' sic a night he taks the road in
As ne'er poor sinner was abroad in."
To follow, in a tram, in broad daylight, oh, certainly the world has
changed, and the Deil too since "the Deil had business on his hand." The
occupations that are gone! It is a highway one follows to-day, suburban
villas and well-kept fields line the way; no need to "skelpit on thro'
dub and mire." Tam would be quite without adventure. And to-day one
wonders if even the lightning can play about this commonplace way. There
is however the Race-course--some reminder of Meg!
Yet, it is possible to forget this pleasant day, and to slip back into
old night as
"Before him Doon pours a' his floods;
The doubling storm roars through the woods;
The lightnings flash frae pole to pole;
Near and more near the thunders roll;
When, glimmering through the groaning trees,
Kirk Alloway seem'd in a bleeze."
The walls of the Auld Kirk lie before us--and "Auld Nick in shape o'
beast" is sitting under "the winnock bunker i' the east." Who would deny
that he also like Tammie "glower'd amazed and curious"?
"The piper loud and louder blew,
The dancers quick, and quicker flew;
They reel'd, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit,
Till ilka carlin swat and reekit,
And coost her duddies to the wark,
And linket at it in her sark."
The ride on this tram has developed a dizziness.
"Wi' tippenny we fear nae evil;
Wi' usquebae we'll face the devil!"
Did we cry "weel done, cutty sark!" Then we, too, must descend and
hurry on foot to the old Brig o' Doon. Not pausing long for The
Monument, even to look at the wedding ring of Jean Armour, or the Bible
Burns gave to Highland Mary; but on to the Auld Kirk which stands
opposite.
To Burns we owe this church in more ways than one. When a certain book
of "Antiquities" was being planned, Burns asked that the Auld Kirk of
Alloway be included. If Burns would make it immortal? yes. So the story
of Tam o' Shanter came to make Kirk Alloway forever to be remembered.
What would William Burns, covenanter, have thought? For I cannot but
think that William looked often askance at the acts of his genius-son.
But William was safely buried within the kirk, and if the epitaph
written by the son reads true, William was excellently covenanted.
"O ye whose cheek the tear of pity stains,
Draw near with pious rev'rence and attend.
Here lies the loving husband's dear remains,
The tender father, and the gen'rous friend.
The pitying heart that felt for human woe,
The dauntless heart that fear'd no human pride,
The friend of man, to vice alone a foe,
For 'ev'n his failings lean'd to virtue's side.'"
The auld clay biggan still stands in Alloway, and "the banks and braes
o' bonnie Doon" bloom as "fresh and fair" to-day as they did a century
and a half ago. It is a simpler place than the birth house on High
Street in Stratford, and a simpler environment than College Wynd in
Edinburgh. This is a true cotter's home, and Saturday nights within must
have been of the description.
Somehow it is less of a tourist's way of forced entry, this through the
barn, than the basement door at Abbotsford; and so one passes through
the byre and into the kitchen, where stands the bed in which Robert
Burns was born. It is all beautifully homely, as lowly as a manger; and,
how the world has been filled by what was once small frail life herein!
It is difficult to divide the poet's relics among so many claimant
places, but here and in the museum are many mementoes of the poet. For
this as well as Kirk Alloway is a national monument, or something like.
There was a century during which this was merely a clay biggan, and a
public house, and that offended no one, least of all the friends of the
poet. Except Keats. He came hither in 1818. The host was drunk most of
the time, and garrulous. Keats complained that it affected his
"sublimity." And, for once, Keats turned severe self-critic. "The
flat dog made me write a flat sonnet."
[Illustration: BURNS' COTTAGE, BIRTH-PLACE OF ROBERT BURNS, AYR.]
It was while living at Mount Oliphant, two miles east of Ayr, when Burns
was fifteen, that he began that long, long list of lasses whom he loved
and whom he made immortal with a verse. He might have said with James
V,--and much he resembled that Gudeman o' Ballangeich--"it came wi' ane
lass and it will gae wi' ane lass." The first was Nelly Kilpatrick,
daughter of the miller of Perclewan--
"O, ance I lov'd a bonnie lass,
Ay, and I love her still."
