THE KINGDOM OF FIFE
Like Somerset, claiming to be something more than a mere shire, the
county half fondly, half jestingly entitled a kingdom, lies islanded
between two firths, cut off from the world by the sea and from the rest
of Scotland by the Ochil ridges. The “Fifers” are thus supposed to be a
race apart; but it would be more like the truth to take Fifeishness as
the essence of Saxon Scotland. Fife is, in fact, an epitome of the
Lowlands, showing great stretches of practically prosaic farming, others
of grimy coal-field, with patches of moor, bog, and wind-blown firs,
here and there swelling into hill features, that in the abrupt Lomonds
attain almost mountain dignity in face of their Highland namesake, sixty
miles away. Open to cold sea winds, it nurses the hardy frames of
“buirdly chiels and clever hizzies”; and all the invigorating discipline
of the northern climate is understood to be concentrated in the East
Neuk of Fife, where a weakling like R. L. Stevenson might well sigh over
the “flaws of fine weather that we call our northern summer.” It is in
the late autumn that this eastern coast is at its best of halcyon days.
As we have seen, the poet lived a little farther south who still laid
himself open to Tom Hood’s reproach--
‘Come, gentle spring, ethereal mildness come!’
O Thomson, void of rhyme as well as reason,
How could’st thou thus poor human nature _hum_--
There’s no such season!
In the _Antiquary’s_ period, we know how Fife was reached from Edinburgh
by crossing the Firth at Queensferry, as old as Malcolm Canmore’s
English consort, or by the longer sail from Leith to Kinghorn, where
Alexander III. broke his neck to Scotland’s woe. A more roundabout land
route was _via_ Stirling, chosen by prudent souls like the old wife who,
being advised to put her trust in Providence for the passage, replied,
“Na, na, sae lang as there’s a brig at Stirling I’ll no fash
Providence!” Lord Cockburn records how that conscientious divine, Dr
John Erskine, feeling it his duty to vote in a Fife election, when too
infirm to bear the motion of boat or carriage, arranged to walk all the
way by Stirling, but was saved this fortnight’s pilgrimage by the
contest being given up. Till the building of its Firth bridges, the
North British Railway’s passengers had to tranship both in entering and
leaving Fife, a mild taste of adventure for small schoolboys. Now, as
all the world knows, the shores of Lothian are joined to Fife by that
monumental Forth Bridge that humps itself into view miles away. Then all
the world has heard of the unlucky Tay Bridge, graceful but treacherous
serpent as it proved in its first form, when one stormy Sabbath night it
let a train be blown into the sea. By these constructions the line has
now a clear course on which to race its Caledonian rival, either for
Perth or Aberdeen. But
[Illustration: THE CASTLE OF ST. ANDREWS, FIFESHIRE]
there is no racing done on the cobweb of North British branches woven to
catch Fife-farers, at whose junctions, as a local statistician has
calculated, the average Fifer wastes one-seventh of his life or
thereabouts. Ladybank Junction, stranded on its moor, used to have the
name of a specially penitential waiting-place, which yet lent itself to
romantic account in one of those _Tales from Blackwood_.
The towns of Fife are many rather than much. Cupar, the county seat, is
still a quiet little place, whose Academy stands on the site of a
Macduff stronghold, recalling that Thane of Fife with whom the Dukedom
of our generation is connected only in title. “He that maun to Cupar,
maun to Cupar,” says the proverb, but few strangers seem to risk this
vague condemnation. When James Ray passed through the town on his way to
Culloden, he has little to tell of it unless that he put up at the
“Cooper’s Arms” which, more by token, was kept by the Widow Cooper. The
above proverb, by the way, seems to belong to Coupar-Angus, usually so
distinguished in spelling, and is transferred to its namesake by
“Cupar-justice,” a Fife version of the code honoured at Jedburgh. A
Scotch cooper or couper may not have to do with barrels, unless
indirectly in the way of business, but is also a chaffer or chapman,
_par excellence_, of horses; and one would like to believe, if
philologists did not shake their heads, that these towns got their name
as markets, like English Chippings and Cheaps.
