THE FAIR CITY
Perth, the central city of Scotland, whose name has been so
flourishingly transplanted to the antipodes, is a very ancient place.
Not to insist on fond derivation from a Roman _Bertha_, there seems to
have been a Roman station on the Tay, probably at the confluence of the
Almond; and curious antiquarians have found cause for confessing to
Pontius Pilate as perhaps born in the county, a reproach softened by the
consideration of his father being little better than a Roman exciseman.
The _alias_ of St. Johnston Perth got from its patron saint, who came to
be so scurvily handled at the Reformation. At this date it was the only
walled city of Scotland. Before this, it had been intermittently the
Stuart capital in such a sense as the residence of its Negus is for
Abyssinia; and farther back Tayside was the seat of the Alpine kingdom
that succeeded a Pictish power. Now sunk in relative importance, Perth
makes the central knot of Scottish railway travelling; so on the Eve of
St. Grouse its palatial station becomes one of the busiest spots in the
kingdom, though the main platform is a third of a mile long. To the
stay-at-home public it may perhaps be best known by an industry that
[Illustration: PERTH FROM THE SLOPES OF KINNOUL HILL]
has given rise to the proverb “See Perth and _dye_,” one which might
have darker significance in days when this low site depended for
drainage on the floods of the Tay flushing its cellars and cesspools.
But its own citizens are brought up to believe that no Naples of them
all has so much right to the title of the “Fair City.”
Legend tells how Roman soldiers gaining a prospect of the Tay from the
heights south of Perth, exclaimed on its North Inch as another Campus
Martius; but later visitors have not always shared the local admiration.
One modern Italian traveller, Signor Piovanelli, after wandering two or
three hours about the Perth streets, took away an impression of dull
melancholy; but then he began with an unsatisfactory experience at the
Refreshment Room. An else conscientious French tourist explains the
bustle of Perth station as its being the rendezvous of the inhabitants
seeking distraction from their _triste_ life. These be ignorant
calumnies. At least our northern York is a typical Scottish town, well
displaying the strata of its development. In quite recent years it has
been much transmogrified by a new thoroughfare, fittingly named Scott
Street, which, running from near the station right through the city, has
altered its centre of gravity. The old High Street and South Street,
with their “vennels” and “closes,” lead transversely from Scott Street
to the river, cut at the other end by George Street and John Street,
which had supplanted them as main lines of business. “Where are the
shops?” I was once asked by a bewildered party of country excursionists,
wandering unedified about the vicinity of the station. In those days one
had to send them across the city to the streets parallel with the
river; but now Scott Street has attracted the Post Office, the Theatre
and the Free Library, and bids fair to become the Strand or the Regent
Street of the Fair City, fringed by such a display of latter-day villas
as attests the prosperity of its business quarters.
Fragments of mediæval antiquity also must be sought for towards the
river. Off John Street stands the old Cathedral, in the practical
Scottish manner shared into three places of worship, once containing
dozens of altars, among which an impudent schoolboy threw the first
image-breaking stone that spread such a ripple of iconoclasm through the
shrines of Scotland. Close by, on the river bank, the Gaol occupies the
site of Gowrie House, where James VI. had his mysterious or mythical
escape from treason. The Parliament House, too, has vanished, its memory
preserved by the name of a “close,” the Scottish equivalent for alley.
The citizens have lately adopted a traditional “Fair Maid’s” house as
their official lion, to which indicators point the way from all over the
city. This, whatever the higher criticism may say of its claims, has
been well restored as a specimen of a solid burgher’s home in those days
when Simon the Glover was so vexed by the vagaries of his Highland
apprentice and by the roistering suitors of his daughter. Since then,
Perth has not wanted Fair Maids; but in our time the title has sometimes
had a satiric tang as implying what the French stigmatise as _une
rosse_.