The last was Jessie Lewars, who ministered to him in those last days in
the Millhole brae in Dumfries--
"O wert thou in the cauld blast
On yonder lea, on yonder lea,
My plaidie to the angry airt,
I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee."
To Kilmarnock one goes for its name. But "the streets and neuks o'
Killie" are changed since that Burns' day. It is a sprawling, thriving
factory town, a town of weavers--and a town of poets. There is something
in the whirr of wheels, to those who are within it, which establishes
rhythm in the ear, and often leads to well-measured poetry! Surely a
weaver is equal to a plowman, and I fancy that many a workingman and
working lass with lines running through the head walk this Waterloo
street, pass Tam o' Shanter's arms, and looks above the Loan Office at
the attic where that precious first edition was printed in 1786. Poems
and pawn broking--Waterloo Street is a suggestive Grub street.
From Kilmarnock to Dumfries by train is a Burns pilgrimage, even though
it be taken without break, and in seventy-seven minutes! And
interspersed are other memories. It is entirely what Burnsland should
be, nothing set down in high tragedy, but all lyrical, with gentle
hills, whispering rivers, and meadows and woodlands all the way.
Mauchline, where the burst of song was like that of a skylark, the very
outpouring of the man's soul; here lies the field where he turned up the
daisy and found an immortal lyric.
Auchinleek, where Boswell and Dr. Johnson paused on their journey and
where to the hot-flung query of the Doctor, "Pray, what good did
Cromwell ever do the country?" the judicial and wrathful father of our
Boswell flung the hotter retort--"He gart kings ken they had a lith in
their necks." The Scottish tongue is the tongue of rebellions. Should
we stay in this corner of the world longer we might turn covenanting and
Cromwellian!
Cumnock, which William Wallace made his headquarters between the battle
of Stirling bridge and that of Falkirk.
New Cumnock, whence the Afton so sweetly falls into the Nith--
"Flow gently, sweet Afton, amang thy green braes,
Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise."
Kirkconnel, which is said not to be the Kirkconnel where Fair Helen
lies--but like the blasted heath, will it not serve?
"I wish I were where Helen lies,
Baith night and day on me she cries."
And in any event "The Bairnies cuddle doon at Nicht" were "waukrife
rogues" in Kirkconnel.
Sanquhar to Thornhill, with rounding green hills along the Nith, with
memories of Old Queensberry and Defoe and Wordsworth and Coleridge and
Allan Ramsay and Dr. John Brown, and Carlyle. Thornhill is Dalgarnock,
where fairs were held--
"But a' the niest week, as I petted wi' care,
I gaed to the tryste o' Dalgarnock,
And wha but my fine, fickle lover was there?
I glowr'd as I'd seen a warlock, a warlock,
I glowr'd as I'd seen a warlock."
Dunscore lies to the right with "Redgauntlet" memories, and a few miles
farther on is Craigenputtock.
Ellisland a brief moment, where immortal "Tam" was written as under the
spell of a warlock.
_Dumfries_
It is a proud little city, more than a bit self-satisfied. It realizes
that its possession of the mortal remains of Burns gives it large claim
in his immortality, and the Burns monument is quite the center of the
town.
Yet Dumfries is well satisfied from other argument. Historically, it
goes back to Bruce and Comyn, and even to a Roman beyond. But there is
nothing left of old Greyfriars where the killing of Comyn took place.
Dumfries had its moment in the Forty Five, for the Bonnie Prince was
here as he went down to the invasion of England, and his room in what is
now the Commercial Hotel may be looked into but not lodged in; Dumfries,
in spite of Covenant, has its modicum of Jacobitism.
[Illustration: CAERLAVEROCK CASTLE.]
It is in "Humphrey Clinker" that Smollett compels some one to say "If
I was confined to Scotland I would choose Dumfries as my place of
residence." Confined to Scotland, forsooth!