In an out-of-the-way edge of the county, below the Lomonds, lies
Falkland, whose royal palace, restored by the late Marquis of Bute, was
the scene of that dubious tragedy enacted in the _Fair Maid of Perth_,
where the dissolute Duke of Rothesay is a little white-washed to
heighten the dramatic atrocity of his death. A few miles behind
Queensferry is Dunfermline, another place where kings once sat “drinking
the blood-red wine,” now a thriving seat of linen manufacture, among its
mills and bleachfields containing choice fragments of royal and
ecclesiastical architecture, as well as modern adornments given by its
bounteous son Mr. Andrew Carnegie, native of the town where Charles I.
was born, and Robert Bruce buried beside Malcolm Canmore and his queen.
There are some fine modern monuments in the new church, which adjoins
the monastic old one, testifying stiffly to Presbyterian distrust of
Popish arts; and altogether Dunfermline is one of those places that
might well “delay the tourist.”
But the largest congregation in Fife is that “long town” of Kirkcaldy,
flourishing on jute and linoleum since the days when Carlyle and Irving
were dominies here, the former a humane pedagogue, though he scourged
grown-up dunces so unmercifully, while the bygone peace of the place was
often broken by the wailing of Irving’s pupils under the tawse with
which he sought to drive them into unknown tongues. Kirkcaldy has older
historic memories; but somehow it is one of those Scottish towns that,
like Peebles and Paisley, lend their names to vulgar or comic
associations. Was it not a bailie of Kirkcaldy who said, “What wi’ a’
thae schules and railways, ye canna’ tell the dufference atween a
Scotchman and an Englishman noo-a-days!”
Let the above words be text for a sermon, to which I invite
seriously-minded readers, while the otherwise-minded may amuse
themselves by taking a daunder among the lions of Kirkcaldy. The
subject is Scottish Humour, which Englishmen are apt to rank with the
snakes of Iceland or the breeks of a Highlander. Foreigners do not make
the same mistake, as how can they when the best known English humorists
are so often Scotsmen or Irishmen? It is the pure John Bull whose
notions of the humorous are apt to be rather childish; so when he gets
hold of a joke like that about the surgical instrument, he runs about
squibbing it in everybody’s face, and never seems to grow tired of such
a smart saying, nor cares to ask if there be any truth in it beyond the
fact that one people may not readily relish another’s wit or wisdom.
The vulgar of all nations have a very rudimentary sense of the comic,
coarse enough in many Scotsmen who can appreciate no more pointed
repartee than--
The never a word had Dickie to say,
Sae he ran the lance through his fause bodie!
The characteristic form of English humour is more or less good-natured
chaff, bearing the same relation to keen raillery as a bludgeon does to
a rapier. A master of this fence was Dr. Johnson, who, if his pistol
missed fire, knocked you down with the butt end of it. Sydney Smith’s
residence in Edinburgh should have given him a finer style, which he
turned to so unworthy use in mocking at Scottish “wut.” As to the
distinction between wit and humour, I know of no better than that which
defines the one as a flash, the other as an atmosphere. It may be
granted that the Scottish nature does not coruscate in flashes. But what
your Sydney Smiths do not observe is that it develops a very high
quality of humour, which has self-criticism as its essence. Know
thyself, has been styled the acme of wisdom; and when the Scotsman’s
best stories come to be analysed, the point of them appears to be a more
or less conscious making fun of his own faults and shortcomings, which
is a wholesomer form of intellectual exercise than that parrot-trick of
nicknaming one’s neighbours. The bailie’s boast above quoted is a
characteristic instance over which an Englishman may chuckle without
seeing the true force of it. All those hoary _Punch_ jests as to “bang
went saxpence,” and so forth, are good old home-made Scottish stories,
which the southron brings back with him from their native heath, and
dresses them up for his own taste with a spice of malice, then rejoices
over the savoury dish which he has prepared by seething poached kids in
their mother’s milk. Yet often print fails to bring out the true gust
that needs a Doric tongue for sauce; and the Englishman who attempts any
Scottish accent is apt to merit their fate who ventured to meddle with
the ark, not being of the tribe of Judah. The effect of such a story
depends as much on the actor as on the words. To mention but one of many
noted masters of this art, who that ever spent an evening with the late
Sir Daniel Macnee, President of the Scottish Academy, could hold the
legendary view of his countrymen’s want of fun? He had to be heard to be
appreciated; but, at the risk of misrepresenting his gift, here is one
of his anecdotes. He was travelling with a talkative oil merchant who,
after much boast of his own business, began to rally the other on his
want of communicativeness--“Come now, what line are you in?”--“I’m in
the oil trade too,” confessed the painter, whereupon his companion fell
to pressing him for an order.--“We’ll do cheaper for you than any house
in the trade!” At last, to get rid of his persistency, Sir Daniel said,
“I don’t mind taking a gallon from you.”--“A gallon! Man, ye’re in a
sma’ way!”