Simon, as we know, lived close to the royal lodging, which, after the
destruction of the castle, was wont to be thriftily taken in the great
monastery of Blackfriars, now represented only by the names of a house
and a street. In it were enacted stirring scenes of history as well as
of fiction, its darkest tragedy the murder of James I. on a February
night of 1437. Handsome, brave, a scholar and poet, with the advantage
of an involuntary English education, in quieter times this king might
have shown himself the best of the Stuarts. He had the welfare of the
people at heart, and on his return from the captivity in which he spent
his boyhood, tried to bring some degree of order among the lawless feuds
of his barons, using against them indeed high-handed and crooked means
that were the statecraft of the age. Thus he roused fell enemies who
were able to take him unawares, though the story goes that, like
Alexander and Cæsar, he had warning from an uncredited seer. Betrayed by
false courtiers, he was retiring to bed when the monastery rang with the
tramp and cries of the fierce Highlandmen seeking his blood. While the
queen and her ladies tried to defend the door, Catherine Douglas giving
her broken arm, says the legend, as a bar, James tore up the flooring
and let himself down into a drain which he had, unluckily, blocked up a
few days before, since in it his tennis balls got lost. There he was
discovered by the conspirators, and after a desperate struggle their
leader, Sir Thomas Graham, stabbed him to death. Not a minute too soon,
for already the good burghers were roused to the rescue, and the
regicides had some ado to spur off to the Highlands, safe only for a
time, the principal criminals being taken for tortures that horrified
even their cruel contemporaries.
From the windings of the Blackfriars quarter, one emerges by what was
the North Port, upon Perth’s famous Inch, bordered by erections that a
generation ago were the modest West End of the city--Athole Place, the
Crescent, Rose Terrace, and Barossa Place. At the foot of the Inch, by
the river, stands a tall obelisk in honour of the 90th Regiment, the
“Perthshire Volunteers,” now amalgamated with the Cameronians; and near
it the customary statue of Prince Albert, one of the first inaugurated
by Queen Victoria, who then insisted on knighting the Lord Provost of
the city, a worthy grocer, much to his discontent, and, if all tales be
true, to his loss in business. Perth, as becomes the ex-capital, has a
Lord Provost, who cannot meet the Lord Provost of Glasgow without
raising sore points of precedence. Invested with special powers when
Perth was a royal residence, its magistrates were not persons to be
trifled with, as an English officer found early in the eighteenth
century. This mettlesome spark, quartered here, had fatally stabbed a
dancing-master who stood in the way of troublesome attentions to one of
his pupils. The same day, tradition has it, the slaughterer was seized,
tried, and hanged under the old law of “red-hand,” then put in force for
the last time. An ornament to the story is that the criminal’s brother
commanded a ship of war in the Firth of Forth, over which was the way to
Edinburgh, and that he long kept watch for a chance of capturing some
Perth bailie on whom to take revenge. These were the good old times.
By the bridge at the foot of the North Inch, a pretentious classical
structure, marking the era of Provost Marshall whom it commemorates,
rears its dome above a Museum of Antiquities such as becomes an ancient
city. This faces the end of Tay Street, the pleasant river-side
boulevard between the North and South Inches,
[Illustration: BEN A’AN, CORNER OF LOCH KATRINE, PERTHSHIRE]
towards the farther end of which a newer Museum contains a remarkable
natural history collection. At its corner of South Street are the County
Buildings, adorned with portraits of local worthies, and at the end of
High Street, the City Buildings with windows illustrating Perth’s
history. Perth has now two bridges and everything handsome about
it--besides the Dundee railway bridge with its footway from the South
Inch. The central bridge is only three or four years old, but here stood
one washed away in 1621, since when the citizens had long to depend on
what is now the old bridge below the North Inch.
This bridge leads over into the transpontine suburb, above which, on the
slopes of Kinnoul Hill, the rank and fashion of the city have inclined
to seek “eligible building sites,” _Scotticè_, “feuing plots.” The banks
of the river, too, on this side have long been bordered by villas and
cottages of gentility; but about “Bridge End” there is still a fragment
of the humbler suburb that has had more than one famous sojourner in our
time. Here, in a house now distinguished by a tablet, and afterwards in
Rose Terrace opposite, John Ruskin spent bits of his childhood with an
aunt, wife of the tanner whose unsavoury business had the credit of
keeping the cholera away from Bridge End. That amateur of beauty, for
his part, has nothing but good to say of Perth: he remembers with
pleasure the precipices of Kinnoul, the swirling pools of the
“Goddess-river,” even the humble “Lead,” in which other less gifted
children have found “a treasure of flowing diamond,” now covered up to
belie his vision of its defilement; and his lifelong impression was
that “Scottish sheaves are more golden than are bound in other lands,
and that no harvests elsewhere visible to human eyes are so like the
‘corn of heaven’ as those of Strath Tay and Strath-Earn.” Yet youthful
gladness turned to pain, when through his connection with Perth Ruskin
came to make that ill-matched marriage with its fairest maid, afterwards
known as Lady Millais. Their brief union he passes over in silence in
his else most communicative reminiscences; and the writer were
indiscreet indeed who should revive rumours spun round a case of
hopeless incompatibility. One misty legend, probably untrue, declares
him, for certain reasons, to have vowed never to enter the house in
which her family lived, that Bowerswell mansion, a little up the hill,
where a crystal spring had often arrested his childish attention. He did
enter the house once, to be married, according to the custom of the
bride’s Presbyterian Church: _hinc illae lacrimae_, according to the
legend.