Dumfries is larger than it was in the days of Burns, and very busy
withal, in factories and railroads. But it is still a country town,
still hints at something of dales and woods and streams, even on High
Street. The land about is true Burnsland; low, gentle hills closing in
the horizon in a golden sea of warmth and sunlight, and the Nith a
pleasant stream. It makes a great bend about Dumfries, with Maxwelltown
across the water, and still
"Maxwellton's braes are bonny
Where early fa's the dew."
Farther a-field there lies Sweetheart Abbey, built by the Lady
Devorgilla, widow of John Balliol, and founder of Balliol at Oxford; one
of the most beautiful ruins not only in Scotland but in the Kingdom.
Caerlaverock castle, the Ellangowan of "Guy Mannering," stands on the
Solway, which still, like love, ebbs and flows. Ecclefechan lies east.
"O, wat ye wha's in yon toun," Burns sang from here, but later it was
made a place of pilgrimage, with its immortal dust come back from London
for Scottish rest.
And in St. Michael's Burns was laid to rest in 1796, and twenty years
later was placed in this mausoleum in the corner of the churchyard. A
sumptuous monument for so simple a man.
"He came when poets had forgot
How rich and strange the human lot;
How warm the tints of Life; how hot
Are Love and Hate;
And what makes Truth divine, and what
Makes Manhood great.
"A dreamer of the common dreams,
A fisher in familiar streams,
He chased the transitory gleams
That all pursue;
But on his lips the eternal themes
Again were new."
The road leads southward, the Via Dolorosa Mary took after Langside, the
Via Victoriosa which Prince Charles took--
"Wi' a hundred pipers an' a', an' a',
Wi' a hundred pipers an' a', an' a',
We'll up and gie them a blaw, a blaw,
Wi' a hundred pipers an' a', an' a'.
Oh, it's ower the Border awa', awa',
It's ower the Border awa', awa',
We'll on an' we'll march tae Carlisle Ha'
Wi' its yetts and castles an' a', an' a'.
Wi' a hundred pipers an' a', an' a'."
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INDEX
A
Abbottsford, 38-47
Aberdeen, 202, 227, 206-212
Aeneas Sylvius, 8
Agricola, 8, 237
Alexander III, 6, 63, 64, 158-159, 173, 210
Alloway Kirk, 327
Anne of Brittany, 21
Ardchonnel, 258
Ard, Loch, 291
Ardnamurchan, 266
Arthur's Seat, 48, 143, 146
Augustus, Fort, 246
Awe, Loch, 258-262
Ayala, Dom Pedro de, 124
B
Badenoch, Wolf of, 193, 197, 224
Balmoral Castle, 205
Bannockburn, 21, 27, 164, 232, 300, 301-303
Banquo, 132, 176
Bass, the, 156-157
Beaton, Cardinal, 164-166
Bemersyde, 27, 49
Berwick, 12-17, 24, 57
Birnam, 192
Blairgowrie, 198
Bonar, Horatio, 59
Border, the, 12, 16, 21, 29, 60, 64
Borlund, Dr., 79
Borthwick, 25, 131, 196
Boswell, James, 155, 167, 234, 274
Bothwell Castle, 131, 316
Bothwell, James, 15, 64, 65, 66, 67, 114, 146, 196
