Transcriber’s Note: Italic text is enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
William E. Griffis, D.D.
BONNIE SCOTLAND AND WHAT WE OWE HER. Illustrated.
BELGIUM: THE LAND OF ART. Its History, Legends, Industry and Modern
Expansion. Illustrated.
CHINA’S STORY, IN MYTH, LEGEND, ART AND ANNALS. Illustrated.
THE STORY OF NEW NETHERLAND. Illustrated.
YOUNG PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF HOLLAND. Illustrated.
BRAVE LITTLE HOLLAND, AND WHAT SHE TAUGHT US. Illustrated. In
Riverside Library for Young People. In Riverside School Library.
Half leather.
THE AMERICAN IN HOLLAND. Sentimental Ramblings in the Eleven
Provinces of the Netherlands. With a map and illustrations.
THE PILGRIMS IN THEIR THREE HOMES,--ENGLAND, HOLLAND, AND AMERICA.
Illustrated. In Riverside Library for Young People.
JAPAN: IN HISTORY, FOLK-LORE, AND ART. In Riverside Library for Young
People.
MATTHEW CALBRAITH PERRY. A typical American Naval Officer.
Illustrated.
TOWNSEND HARRIS, First American Envoy in Japan. With portrait.
THE LILY AMONG THORNS. A Study of the Biblical Drama entitled The
Song of Songs. White cloth, gilt top.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
BONNIE SCOTLAND
AND WHAT WE OWE HER
[Illustration: IONA, ST. MARTIN’S CROSS]
BONNIE SCOTLAND
AND WHAT WE OWE HER
BY
WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS
_With Illustrations_
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October, 1916_
DEDICATED
TO THE THREE WOMEN FRIENDS
QUANDRIL
LYRA
FRANCES
FELLOW TRAVELLERS AND GUESTS IN THE
LAND OF COLUMBA, MARGARET, BRUCE, BURNS
AND SCOTT
PREFACE
In the period from student days until within the shadow of the great
world-war of 1914, I made eight journeys to and in Scotland; five
of them, more or less when alone, and three in company with wife or
sister, thus gaining the manifold benefits of another pair of eyes. On
foot, and in a variety of vehicles, in Highlands and Lowlands, over
moor and water, salt and fresh, I went often and stayed long. Of all
things remembered best and most delightfully in this land, so rich in
the “voices of freedom,”--the mountains and the sea,--the first is the
Scottish home so warm with generous hospitality.
In this book I have attempted to tell of the Scotsman at home and
abroad, his part in the world’s work, and to picture “Old Scotia’s
grandeur,” as illustrated in humanity, as well as in history, nature,
and art, while showing in faint measure the debt which we Americans owe
to Bonnie Scotland.
W. E. G.
ITHACA, NEW YORK.
CONTENTS
I. THE SPELL OF THE INVISIBLE 1
II. THE OUTPOST ISLES 7
III. GLASGOW: THE INDUSTRIAL METROPOLIS 17
IV. EDINBURGH THE PICTURESQUE 27
V. MELROSE ABBEY AND SIR WALTER SCOTT 38
VI. RAMBLES ALONG THE BORDER 50
VII. THE LAY OF THE LAND: DUNFERMLINE 65
VIII. DUNDEE: THE GIFT OF GOD 76
IX. THE GLAMOUR OF MACBETH 88
X. STIRLING: CASTLE, TOWN, AND TOWERS 97
XI. OBAN AND GLENCOE--CHAPTERS IN HISTORY 108
XII. SCOTLAND’S ISLAND WORLD--IONA AND STAFFA 119
XIII. THE CALEDONIAN CANAL--SCOTTISH SPORTS 131
XIV. INVERNESS: THE CAPITAL OF THE HIGHLANDS 143
XV. “BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE” 156
XVI. THE OLD HIGHLANDS AND THEIR INHABITANTS 164
XVII. HEATHER AND HIGHLAND COSTUME 177
XVIII. THE NORTHEAST COAST--ABERDEEN AND ELGIN 191
XIX. THE ORKNEYS AND THE SHETLANDS 202
XX. LOCH LOMOND AND THE TROSSACHS 213
XXI. ROBERT BURNS AND HIS TEACHERS 223
XXII. KIRK, SCHOOL, AND FREEDOM 234
XXIII. JOHN KNOX: SCOTLAND’S MIGHTIEST SON 247
XXIV. INVERGOWRIE: IN SCOTTISH HOMES 259
XXV. AMERICA’S DEBT TO SCOTLAND 270
CHRONOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK OF SCOTLAND’S HISTORY 279
INDEX 287
ILLUSTRATIONS
ST. MARTIN’S CROSS AT IONA _Frontispiece_
EDINBURGH CITY AND CASTLE 28
DRYBURGH ABBEY 44
ABBOTSFORD 62
THE MONASTERY, DUNFERMLINE ABBEY 70
THE VALLEY OF THE TAY 84
A TYPICAL SCOTTISH STREET: HIGH STREET, DUMFRIES 94
STIRLING CASTLE, FROM THE KING’S KNOT 100
THE KINGS’ GRAVES, IONA 128
THE CAIRN AT CULLODEN 148
THE SCOTCH BRIGADE MEMORIAL 174
INTERIOR OF COTTAGE, NORTHEAST COAST 194
THE HARBOR OF KIRKWALL, ORKNEY ISLANDS 202
THE TROSSACHS AND LOCH ACHRAY 216
THE TAM O’ SHANTER INN, AYR 226
THE EDINBURGH CONFERENCE OF MISSIONS 268
BONNIE SCOTLAND
CHAPTER I
THE SPELL OF THE INVISIBLE
As with so many of my countrymen, the dream floated before the
vision dawned. The American who for the first time opens his eyes in
Europe is like the newborn babe, whose sight is not yet focused. He
sees double. There is continually before him the Old World of his
fancy and the Europe of reality. War begins, as in heaven, between
the angels--of memory and of hope. The front and the rear of his
brain are in conflict. While the glamour of that initial glimpse,
that never-recurring moment of first surprise, is before him, he
perforce compares and contrasts the ideal and the reality, even to
his bewilderment and confusion. Only gradually do the two beholdings
coalesce. Yet even during the dissolving pictures of imagination and
optical demonstration, that which is present and tangible wins a glory
from what is past and unseen.