Like that great prose-poet, the reader’s humble servant, without being
able to boast himself a native of Perth, spent part of his youth here
and has pleasant memories that tempt him, too, to be garrulous. I have
no recollection of seeing Ruskin at Perth, but I well remember Millais
in the prime of manly beauty. In the early days of his fame he lived
much with his wife’s family at Bowerswell; and several of the children
he then painted so charmingly were playmates of mine, who would come to
our Christmas parties in the picturesque costumes he had been putting on
canvas. For some reason or other, he never proposed to immortalise my
features; but I have boyish memories of him that seem to hint at the two
sides of his art. My sister sat for one of his most famous pictures, on
which, in the capacity of escort to his child model, I had the
unappreciated privilege of seeing him at work. What struck a little
Philistine like me was how the painter paid no attention to a call to
lunch, working away in such a _furor_ of industry as I could sympathise
with only if mischief were in question. Someone brought him a plate of
soup and a glass of wine, which he hastily swallowed on his knees, and
again flung himself into his absorbing task. My internal reflection was
that in thus despising his meals this man showed such sense as
Macfarlane’s geese who, as Scott records, loved their play better than
their meat. But a quite different behaviour on another occasion excited
stronger disapproval of the future P.R.A. in my schoolboy mind. When out
shooting with my father one hot day, I took him to a little moorland
farm where the people would offer us a glass of milk. Millais rather
scornfully asked if they had no cream. They brought him a tumblerful,
the whole yield for the day probably, and he tossed if off with a “Das
ist kleine Gabe!” air that set me criticising the artistic temperament.
It was a fixed notion with young Scots that all English people were
greedy: “Set roasted beef and pudding on the opposite side o’ the pit o’
Tophet, and an Englishman will make a spang at it!” exclaimed the
goodwife of Aberfoyle. Thus we give back the southron’s sneer for our
frugal poverty. Our old Adam might welcome the good things of life that
fairly came our way; but we schooled each other in a Spartan point of
honour that forbade too frank enjoyment. Millais was born very far
south; and there are those who say that he might have been a still
greater painter, had he shown less taste for the cream of life.
From Bowerswell, an artist had not far to go for scenes of beauty. The
road past the house, winding up to a Roman Catholic monastery built
since those days, leads on into the woods of Kinnoul Hill, which is to
Perth what Arthur’s Seat is to Edinburgh. No tourist should, as many do,
neglect to take the shady climb through those woods, suggesting the
scenes of a tamed German “Wald.” At the farther side one comes out on
the edge of a grand crag, the view from which has been compared to the
Rhine valley, and to carry out this similitude, a mock ruin crowns the
adjacent cliff. We have here turned our backs on the Grampians so finely
seen from the Perth slope of the hill, and are looking down upon the Tay
as it bends eastward between this spur of the Sidlaws and the wooded
outposts of the Ochils opposite, then, swollen by the Earn, opens out
into its Firth in the Carse of Gowrie, dotted with snug villages and
noble seats such as the Castle of Kinfauns among the woods at our feet,
a scene most lovely when
The sun was setting on the Tay,
The blue hills melting into grey;
The mavis and the blackbird’s lay
Were sweetly heard in Gowrie.