Braehead, 154
Braemar, 196
Brandir, Pass of, 259-260
Brantome, Sieur de, 128
Brown, Dr. John, 79, 151
Bruce, the, 14, 28, 36, 88, 97, 132, 164, 177, 178, 255, 285, 320, 332
Buccleuch, Duke of, 37, 68
Buchan, Lords of, 51
Buchanan, George, 66, 93, 307
Burns, Robert, 20, 45, 61, 145, 320-334
(quoted), 20, 304, 325, 326, 327, 331
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 205, 209
C
Calton Hill, 84, 98, 143-148
Cambuskenneth, abbey, 309
battle, 300
Canongate, 100, 101-110, 115, 120, 125
Carberry, 25, 131
Carlyle, Thomas, 10, 78, 150, 163
Carnegie, Andrew, 178, 237
Carterhaugh, 72
Catrail, 40
Cawdor Castle, 226-227
Charles I, 25, 45, 88, 89, 112, 168
Charles II, 21, 25, 96, 111, 113, 132, 189, 215
Charles, Prince, 25, 45, 58, 61, 68, 71, 88, 114, 115, 133, 204-205,
227, 230, 233, 234, 244, 247, 248, 334
Chastelard, 158
Chaucer, 8, 126
Cheviots, Io, 40, 47, 49
Cistercians, 36
Claverhouse (Bonnie Dundee), 45, 94, 142, 194-195
Clephane, Elizabeth, 27
Closes, the, 103
Col, 267
Coldstream, 19, 20, 21
Coleridge, 287
Columba, Saint, 34, 192, 208, 269, 271-275
Corriemulzie, 203
Cowgate, the, 95
Craigenputtock, 332
Cromwell, 88, 89, 90, 91, 97, 102, 214, 230
Cruachan, Ben, 259, 260, 261
Culdee, 36, 51, 213
Culloden, 205, 231-234, 237
Cuthbert, Saint, 7, 35
D
Dalkeith, 25, 125
Danes, 12
Darien scheme, 318
Darnick, 48
Darnley, 26, 67, 92, 114, 115, 130, 131, 160, 196, 306
David I, 24, 35, 51, 55, 63, 70, 109-110, 176
Deans, Jeanie, 10
Dee, 203, 204
Disraeli, 10
Donaldson Hospital, 135
Douglass, Gavin, 118-122, 193
Lord James, 28, 76
Douglasses, the, 16, 29, 76, 88, 91, 305
Doune, 310
Drummelzier, 29
Drummond, William, 8
Dryburgh, 39, 47-52
Dumbarton Castle, 90, 299
Dumfries, 321, 330, 332-334
Dunbar, Bob, champion curler, 180
William, 120-123, 126
Dunblane, 309
Dunfermline, 36, 55, 141, 159, 173-179
Dunnolly Castle, 255
Dunnottar Castle, 212-219, 221
Dunsinane, 192
Dunstaffnage Castle, 189, 255-257
E
Edinburgh, 14, 24, 82-148
Edward I, 18, 19, 36, 87, 89
Edward VII, 89, 111, 312
Eildon hills, 30, 33, 40, 49, 57
Elgin, 34, 224
Elizabeth, 13, 16, 129
Elliott, Jean (quoted), 23
Ettrick, 47, 105
F
Fair Maid, 188
Falkirk, 133, 300, 301
Fergusson, Robert, 106
Fife, 14, 149-170
Findon, 212
Fleming, Marjorie, 150-155, 160-162
Flodden, 17, 21, 22, 23, 27, 71, 117, 126
Ford Castle, 18, 19, 22
Forres, 224
Fotheringay, 6, 16, 67, 183
Fox, George, 8
Froissart, 8
G
Galashiels, 41, 71
Gala Water, 41
George IV, 144
George V, 104, 311
Gladstone, 79, 319
Glamis Castle, 194
Glasgow, 83, 227
Glencoe, 262-264
Glenshee, 198, 199
Golf, 167-170
Gordon, Lady Jane, 123
Grassmarket, 93, 94, 125
Great Glen, 234, 236, 242-250
Greyfriars, 95-96
H
Hadrian, 11
Halidon Hill, 16
Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 258
