comfortably enough, but the Lowlanders had no protection whatever.
Rob Roy, observing this, directed one of his followers to afford
the old man a portion of his plaid; “for the callant (boy), he
may,” said the freebooter, “keep himself warm by walking about and
watching the cattle.” My informant heard this sentence with no
small distress; and as the frost wind grew more and more cutting,
it seemed to freeze the very blood in his young veins. He had been
exposed to weather all his life, he said, but never could forget
the cold of that night; in so much that, in the bitterness of his
heart, he cursed the bright moon for giving no heat with so much
light. At length the sense of cold and weariness became so
intolerable that he resolved to desert his watch to seek some
repose and shelter. With that purpose he couched himself down
behind one of the most bulky of the Highlanders, who acted as
Lieutenant to the party. Not satisfied with having secured the
shelter of the man’s large person, he coveted a share of his plaid,
and by imperceptible degrees drew a corner of it round him. He was
now comparatively in paradise, and slept sound till daybreak, when
he awoke and was terribly afraid on observing that his nocturnal
operations had altogether uncovered the dhuiniewassell’s neck and
shoulders, which, lacking the plaid which should have protected
them, were covered with _cranreuch_ (_i.e._ hoar frost). The lad
rose in great dread of a beating, at least, when it should be found
how luxuriously he had been accommodated at the expense of a
principal person of the party. Good Mr. Lieutenant, however, got up
and shook himself, rubbing off the hoar frost with his plaid, and
muttering something of a _cauld neight_.
After Culloden, for a time, Menteith farmers might sit in a worse plight
than before. While the blackmail insurance was no longer to be depended
on, a banditti of broken rebels ensconced themselves above the lakeland
passes in fastnesses like the crags of Ben Venue, from which they
sallied forth on depredations now unchecked by any spirit of clan
loyalty, or neighbourly alliances. Their reign of robbery was overthrown
mainly through the exertions of Mr. Nicol Graham of Gartmore, whose
descendant in our time has not always been hot on the side of law and
order, while a forbear of theirs had shown the family spirit in refusing
to pay tribute to Rob Roy. This gentleman stirred up the Government to
military battues, which, guided by his experience and knowledge of the
country, had more success than Captain Thornton’s expedition, till the
robbers were rooted out of their lairs, scattered, banished, or
executed. Mr. Graham accumulated in his library a curious collection of
documents which he called “thief-papers,” illustrating the condition of
the border country in this troubled time. These papers are understood to
have been put into the hands of the romancer who turned them to such
famous use, hence, for instance, being taken Mr. Nicol Jarvie’s account
of the population and resources of the clans behind the Highland line;
and the “change-houses,” like that of Lucky Macalpine at Aberfoyle, are
here pointed out as stills of demoralisation.
Even after peace had been won for the villages and farms of the strath,
the law was long a little shy of trusting itself among the mountains.
Lockhart tells us that Scott’s first acquaintance with the braes of
Balquhidder was as a writer’s apprentice, when he accompanied a process
server who had to be escorted to the scene of his duty by a party of
soldiers, where now a policeman is a rare sight, and few crimes are
known to justice but drunkenness with its _sequelae_. Till a good deal
later there were parts on the Welsh borders in much the same state of
home rule. An old gentleman not long deceased told me how in the
Llanthony Valley, where the late Father Ignatius secluded himself,
disputes were settled by a sort of rough lynch law; and in the next
valley, within living memory, the only murder known had been that of a
bailiff who attempted to serve a writ. In some parts of the United
States, if all tales be true, life and property are less safe to-day
than they were a century ago in the Highlands--where officers of the law
were the last travellers to feel how they carried their lives in their
hands.
Scott compares the mountain clans to Afghan tribes, of whom he seems to
have been reading some account. A more familiar resemblance is with the
Red Indians of the backwoods, so well known to us through Catholic and
Puritan adventurers on their borders. There was the same fierce pride,
tempered by traits of generosity and scruples of honour; the same
hardihood, along with impatience of regular work; in some cases the same
veneer of Christian ritual; always the same restless turbulence of young
warriors eager to prove their manhood, held more or less in check by the
cooler heads of chiefs and counsellors. The moving narratives of the
frontier settlers of New York and Pennsylvania give us some idea of what
perils Menteith farmers had long to be familiar with, though indeed the
wild Highlandmen seldom showed such cruel temper as was religiously
cultivated in the Red Indian.
There appears this other difference in the Highlands and the backwoods
border feuds, that in the former, the jarring elements were brought into
much closer relations, so that love played its part as well as hatred.