The Gowrie earldom, once so powerful in Perth, has disappeared from its
life; but the title is still familiar as covering one of those districts
of a Scottish county that bear enduring by-names, like the Devonshire
South Hams or the Welsh Vale of Glamorgan. To a native ear, the scene is
half suggested by the word _Carse_,
[Illustration: LOCH VENNACHAR, PERTHSHIRE]
implying a stretch of rich lowland along a river-side, whereas Strath is
the more broken and extensive valley of a river that has its upper
course in some wilder Glen or tiny Den, the _Dean_ of so many southern
villages. The course of the Tay from Perth to Dundee, below Kinnoul,
ceases to be romantic while remaining beautiful in a more sedate and
stately fashion as it flows between its receding walls of wooded
heights, underneath which the “Carles of the Carse” had once such an ill
name as Goldsmith’s rude Carinthian boor, but so many a “Lass of Gowrie”
has shown a softer heart--
She whiles did smile and whiles did greet;
The blush and tear were on her cheek.
There are various versions of this ballad, whose tune makes the Perth
local anthem; but they all tell the same old tale and often told, with
that most hackneyed of ends--
The old folks syne gave their consent;
And then unto Mass-John we went;
Who tied us to our hearts’ content,
Me and the Lass o’ Gowrie.
Many a stranger comes and goes at Perth without guessing what charming
prospects may be sought out on its environing heights. But half an
hour’s stroll through the streets must make him aware of those Inches
that prompt a hoary jest concerning the size of the Fair City. The North
and South Inches, between which it lies, properly islands, green flats
beside the Tay, are in their humble way its Hyde Park and Regent’s Park.
The South Inch, close below the station, is the less extensive, once
the grounds of a great Carthusian monastery, then site of a strong fort
built by Cromwell, now notable mainly for the avenue through which the
road from Edinburgh comes in over it, and for the wharf at its side that
forms a port for small vessels and excursion steamers plying by leave of
the tide. On the landward side, beyond the station, Perth is spreading
itself up the broomy slopes of Craigie Hill, which still offers pleasant
rambles. Beyond the farther end stands a gloomy building once well known
to evil-doers as the General Prison for Scotland; but of late years its
character has undergone some change; and I am not sure how far the old
story may still keep its point that represents an inmate set loose from
these walls, when hailed by a friendly wayfarer as “honest man,” giving
back glumly “None of your dry remarks!”
A more cheerful sight is the golf links on Moncrieff Island, above which
crosses the railway to Dundee. This neighbour has long surpassed Perth,
grown on jute and linen to be the third city of Scotland, its name
perhaps most familiar through the marmalade which used to be
manufactured, I understand, in the Channel Islands, when wicked wit
declared its maker to have a contract for sweeping out the Dundee
theatre. Northern undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge are believed to
have spread to southern breakfasts the use of this confection in the
form so well known now that its materials are so cheap. The name has a
Greek ancestry, and the thing seems to have come to us as
quince-preserve, through the Portuguese _marmelo_, in time transferred
and restricted to another fruit. Oranges, indeed, could not have been
as plentiful as blackberries in Britain, when the Euphuist Lyly
compared life without love to a meal without marmalade.
Such a twenty-miles digression from the South Inch implies how little
there is to say about it. Now let us take a dander up the larger North
Inch, Perth’s Campus Martius, at once promenade, race-course, review
ground, grazing common, washing green, golf links, cricket-field, and
area for unfenced football games in which, summer and winter, young
Scots learn betimes to earn gate-money for English clubs. Opposite the
Perth Academy appears to have been the arena where that early
professional, Hal o’ the Wynd, played up so well in the deadly match by
which the Clan Kay and the Clan Chattan enacted the less authentic
tragedy of the Kilkenny cats. This spacious playground is now edged by a
neat walk, which makes the constitutional round of sedate citizens, who
on the safe riverside have the spectacle of pleasure boating against the
difficulties of a strong stream and shallow rapids, and of the pulling
of salmon nets in the season. Here a barelegged laddie, with the rudest
tackle, has been known to hook a 30-lb. fish, holding on to the monster
for two hours till some men helped him out with his fortune. The salmon
of the Tay, reared in the Stormontfield Ponds above Perth, are famous
for size, a weight of over 70 lbs. being not unknown; and cavillers on
other streams cannot belittle its bigger fish by the sneer of “bigger
liars there!” The keeping of fish in ice, and railway communications,
have much enhanced the price, to the astonishment of a Highland laird
who in a London tavern ordered a steak for himself and a “salmon for
Donald” without guessing that his henchman’s meal must be paid for in
gold as his own in silver. The old story of masters contracting not to
feed their servants on salmon more than twice a week, is told, by Ruskin
for one, of Tayside as of other river-lands. But so masterful are the
demands of London now, that salmon may sometimes be dearer on the banks
of the Tay than in the glutted metropolitan market. The Tay has another
treasure, for now and then valuable pearls have been fished out of it by
boys who, in a dry summer, can wade across its shallows just above the
old bridge. A very different sight might be seen here when the river was
frozen across and roughened by a jam of miniature icebergs.