From childhood there was always a Scotland which, like Wordsworth’s
“light that never was, on sea or land,” lay in my mind as “the
consecration and the poet’s dream,” of purple heather, crimson-tipped
daisies, fair lasses, and brave lads. It rose out of such rainbow
tints of imagination and out of such mists of fancy as were wont to
gather, after reading the poets and romancers who have made Scotland a
magnet to travellers the world over. This far-off region, of kilts and
claymores, first sprang out of the stories of friends and companions.
Our schoolmates, whether born on the moor or sprung from Scottish
parents in America, inherited the love of their fond forebears and
kinsmen, who sincerely believed that, of all lands on this globe,
Bonnie Scotland was the fairest.
One playfellow, who afterwards gave up his life at Bull Run for the
land that had given him welcome, was my first tutor in Scottish
history. If native enthusiasm, naïve sincerity, and, what seemed to one
mind at least, unlimited knowledge, were the true bases of reputation,
one might call this lad a professor and scholar. As matter of fact,
however, we were schoolboys together on the same bench and our combined
ages would not amount to twenty-five. He it was who first pictured with
vivid phrase and in genuine dialect the exploits of Robert the Bruce
and of William Wallace. He told many a tale of the heather land, in
storm and calm, not only with wit and jollity, but all the time with
a clear conviction of the absolute truth of what had been handed down
verbally for many generations.
He it was who, without knowing of the books written in English which
I afterwards found in my father’s rich library of travel, stirred my
curiosity and roused my enthusiasm to read the “Scottish Chiefs” and
Sir Walter’s fascinating fiction, and, by and by, to wander over the
flowery fields of imagination created by that “illegitimate child of
Calvinism,” Robert Burns.
Though the boy who became a Union soldier was the first, he was by no
means the last of Scottish folk whose memories of the old country were
fresh, keen, and to me very stimulating. In church and Sunday school,
in prayer-meeting and Bible class, I met with many a good soul who
loved the heather. I heard often the words of petition and exhortation
that had on them the burr and flange of a pronunciation that belonged
to the Lowlands. As years of experience and discrimination came, I
could distinguish, even on American soil, between the Highlander’s
brogue and the more polished speech of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
When the time for college preparation came, I had, for private tutor in
the classics, a theological student, who in physical frame and mental
traits, as well as in actual occupation, was Hugh Miller all over
again. He had been a stonecutter, believed in “the testimony of the
rocks,” and could lift, move, or chisel a block of mortuary material
with muscles furnished for the occasion. In character, he resembled in
hard beauty the polished rose-red granite of his native hills. Strictly
accurate himself, a master whose strength had grown through his own
surmounting of difficulties, he was not too ready to help either a
lazy boy or an earnest student, while ever willing to give aid in
really hard places. He introduced me to Xenophon, and his criticisms
and comments on the text were like flashlights, while his sympathy for
Klearchus and his comrades illuminated for me my own memories of the
camp life, the hard marching, and the soldier’s experiences during the
Gettysburg campaign. From the immortal Greek text he made vivid to me
the reality of human relations and their virtual identity, whether in
B.C. 400 or A.D. 1863.
By this Scotsman I had a window opened into the Caledonian mind in
maturity. Through him I realized something, not only of its rugged
strength, its sanity, and its keen penetration, but I gained some
notion also of the Scottish philosophy of common sense, which so long
dominated colonial America and especially Princeton--the mother of
statesmen and presidents, over which McCosh presided in my earlier days.
It was this Caledonia of mind, made by the deposits of human thought
through many ages and experiences, which seemed and yet appears to me
as an eternal Scotland, which, despite change of fashions, of wars and
calamities, shall never pass away. So I must confess to the spell of
invisible Scotland, as well as to the fascination of the storm-swept
peninsula of heaths and rugged hills.
Besides boyhood’s companions of Scottish blood and descent, there were
odd characters in the Pennsylvania regiment in which I served as flag
corporal. My comrades under the Stars and Stripes came from various
shires of Caledonia. Then, too, besides the bonnie maidens, like those
Burns and Ramsay talked with, whose ancestry I knew, because I was
often in their homes and met their parents and their kinsmen, there was
the glamour of the dramatic poet’s creation. Immediately in front of my
father’s home, in Philadelphia, was the famous Walnut Street Theatre,
where that mighty figure in histrionic art, Edwin Forrest, was often
seen. The tragedy of “Macbeth,” which I have seen rendered more times
by famous actors than I have seen any other of Shakespeare’s creations,
gave a background, which built in my imagination a picture of Scotland
that had in it the depths of eternal time. The land and people had
thus a perspective of history such as nothing else could suggest, even
though I knew enough of the background of actual record to realize that
Shakespeare’s chronology often passed the limits of Usher.
So with boyhood’s memories and the reading of poets and romancers,
with the more or less undefined horizons of picture, painting, book,
and the drama, reinforced by what a college student might be supposed
to have absorbed, I was ready for wondrous revelations when, with
Quandril, my eldest sister, I embarked in the Scottish Anchor Line
steamer Europa, Captain Macdonald, master, on the 26th of June, 1869.
It was after graduation and at the end of the month of roses. We were
bound for the land of Macbeth, Bruce, Wallace, Scott, and Burns.