Henley (quoted), 134, 171
Henry VIII, 14, 36, 57
Hermitage Castle, 15, 65, 66, 127
Hogg, James, 9, 75, 105
Holyrood Palace, 14, 54, 85, 111-133, 146
Howell, James, 9, 314
Hume, 84, 145, 223
Huntlie Bank, 42, 43
Huntly, 127, 220, 229, 310
I
Innishail, 260
Inveraragaig, 244
Inversnaid, 285
Inverugie Castle, 221, 223
Iona, 34, 35, 36, 70, 264-276
Irving, Edward, 78, 150
Washington, 30
J
James I, 113, 156-157, 188, 189-190
James II, 25, 56, 113, 304
James III, 25, 45, 57, 113, 142
James IV, 19, 21, 22, 25, 73, 87, 97, 113, 115-126, 129, 305
James V, 25, 73, 96, 97, 109, 113, 184, 281, 305
James VI, 6, 13, 25, 36, 92, 132, 167, 190, 283, 306, 307, 310
James II of England, VII of Scotland, 91, 113, 137, 168
James the Chevalier, 6, 57, 113, 201, 212, 223
Jedburgh, 15, 60-68
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 9, 102, 138-139, 156, 164, 167, 212, 234, 274, 281
Jonson, Ben, 8
K
Katrine, Lake, 287-290, 298
Keats (quoted), 105, 328
Kelso, 34, 56-60
Ker of Fernihurst, 68
Kerrera, 257
Kilchurn Castle, 258
Killiecrankie, Pass of, 194-196
Kilmarnock, 321, 329-330
King Arthur, 85, 168
Kinghorn, 158, 173
Kirkcaldy, 150, 151, 159
General, 88
Kirk o' Field, 15, 130-131
Kirkwall, 238
Knox, John, 14, 107, 150, 164, 166, 184, 185-187, 190, 207, 307
L
"Lady of the Lake," 278-280
Lamb, Charles, 150
_Lands_, 100, 106, 125, 136, 168
Lang, Andrew, 31, 71
(quoted), 31, 162
Lauder, Harry, 180, 181, 282
Lavery, John, 317
Lawnmarket, 100
Le Croc, 16
Leith, 14, 116, 128, 155
Lethington, Mr., Secretary, 67
Lincoln, Abraham, 145
Lindisfarne, 7, 35
Lindsay, Sir David, 122
Linlithgow Palace, 184-185
Loch Leven, 45, 67, 106, 131
Lockhart (quoted), 46
Lomond, Ben, 285
Lomond, Loch, 281, 282-287
M
Macbeth, 132, 192, 216, 220, 226, 227, 229, 230
MacDonald, Flora, 45, 230, 233
MacDui, Ben, 202
Magdalene, Queen, 113, 156
Maid of Norway, 7, 210
Malcolm Canmore, 87, 90, 173, 177, 179, 200, 220, 229
Margaret of Denmark, 184, 210, 238
Saint, 35, 87, 90, 141, 158, 172, 174-177
Tudor, 124-126, 175, 184
Maries, the Four, 127, 128, 293
Marischal, Earl, 207, 208, 217, 220-223
Marmion, 17, 21, 22, 23, 157
Mary, Queen of Scots, 13, 15, 16, 17, 25, 36, 45, 57, 61, 64, 66, 67,
68, 86, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 102, 105, 106, 114, 115, 126-131, 146,
147, 158, 160, 181-187, 190, 196, 230, 240, 292-293, 305, 306, 308,
316, 334
Masson, Rosaline (quoted), 132
McLeod of Dare, 270
Meg Merrilies, 62
Melrose, 5, 25, 48, 63, 113, 177, 227
Mendelssohn, 112, 268
Menteith, Lake, 292
Merlin, 29
Moffat, 70
Monk, General, 20
Mons Meg, 90-91, 97, 117
Montrose, Marquis of, 20, 28, 45, 71, 73, 106-108, 214, 248-249
(quoted), 108
Moray House, 102, 106
Moreville, Hugh de, 51
Mull, 257, 264, 266, 268, 270
N
Nairn, 225
Napoleon, 44, 45, 46
Nelson, Lord, 145