Half-way up the town side of the Inch, where a few trees dotted across
it mark its old limits, extended more than a century ago, stands the now
restored mansion of Balhousie, which used to be known as _Bushy_ by that
curious trick of contraction, more common in Scottish than in English
names, that drove a bewildered foreigner to complain of our pronouncing
as _Marchbanks_ what we spelt as _Cholmondeley_. But one notes how in
Scotland as in England, the tendency is to restore such words to their
full sound, as in this case. Near the station in Perth is Pomarium
Street, marking the orchard of the old Carthusian monastery, or, as some
have held, the outskirt of the Roman City. _Consule Planco_, I knew it
only as the _Pow_; but out of curiosity I lately tried this abbreviation
in vain on a postman and on a telegraph boy of the present generation.
Methven, near Perth, was always pronounced _Meffen_; Henry VIII. spells
it _Muffyn_; as Ruthven was and perhaps still is _Riven_. The station of
Milngavie is no longer
[Illustration: A CROFT NEAR DALMALLY, ARGYLLSHIRE]
proclaimed by railway porters as _Millguy_, and the place
Claverhouse--no hero indeed at spelling--spells _Ruglen_, tends to
assume its full dignity of Rutherglen, as Cirencester or Abergavenny
lose their old contractions in this generation’s mouth. Many other
examples might be given of a change, with which, I fancy, railway
porters have much to do; but one of the best authorities on such
matters, Dr. H. Bradley, puts it down to what he calls half-education,
setting up spelling as an idol. As for the altered pronunciation of
Scottish family names, that seems often to come from English blundering,
modestly adopted by their owners. Bálfour, to take a distinguished
example, was Balfoúr, till the trick of southern speech shifted back the
accent. Forbes is still vernacularly a dissyllable in the Forbes
country, as in _Marmion_, and in the old schoolboy saw about General 4
B’s, who marched his 4 C’s, etc. Dalziels and Menzies must have long
given up in despair the attempt to get their names properly pronounced
in the south as _Déél_ and _Meengus_. The family known at home as
_Jimmyson_ become now content to have made a noise in the world as
Jameson. But some such changes have been long in progress. It was
“bloody _Mackengie_” whom audacious boys dared to come out of his grave
in Greyfriars’ Churchyard; and if we go far enough back we find the name
of this persecutor written Mackennich. In the good old times every
gentleman had his own spelling, as what for no? There is a deed, and not
a very ancient one, drawn up by certain forebears of mine, in which,
among them, they spell their name five different ways. In general, it
may be remembered, the _z_ that makes such a stumbling-block to
strangers in so many Scottish names, is to be taken as a _y_. When we
have such real enigmas as Colquhoun and Kirkcudbright to boggle over,
the wonder is that Milton should make any ado at Gordon or “Galasp,” by
which he probably meant Gillespie.
Nearly opposite Balhousie, which has suggested this digression, across
the Tay, peeps out the house of Springlands, which reminds me how Perth
has been the cradle of a sect. The Sandemans of Springlands in my youth
exhibited some marked religious leanings, but none of them, I think,
followed the doctrine of their ancestor. The sect in question was
founded in the days of early methodism by John Glass, a Scottish
clergyman; but his son-in-law, Robert Sandeman, proved so much the Paul
of the new faith by preaching it as far as America, that there, as in
England, the body is known as Sandemanians, while in Scotland they still
sometimes bear the original name Glassites. Their most famous member was
Michael Faraday, who preached in the London meeting-house. Its doctrine
had, like Plymouth Brethrenism, a strange attraction for old Indian
officers, who, cut off from home influences, repelled by surrounding
heathenism, and their brains perhaps a little addled by the sun, have
often been led to read odd meanings into revelations and prophecies,
studied late in life. There used to be a detachment of retired veterans
encamped about Perth as headquarters of their Bethel, whose wives and
children, in some cases, attended the Episcopal Chapel. A peculiarity of
their belief was an absolute horror of being present at any alien
worship, even family prayers, as I could show from some striking
instances. This must have borne hard on soldier converts, who, in the
army, are allowed a choice of only three forms of worship. “No fancy
religions in the service,” growled the sergeant to a recruit who
professed himself a Seventh Day Baptist: “fall in with the Roman
Catholics!” Another note of the Sandemanians was an unwillingness to
communicate their views, what even seemed a resentfulness of inquiry by
outsiders. Disraeli excused a similar trait in the Jews by the dry
remark, “The House of Lords does not seek converts.” I once in the
innocent confidence of youth asked a Glassite leader to enlighten me as
to their faith, and was snubbed with a short “The doors are open.” But I
never heard of any stranger trusting himself within the doors of that
meeting-house. Report gave out a love-feast as a main function, from
which the sect got “kailites” as a nickname. The kiss of peace, it was
understood, went round; and ribald jesters represented the presiding
official as obliged to exhort, “Dinna pass over the auld wife!” This
much one can truly say of the congregation, that they were kind and
helpful to each other, a Glassite in distress being unknown in the Fair
City, where they had adherents in all classes. As for their spiritual
exclusiveness, against that reproach may be set the old story of the
“burgher” lass who, having once attended an “anti-burgher” service with
her lad, was rebuked by her own kirk-session for the sin of “promiscuous
hearing.”