Perhaps this humour is a modern production, like certain fruits
cultivated in Scotland “with deeficulty.” There were times, indeed, when
life here was no laughing matter. But even the sun-loving vine is all
the better for a touch of frost at its roots, and the best wines are not
those the most easily made. In contrast with other home-brewed fun that
soon goes flat, and with such cheap brands as “Joe Miller,” the vintage
of Scottish humour, if not distinguished by effervescing spurts of
fancy, has body and character which only improve by age, keeping well
even when decanted, and giving a marked flavour when mixed with less
potent materials, into _Punch_, let us say. There is also a dry quality
thrown away on palates used to the public-house tap; Ally Sloper, for
instance, might not taste the womanthropy, as he would call it, of that
bachelor divine who began his discourse on the Ten Virgins with “What
strikes us here, my brethren, is the unusually large proportion of
_wise_ Virgins.” A good Scotch story, with the real smack upon the
tongue, bears to be told again, like an aphorism distilled from the
wisdom of generations. Sound humour is but the seamy side of
common-sense, for a sense of the incongruous degenerates into nonsense
if not shaped by a clear eye for the relation and proportion of things.
If the reader will consider the many specimens of Scottish humour now
current in England, or to be drawn from such treasuries as Dean
Ramsay’s; and if he will reflect on their weight and minting, he may
understand the value of this coinage in the national life.
The northern Attic salt abounds in one savour that appears in a hundred
stories like that of the preacher who, at Kirkcaldy or elsewhere,
apologised for his want of preparation: “I have been obliged to say what
the Lord put into my mouth, but next Sabbath I hope to come better
provided!” If there is any subject which the Scot takes seriously it is
religion, that yet makes the favourite theme of his jests. Revilers have
gone so far as to state that the incongruous elements of Scottish humour
are usually supplied by a minister and a whisky bottle. It is certainly
the case that a Scotsman relishes playing upon the edge of sacred
things, and that the pillars of his church will shake their sides over
stories which strike Englishmen as irreverent. But has not vigorous
faith often shown a tendency to overflow into backwaters of comicality,
as in the gargoyles of our cathedrals, the mediæval parodies of church
rites, and the homely wit of Puritan preachers? There are some believers
who can afford a laugh now and then at their sturdy solemnities, others
who must keep hush lest a titter bring down their fane like a house of
cards. Familiarity with the language of the Bible counts for a good deal
in what seems the too free handling of it in the north. But note how the
irreverence of the Scot’s humour is usefully directed against his own
tendency to fanaticism. It is only of late years, I think, that he has
taken to joking on the religious practices of his neighbours, whose
shortcomings once seemed too serious for joking. That
[Illustration: LOCH LUBNAIG, PERTHSHIRE]
“one” of the servant girl who described the services at Westminster
Abbey as “an awful way of spending the Sabbath” may be taken as a sign
of growing charity. Yet, in the past, too, a Scotsman seldom chuckled so
heartily as over any rebuke to priestly pretension within his own
borders. Jenny Geddes’s rough form of remonstrance with the dignitary
who would have read the mass in her lug was a practical form of Scotch
humour, that on such subjects is apt to have a good deal of hard earnest
in it. As for the Kirk’s own ministers, the tyranny ascribed to them by
Buckle has long been tempered by stories at their expense. Buckle’s
famous comparison of Spain and Scotland is vitiated by his leaving out
of account that natural sense of humour that has aided popular
instruction in counteracting superstition. Dean Ramsay ekes out Carlyle
and other weighty authors who explain how Irving found no depth of earth
in Scotland for the seeds of his wild enthusiasm, and why the tourist
seeks in vain for winking Madonnas at Kirkcaldy, long ago done with all
relics and images but the battered figureheads of her whalers.
