"Scotland is the home of romance because it is the home of Scott, Burns,
Black, Macdonald, Stevenson, and Barrie--and of thousands of men like
that old Highlander in kilts on the tow-path, who loves what they have
written. I would wager he has a copy of Burns in his sporran, and has
quoted him half a dozen times to the grim Celt who is walking with him.
Those old boys don't read for excitement or knowledge, but because they
love their land and their people and their religion--and their great
writers simply express their emotions for them in words they can
understand. You and I come over here, with thousands of our countrymen,
to borrow their emotions."--ROBERT BRIDGES: Overheard in Arcady.
My friend the Triumphant Democrat, fiercest of radicals and kindest
of men, expresses his scorn for monarchical institutions (and his
invincible love for his native Scotland) by tenanting, summer after
summer, a famous castle among the heathery Highlands. There he proclaims
the most uncompromising Americanism in a speech that grows more broadly
Scotch with every week of his emancipation from the influence of the
clipped, commercial accent of New York, and casts contempt on feudalism
by playing the part of lord of the manor to such a perfection of
high-handed beneficence that the people of the glen are all become
his clansmen, and his gentle lady would be the patron saint of the
district--if the republican theology of Scotland could only admit saints
among the elect.
Every year he sends trophies of game to his friends across the
sea--birds that are as toothsome and wild-flavoured as if they had not
been hatched under the tyranny of the game-laws. He has a pleasant trick
of making them grateful to the imagination as well as to the palate by
packing them in heather. I'll warrant that Aaron's rod bore no bonnier
blossoms than these stiff little bushes--and none more magical.
For every time I take up a handful of them they transport me to
the Highlands, and send me tramping once more, with knapsack and
fishing-rod, over the braes and down the burns.