Above the Inch comes the less trim space called the “Whins,” where lucky
caddies glean lost golf balls in its patches of scrub and in pools
formed by the highest flowing of the tide from the Firth. With this ends
the public pleasure-ground; but the walk may be prolonged along the
elevated bank of the river, above the sward that makes the town
bathing-place, and brown pools that Ruskin might have found perilous as
well as picturesque, but as he speaks of himself as keeping company with
his girl cousin, not to speak of the fear of his careful mother, we may
suppose that he made no rash excursions into the water. One deep swirl
within a miniature promontory is aptly known as the “Pen and Ink”; then
higher up a shallow creek encloses the “Woody Island,” no island to
bare-legged laddies who here play Robinson Crusoe.
The opposite bank shows a lordly park with timber that should bring a
blush to the cheek of Dr. Johnson’s ghost, concealing the castellated
Scone Palace, seat of its Hereditary Keeper, Lord Mansfield, who has
another enviable home beside Hampstead Heath. Little remains of the old
royal Castle and Abbey of Scone; the Stone of Destiny, that ancient
palladium, fabled pillow of Jacob’s vision of the angels, on which the
Scottish kings were crowned, has been in Westminster Abbey since Edward
I.’s invasion. The modern mansion contains some relics of Queen Mary and
her son, but its owners do not encourage visitors. An eminence near at
hand is known by the curious name of the Boot Hill, tradition making it
formed by the earth which nobles after a coronation emptied out of their
boots, so stuffed that each proud baron might feel the satisfaction of
standing on his own ground!
Half-a-dozen miles farther up the river, on this side, one is free to
seek the top of Dunsinnan Hill for what is believed to have been the
site of Macbeth’s Castle, and for a fine prospect of the Grampians with
Birnam Wood in the foreground. Shakespeare, and the legend he
followed,
[Illustration: WET HARVEST TIME NEAR DALMALLY, ARGYLLSHIRE]
make no account of the fact that a considerable river guarded Dunsinnan
from hostile advance of its distant neighbour. Yet a parish minister of
these parts has convinced himself that the author of _Macbeth_ must have
known the neighbourhood. One conjecture is that he visited Perth with a
far-strolling troop of actors. “You will say next that Shakespeare was
Scotch!” exclaimed a scornful southron to a Scot who seemed too
patriotic; and the cautious answer was, “Weel, his abeelity would
warrant the supposeetion.” As for Macbeth and his good lady, it is time
that some serious attempt were made to whitewash their characters, as
Renan has done for Jezebel, and Froude for Henry VIII. No doubt these
two worthies represented the good old Scottish party, strong on
Disruption principles and sternly set against the Anglican influences
introduced through Malcolm Canmore, in favour of whose family the
southern poet shows a natural bias. Did we know the whole truth, that
gracious Duncan may have had a scheme to serve the Macbeths as the
Macdonalds of Glencoe were served by their guests. The one thing clear
in early Scottish history is that the dagger played a greater part than
the ballot box, and that scandals in high life might sometimes be
obscured by an eloquent advocate on one side or other. Sir Walter does
give some hints for a brief in Macbeth’s case, though in his _Tales of a
Grandfather_ he sets the orthodox legend strutting with its “cocked hat
and stick.” Macbeth, as he says, probably met Duncan in fair fight near
Elgin; and the scene of his own discomfiture appears to have been the
Mar country rather than the Tay valley.