Kirkcaldy’s whalers now grow legendary, and strangers beholding her
shipping to-day, may take for a northern joke that this ranks as the
third Scottish port of entry; but the fact is that a whole string of
Fife harbours are officially knotted together under its name, as all
North America was once tacked on to the manor of Greenwich, and every
British child born at sea belongs to the parish of Stepney. The
coast-line here is thick-set with little towns of business and pleasure,
grimy coal ports and odorous fishing havens, alternating with bathing
beaches and golf-links in the openings of the low cliffs. At the
western edge has now been taken in the old burgh Culross, pronounced in
a manner that may strike strangers as curious. Not far from the Forth
Bridge is the prettiest of Edinburgh seaside resorts, Aberdour, with its
own ruins to show, and the remains of an abbey on Inchcolm that shuts in
its bay, and behind it Lord Moray’s mansion of Donibristle, part of
which stands a charred shell, burned down and rebuilt three times till
its owner accepted what seemed a decree of fate. Opposite Edinburgh,
Burntisland’s prosaic features make a setting for the castle of Rossend,
with its romantic scandal about Queen Mary and Chastelard. Beyond
Kirkcaldy come Leven and Largo, trying to grow together about the statue
of Alexander Selkirk; and Largo House was home of a more ancient
Fifeshire mariner, Andrew Wood, his “Yellow Frigate” a sore thorn in
England’s side, as commemorated by a novel of James Grant, who wrote so
many once-so-popular romances of war. Fife coast towns have a way of
sorting themselves in couples. At the corner of the bay overlooked by
Largo Law, Elie and Earlsferry flourish together as a family bathing
place, behind which, at the pronunciation of Kilconquhar the uninitiated
may take a thousand guesses in vain. Then we have Anstruther and Crail
on Fifeness, that sharp point of the East Neuk of Fife. Round this, at
the mouth of the Eden, we come to St. Andrews, “gem of the province.”
Everybody has heard of St. Andrews, but only those who have seen it
understand its peculiar rank among seaside resorts. It is distinguished
by a certain quiet air, like some high-born spinster’s, accustomed to
command respect, whose heirlooms of lace and jewellery put her above
any need of following the fashions. Her parvenu rivals must lay
themselves out to attract, must make the best of their advantages, must
ogle and flirt, and strain themselves to profit by the vogue of public
favour. St. Andrews does not display so much as an esplanade, standing
secure upon her sober dignity, a little dashed, indeed, of Saturday
afternoons by excursions from Dundee. Other sea-side places may be said
to flourish, but the word seems inappropriate in the case of this
resort, that yet thrives sedately, as how should she not with so many
strings to her bow? First of all she is a venerable University city,
whose Mrs. Bouncers ought to make a good thing of it with the students
and the sea-bathing visitors playing “Box and Cox” for them through the
winter session and the summer season. Then she is a Scottish Clifton or
Brighton of schools, recommended by the singular healthiness of the
place. Unless in the smart new quarter near the railway station, the
dignified bearing of an ancient town carries it over the flighty manners
of a watering-place. The only pier is a thing of use, where the
wholesome smell of seaweed mingles with a strong fishy flavour. No
gilded pagoda of a bandstand profanes the “Scores,” that cliff road
which your Margates would have made into a formal promenade. A few
bathing machines on the sands alone hint at one side of the town’s
character. In one of the rocky coves of the cliff is a Ladies’ bathing
place, which I can praise only by report. But the Step Rock, with its
recent enclosure to catch the tide, is now more than ever the best
swimming place on the East Coast.
What first strikes one in St. Andrews is its union of regularity and
picturesqueness, and of a cheerful well-to-do present with relics of a
romantic past. Its airy thoroughfares, with their plain solidity of
modern Scottish architecture, form an effective setting for bits of
antiquity, such as the ivy-clad fragment of Blackfriars’ Chapel, and the
Abbey wall, beneath which no professor cares to walk, lest then should
be fulfilled a prophecy that it is one day to fall upon the wisest head
in St. Andrews. The architectural treasures of this historic cathedral
city would alone be enough to make it a place of pilgrimage. “You have
here,” says Carlyle, “the essence of all the antiquity of Scotland in
good and clean condition.” Southron strangers will hardly understand how
these fragments of ecclesiasticism have become a nursery of Protestant
sentiment. A generation ago it was stated that but one solitary Romanist
could be found in the little city. Generations of Scottish children,
like myself, have been shown that gloomy dungeon at the bottom of which
once pined the victims of Giant Pope, a sight to fill us with shuddering
horror and hate of persecuting times; but we were not told how
Protestants could persecute, too, while they knew not yet of what spirit
they were. What shades of grim romance haunt these crumbling walls, what
memories of Knox and Beaton, what dreams of the old Stuart days! I never
realised the power of their associations till one evening, on the
Scores, there sat down beside me two French tourists who had somehow
strayed into St. Andrews, and their light talk of boulevards, theatres,
and such like, seemed sacrilegious under the shadow of the Martyrs’
Memorial.