Netherbow Port, 100
Nevis, Ben, 202, 243, 249-251
Norham Castle, 17, 18
North, Christopher, 77, 245
Inch, Perth, 180
Noyes, Alfred (quoted), 98
O
Oban, 235, 252-258
Ossian, 258
P
Park, Mungo, 71, 74
Pennells, the, 61, 274, 281, 282
Percy's Reliques, 42, 58, 59
Perth, 187-192, 227
Peterhead, 6, 221-223
Philipshaugh, 28, 71, 73
Prestonpans, 25
Pulpit Hill, Oban, 257
Q
Queensberry House, 102
Queensferry, 172, 174
R
Raeburn, 136, 137
Ravelston, 154-155
Regalia, 96-97, 214-216
Richard II, 36, 88, 112
Rizzio, 130, 131, 190, 306
Rob Roy, 45, 285, 288, 318
Roman, 11, 40, 48, 51, 158
Roscoff, 68
Rosebery, Lord, 172
Rosetti (quoted), 189
Roxburgh, 54-55
Ruskin, 44, 191
S
St. Andrews, 14, 162-170
St. Cuthbert's Church, 95, 136
St. Giles Church, 67, 85, 93, 104, 118, 136, 146
St. John's Church, 136
St. Mary's Loch, 70
Sandyknowe, 49, 50
Sauchieburn (battle), 300, 302
Scone, 189, 227
Scotch plaids, 137
Scot, Michael, 29, 30, 34, 48
Scott monument, 137, 146
Scott, Sir Walter, 10, 17, 38, 41, 43, 44, 58, 62, 75, 82, 84, 91, 95,
97, 142, 144, 150, 152, 172, 177, 242, 255, 260, 281
(quoted), 18, 20, 21, 22, 26, 29, 30, 32, 37, 38, 50, 56, 74, 80,
118, 191, 264, 267, 277, 280, 282, 283, 289, 291, 294, 295, 296, 297,
302, 304, 305, 311
Sentimental Tommy, 85, 169
Severus, Emperor, 8
Shakespeare (quoted), 192, 225, 226, 230, 268
Sheriffmuir (battle), 300, 302
Skerryvore, 268
Skye, 268
Smailholm, 50
Smith, Adam, 150
Smollett, Tobias, 282, 332
Spynie Castle, 224
Staffa, 267-268
Stevenson, 10, 79, 82, 95, 142, 145, 147, 152, 172, 200, 267, 268,
275, 314
(quoted), 95, 104, 143, 145, 275
Stewart, Margaret, 15
the, 87, 108-109, 112, 115, 130, 194, 253, 305
Stirling (battle), 300, 227
Stonehaven, 210
Strathcona, Lord, 263
Stronochlachar, 288
T
Tam O'Shanter Inn, 325
Tantallon Castle, 157
Tay, 188, 191, 198
Taylor, the water-poet, 8, 99, 102, 203
Teviot, 54, 56
Thomas of Ercildoun, 42, 43, 229
Thomson, James, 59
Tibbie Shiel, 70, 77
Tilt, Glen, 196, 197, 203
Tiree, 267
Tolbooth, 45, 106
Tomnahurich, 229
Town Cross, Edinburgh, 125
Trehinish Isles, 266, 268
Tronkirk, 136
Turner, 18, 19, 20, 27, 39
Twain, Mark, 151
Tweed, 13, 15, 43, 44, 47, 54
U
Upson, Arthur, 148, 175
Urquhart, 244
V
Victoria, Queen, 4, 284, 285, 310, 312
W
Wallace, William, 74, 178, 214, 260, 308, 315-319
Wall, the, 10, 11
Warbeck, Perkin, 123
Watson, William (quoted), 334
Waverleys, the, 45, 144, 148
Wesley, John, 9
West Bow, 141
Westminster Abbey, 16
Whistler, 317
William, Fort, 236, 248
Winter, William, 10, 160, 228, 252
Wishart, George, 164
Wolfe, General, 288
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 34, 39, 61, 62, 95, 263, 284, 289, 294-295
William, 66, 69, 72, 73, 75, 225, 287, 331
Y
Yarrow, 47, 69, 70-72
Yetholm, 62
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