But we are still strolling on the right bank of the Tay, to be followed
for a mile or two up to the mouth of the Almond, a pretty walk, which
few strangers find out for themselves. There is in Scotland a want of
the field paths which Hawthorne so much admired in England, “wandering
from stile to stile, along hedges and across broad fields, and through
wooded parks leading you to little hamlets of thatched cottages,
ancient, solitary farmhouses, picturesque old mills, streamlets, pools,
and all those quiet, secret, unexpected, yet strangely-familiar features
of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in his idylls and eclogues.”
Every inch of tillable land is in the north more economically dealt
with; the farmer, struggling against a harsher climate, cannot afford to
leave shady hedges and winding paths; his fields are fenced by
uncompromising stone walls against a looser law of trespass. Embowered
lanes, too, “for whispering lovers made,” are rarer in this land of
practical farming. Here it is rather on wild “banks and braes” of
streams, unless where their waters can be coined into silver as
salmon-fishings, that lovers and poets may ramble at will, shut out from
the work-a-day world by thickets of hawthorn, brier, woodbine, and other
“weeds of glorious feature”:--
The Muse, nae poet ever fand her
Till by himsel’ he learned to wander
Adown some trotting burn’s meander,
An’ no think lang.
If any ill-advised stranger find the streets of the Fair City dull, as
would hardly be his lot on market-day, let him turn to Kinnoul Hill for
a noble scene, and to the Tay banks for a characteristic one of broad
fields and stately woods, backed by the ridge of the Grampians a dozen
miles away. For another sample of Scottish aspects he might take the
Edinburgh road across the South Inch, and over by Moncrieff Hill to the
Bridge of Earn, where he comes into the lower flats of Strathearn, on
which a tamed Highland stream winds sinuously to the Tay between its
craggy rim and the rounded ridge of the Ochils. The village has a
well-built air, due to the neighbourhood of Pitkaithly spa, that in
Scott’s day was a local St. Ronan’s, whose patrons lodged at the Bridge
of Earn, or even walked out from Perth, to take the waters, which before
breakfast, on the top of this exercise, must have had a notable effect
in certain cases. The original Spa in Belgium owed much of its credit to
the fact of its springs being a mile or two out of the town. Our
forefathers’ ignorance of microbes seems to have been tempered by active
habits: it was more than a dozen miles Piscator and his friends had to
trudge from Tottenham before reaching their morning draught at
Hoddesdon. As for Pitkaithly, there is at present an attempt to
resuscitate the use of its waters, still dispensed near Kilgraston, a
house founded by a Jamaica planter, who had two such sons as General Sir
Hope Grant and Sir Francis Grant, P.R.A.
This part of Strathearn is a flat lowland plain, on which, once in a
way, I have seen a pack of foxhounds, whereas, in the ruggeder mass of
the county, as English squires must be scandalised to learn--
Though space and law the stag we lend,
Ere hound we slip or bow we bend,
Whoever recked where, how, and when,
The treacherous fox is trapped or slain.
Where foxes are sometimes like wolves for size and destructiveness, a
Highland fox-hunter ranks with a rat-catcher. But Fife, at hand over the
Ochils, is a civilised region in which Reynard claims his due
observance. Near its border, still in Perthshire, is the sadly-decayed
town of Abernethy, whose Round Tower makes the only monument of the days
when it was a Pictish capital. Another seat of Pictish princes, not far
away, was at Forteviot, near the Kinnoul Earls’ Dupplin Castle, where
Edward Balliol defeated the Regent Mar in a hot fight, before marching
on to Perth to be crowned for a time, when Scotland, like Brentford, had
two kings. If only for their natural amenities, these spots might well
be visited; yet to tourists they are unknown unless as way-stations
respectively on the rival North British and Caledonian railways from
Edinburgh to Perth. But to me each of their now obscure names is dearly
familiar, since the days when they were landmarks on my way back from
school, from which in those days one came back more gladly; and
_Auchterarder_, FORTEVIOT, FORGANDENNY, made a _crescendo_ of joyful
sounds, each hailing a stage nearer home.