[Illustration: IN GLENFINLAS, PERTHSHIRE]
I have an acquaintance with St. Andrews going back more than half a
century. My introduction to club life was at _the_ club here, then a
cottage of two or three rooms, into which I was invited under charge of
my nurse, and treated to the refreshment of gingerbread snaps by a
member who seemed to me little short of a patriarch. In the scenery of
my childhood, nothing stands out more clearly and cheerfully than those
sandy green links dotted with red jackets and red flags, not to speak of
the red balls with which enthusiasts bid defiance to snow and ice. Nay,
another among my earliest reminiscences is of seeing the multitudinous
seas themselves incarnadined, when, for once, the golfers allowed their
attention to be drawn from their own hazards. A cry had been raised that
a lady was drowning; then every group of red jackets within hearing
forgot their balls, flung down their clubs, raced across the links,
dashed into the waves, and struggled emulously to the rescue. I think a
caddie, after all, was the fortunate youth who had the glory of
achieving such an adventure.
Since those days, when feather balls cost half-a-crown and few profane
foreigners had penetrated its mysteries, the Golf Club has been
transformed in a style becoming the chief temple of this Benares, hard
by a more modest “howff” for the “professionals” who are its Brahmins,
where little “caddies” swarm like the monkeys of an Indian sanctuary.
For golf is the idol of a cult that draws here many pilgrims from far
lands, now that, in the international commerce of amusement, while
barelegged little Macs take kindly to cricket, the time-honoured
Caledonian game spreads fast and far over England, over the world,
indeed, for on dusty Indian _maidans_ good Scotsmen can be seen trying
to play the rounds of Zion in that strange land, and under the very
Pyramids a golf course is laid out, where the dust of Pharaohs may serve
as a tee, or a mummy pit prove the most provoking of bunkers. In the
home of its birth this pastime flourishes more than ever. Parties are
given for golf along with tea and tennis; schools begin to lay out their
golf ground as well as their football field; and at St. Andrews we have
the Ladies’ Links, where many a masculine heart has been gently spooned
or putted into the hole of matrimony. Fair damsels may even be seen
lifting and driving in a “foursome,” an innovation frowned at by some
old stagers, who hardly care to talk about the game till it is ended,
and then can talk of nothing else. “_Tee_, veniente die, _tee_,
decedente--!” is the song of St. Andrews, which asks for no more
absorbing joy than a round in the morning and a round in the evening. In
the eyes of inveterate golfers, all prospects are poor beside those
links that make the Mecca, the Monte Carlo, the Epsom of the royal game,
so one is free to give up the surrounding country as not much
contributing to the attractions of the place, many of whose visitors
hardly care to stir beyond their beloved arena, unless for a Sunday
afternoon walk along the shore as far as that curious freak of the
elements known as the Spindle Rock.
Besides its devotion to the game where clubs are always trumps, St.
Andrews has in the last generation had an attraction for celebrities in
literature and science. The University staff, of course, makes a
permanent depot of intellect. The facile essayist A.K.H.B. was long
parish minister here, when the Episcopal bishop was a nephew of
Wordsworth, himself an author too well known to schoolboys. Here Robert
Chambers spent the evening of his days. Blackwood the publisher had a
house close at hand, where many famous authors have been guests. In the
vicinity, too, is Mount Melville, seat of Whyte-Melville, the novelist.
Not to mention living names, the late Mrs. Lynn Linton was a warm lover
of St. Andrews. It must have been well known to Mrs. Oliphant, more than
one of whose novels take this country for their scene.
Is it impertinent to say a word in praise of a writer, too soon
forgotten at circulating libraries, where she was but too voluminously
in evidence for the best part of her lifetime? Had she been content with
a flat in Grub Street, Mrs. Oliphant might now be better remembered than
by the mass of often hasty work for which her way of life gave hostages
to fortune and to publishers. Her novels often smell too much of an
Aladdin’s lamp that had to be rubbed hard for copy; there is awful
example to money-making authorship in a middle period of them that
scared off readers for whom again she would rise to her early charm.
Defects she had, notably a curious warp of sympathy that led her to do
less than poetic justice to prodigal ne’er-do-weels; but her chief fault
was in writing too much, when at her best she was very good. Her best
known stories are those which deal with English life; yet she was not
less happy in describing her native Scotland, having an extraordinary
insight that set her at home in very varied scenes and classes of
society. Few writers are found in touch with so many phases of life.
Even George Eliot, sure as she is in portraying her Midland middle-class
life, seems a little _depaysé_ when she strays among fine folk; and many
a skilful novelist might be mentioned who falls into convention or
caricature as soon as he gets out of his own familiar environment. But,
after Sir Walter, I doubt if there be any author who has given us such a
varied gallery of Scottish characters, high and low, divined with
Scott’s sympathy and often drawn with Jane Austen’s minute skill. Her
servants and farmers seem as natural as her baronets and ministers, all
of them indeed ordinary human beings, not the freaks and monsters of the
overcharged art that for the moment has thrown such work as hers into
the shade.
Of her tales dealing with Fife, perhaps the best, at least the longest,
is “The Primrose Path,” a beautiful idyll of this East Neuk, its scene
laid within a few miles of St. Andrews, evidently at Leuchars, where
such a noble Norman chancel is disgraced by the modern meeting-house
built on to it, and the old shell of Earl’s Hall offered itself as a fit
setting for the drama of an innocent girl’s heart, that at the end
shifts its stage to England. The hero, he that is to be made happy after
all, plays a somewhat colourless part in the background; but heroes have
license to be lay figures. The real protagonist, the imperfectly
villainous Rob Glen, seems to walk out of the canvas; and all the other
characters, from the high-bred, scholarly father to the love-sick
servant lass, are alive with humour and kindliness. As for the scenery,
it is thus that Mrs. Oliphant puts the East Neuk in its best point of
view:--
[Illustration: ON THE DOCHART, KILLIN, PERTHSHIRE]
“There does not seem much beauty to spare in the east of Fife. Low
hills, great breadths of level fields: the sea a great expanse of
blue or leaden grey, fringed with low reefs of dark rocks like the
teeth of some hungry monster, dangerous and grim without being
picturesque, without a ship to break its monotony. But yet with
those limitless breadths of sky and cloud, the wistful clearness
and golden after-glow, and all the varying blueness of the hills,
it would have been difficult to surpass the effect of the great
amphitheatre of sea and land of which this solitary grey old house
formed the centre. The hill, behind which the sun had set, is
scarcely considerable enough to have a name; but it threw up its
outline against the wonderful greenness, blueness, goldenness of
the sky with a grandeur which would not have misbecome an Alp.
Underneath its shelter, grey and sweet, lay the soft levels of
Stratheden in all their varying hues of colour, green corn, and
brown earth, and red fields of clover, and dark belts of wood.
Behind were the two paps of the Lomonds, rising green against the
clear serene: and on the other side entwining lines of hills, with
gleams of golden light breaking through the mists, clearing here
and there as far as the mysterious Grampians, far off under
Highland skies. This was one side of the circle; and the other was
the sea, a sea still blue under the faint evening skies, in which
the young moon was rising; the yellow sands of Forfarshire on one
hand, stretching downwards from the mouth of the Tay, the low brown
cliffs and green headlands bending away on the other towards
Fifeness--and the great bow of water reaching to the horizon
between. Nearer the eye, showing half against the slope of the
coast, and half against the water, rose St. Andrews on its cliff,
the fine dark tower of the college church poised over the little
city, the jagged ruins of the castle marking the outline, the
cathedral rising majestically in naked pathos; and old St. Rule,
homely and weather-beaten, oldest venerable pilgrim of all,
standing strong and steady, at watch upon the younger centuries.”
From the flattest part of Fife, let us turn to its inland Highland
side. The main North British line to Perth, after passing a dreary
coal-field, brings us suddenly beneath the bold swell of Benarty, round
which we come in view of the Lomonds with Loch Leven sparkling at their
foot. Here indeed we soon get into the small shire of Kinross; but this
may be taken as a dependency of the kingdom of Fife, its lowlands also
running on the west side into a miniature Highland region, reached by
the railway branch that from Loch Leven goes off to Stirling by the
Devon Valley and the Ochils, at the end of which Clackmannan vies with
Kinross as the Rutland of Scottish counties.
Loch Leven is celebrated for its breed of trout, and for that grey tower
half hidden by trees on an islet, which was poor Mary Stuart’s prison.
The dourest Scotsman’s heart has three soft spots, the memory of Robert
Burns, the romance of Prince Charlie, and the misfortunes that seem to
wash out the errors of that girl queen. This is dubious ground, into
which tons of paper and barrels of ink have been thrown without filling
up a quaking bog of controversy. I myself have heard a distinguished
scholar hissed off the most philosophic platform in Scotland for
throwing a doubt on Queen Mary’s innocence, so I will say no more than
that her harshest historian, if shut up with her in Loch Leven as page
or squire, might have been tempted to steal the keys and take an oar in
the boat that bore her over those dark waters to brief freedom and
safety. Had Charles Edward only had the luck to get his head cut off in
solemn state, how much more gloriously dear might now be his memory!
As Scott points out, Fife was noted for a thick crop of gentry, who
were apt to be found on the side of the Queen Marys and Prince Charlies,
whereas its sturdy common folk rather favoured Whig principles. Not far
from Kinross, the grey homespun of Scottish life is proclaimed by one of
those ugly obelisks that have so much commended themselves for the
expression of Protestant sentiment. At Gairney Bridge, on the Fife and
Kinross border, in 1733, four suspended ministers formed themselves into
the first Presbytery of the Original Secession Church, a most
fissiparous body which brought forth a brood of sects not yet altogether
swallowed up in the recent union of the Free and United Presbyterian
churches. I am bound to special interest in that foundation, for as a
forebear of mine appears riding away from the shores of Loch Leven in
Queen Mary’s train, so one of those four seceders was my
great-great-great-great (or thereabouts) grandfather, Moncrieff of
Culfargie, himself grandson of a still remembered Covenanter. His
spiritual descendants make a point of the fact that being a small laird,
he yet testified against the unpopular system of patronage, and thus is
taken to have been before his time. But _Plato amicus_, etc., or as
Sterne translates, “Dinah is my aunt, but truth is my sister,” and a
closer examination reveals among the heads of my forefather’s testimony
against the Church of Scotland a conscientious protest in favour of
executing witches and persecuting Roman Catholics, so perhaps the less
said about his views the better. A few years before, a poor old wife,
rubbing her hands in crazy delight at the blaze, had been burned as a
witch for the last time in Scotland; and the “moderate” ministers were
now content to ignore an imaginary crime which a few years later became
wiped out of the statute-book.
The ancestral shade should know how filial piety urged me, perhaps alone
in this generation, to perform the rite of reading his works, which
indeed want such “go” and “snap” as are admired by congregations who
“have lost the art of listening to two hours’ sermons.” He was truly a
painful and earnest preacher, in one volume of whose discourses I note
this mark of wide-mindedness, that it is entitled “_England’s_ Alarm,”
whereas other old Scottish divines seem rather to treat the neighbour
country as beyond hope of alarming. His brother-in-law, Clerk of
Penicuik, characterises Culfargie as “a very sober, good man, except he
should carry his very religious whims so far as to be very uneasy to
everybody about him.” It is recorded of him that he prayed from his
pulpit for the Hanoverian King in face of the Pretender’s bristling
soldiery, like that other stout Whig divine whose petition ran, “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!”
Loyalty to the same line was less frankly shown by a very different
member of our clan, Margaret Moncrieff, a name little renowned on this
side the Atlantic, while she figures in more than one American book as
the “Beautiful Spy.” Being shut up among rebels in New York, when the
besieging Engineers were commanded by her father Colonel Moncrieff, she
got leave to send him little presents, among them flower-paintings on
velvet, beneath which were traced plans of the American works. The
device being discovered, it might have gone hard with her but for Yankee
chivalry, that expelled that artful hussy unhurt, in the end to bring no
honour upon her name, if all tales of her be true.
The ancestral worthy whose memory has led me into a digression, lived
and laboured in Strathearn, to which from Kinross we pass by Glenfarg,
no Highland glen but a fine gulf of greenery with stream, road, and
railway winding side by side through its banks and knolls, that called
forth Queen Victoria’s warm admiration on her first visit to Scotland.
At the other end of this Ochil gorge we are welcomed to Perthshire by
the wooded crags of Moncrieff Hill, round which the Earn bends to the
Tay; then some dozen miles behind, rises the edge of the true Highlands,
where “to the north-west a sea of mountains rolls away to Cape Wrath in
wave after wave of gneiss, schist, quartzite, granite, and other
crystalline masses.”