The inveterate enemies of the wide New World would be separated from
each other by great stretches of forest and prairie, through which war
parties travelled for days and weeks, by stealthy paths and silent
waterways, to fall at advantage upon their unguarded foe. The pale-face
settlers could not feel themselves safe from vengeful redskins whose
camp-fires were a hundred miles away. It is said that the Indian summer,
that serene truce of nature, got its name through the red warriors
taking then a last chance of a raid in force upon the frontier, before
the snows held them back; yet even in the depth of winter bands of human
wolves might come prowling about the lonely blockhouses, to drag away
unwary or unlucky victims to a carnival of torture among their distant
wigwams. No band of cultivators would care to fix themselves within a
dozen miles of a tribe that was being slowly pushed out of its
hunting-grounds. But in Menteith and behind its mountain walls,
hereditary enemies were so closely packed together that it is hard to
understand how they got on without mutual extermination.
We hear, indeed, of occasional raids into this district from so far off
as Appin and Lochaber. But also the tale quoted above from Scott shows
how near to their prey were caterans, who, in the _Lady of the Lake’s_
time, could push their devastations as far as the Devon valley of the
Ochils. We have seen how the Macgregors and the Maclarens
ill-neighboured each other in Balquhidder, the latter clan gradually
ousted and taking refuge among the Stewarts, who filled the adjacent
wilds of Glenfinlas. To the south lay the Buchanans, the Colquhouns, and
the “wild Macfarlanes.” To the north were the Macnabs and advanced
parties of Murrays. The name of the Dreadnought Hotel at Callander tells
us how it was first built by the Laird of Macnab, whose concerns
straggled so far from their root on Loch Tay. And all those smaller
bodies were pushed upon from opposite sides by the Grahams and the
Campbells, powerful enemies whom the older inhabitants would sometimes
be able to play off against each other, while sometimes the medley of
quarrel seems to have tended to such an awkward shape as that
triangular duel in _Midshipman Easy_.
What the Campbells were in Argyll and Breadalbane, the Grahams were in
Menteith, intruders and agents of civilisation, who had to hang their
heads for long through a series of miscalculations and misfortunes. The
house of Menteith was an unlucky one ever since one of its sons betrayed
Wallace; nor did it prosper by the earldom of Strathearn, through which
it claimed to inherit the purest strain of royal blood. It sank into
misery and extinction, having passed from Menteiths and Stewarts to the
Grahams, on whom also a curse seemed to come through the murder of James
I. Other branches of this family gained futile distinction, in the
meteoric career of Montrose and the dark fame of Claverhouse, who to an
uncovenanting generation looks now not so black as he was once painted.
The mysterious murder of Lord Menteith’s heir by an intimate friend has
been told in _The Legend of Montrose_. In the next century the empty
title was claimed by one who literally died a beggar on the roadside.
The _jeune premier_, though not the hero, in the _Lady of the Lake_, was
a Graham who appears no further unfortunate than by having a double
allowance of powerful rivals, to hinder his course of true love for the
daughter of a once greater house that then lay under heavy clouds of
royal disfavour. This heroine, we remember, was Ellen Douglas,
conveniently exiled to a nook rather out of the way of Douglas power and
pride. Did it ever occur to a careless reader to ask why here she had
been brought up by an aunt, taking the place of a mother? Looking away
from the Grahams a moment, I should like to quote a piece of commentary
which my friend Mr. H. R. Allport believes himself to have made for the
first time, in a privately-printed volume.
The heroines of the Waverley Novels, with a single prominent
exception, are all of them motherless. They had mothers presumably,
but their mothers filled untimely graves. The one prominent
exception, of course, is Lucy Ashton, whose mother, Lady Ashton, is
an important personage in the story. In _Waverley_ there are two
heroines, Flora M’Ivor and Rose Bradwardine, who are both
motherless. In _Guy Mannering_ there are also two heroines, Julia
Mannering and Lucy Bertram, who are both motherless. In _Rob Roy_
the heroine is Die Vernon, who is motherless. In _Old Mortality_
the heroine is Edith Bellenden, who is motherless. In _The Heart of
Midlothian_ the heroine is Jeanie Deans, who is motherless. In
_Ivanhoe_ there are again two heroines, Rebecca and Rowena, who are
both motherless. In _Kenilworth_ the heroine is Amy Robsart, who is
motherless. In _The Pirate_ the heroines are Minna and Brenda
Troil, who are motherless. In _The Fortunes of Nigel_ the heroine
is Margaret Ramsay, who is motherless. In _Quentin Durward_ the
heroine is Isabelle, Countess of Croye, who is motherless. In
_Woodstock_ the heroine is Alice Lee, who is motherless. In _The
Fair Maid of Perth_ the heroine is Catherine Glover, who is
motherless. I need not go through the entire list. I believe that
Lucy Ashton is the only exception of note.
It would be interesting to know Scott’s reason for what can hardly
be the result of accident. He may possibly have thought that a girl
deprived of a mother’s care and control was likely to grow up a
more unconventional, and therefore a more picturesque, personage
than one more happily circumstanced. But this is a mere guess.
I can think of another guess. It is known how Scott was disappointed in
early love, and how he married a lady of French extraction, who makes a
very shadowy appearance in biographies of him. Now that his children’s
children are dead, there can be no harm in hinting that his wife was
accused of a weakness which went to diminish the respect if not the
affection of her family. An old friend of my father, still alive, heard
the matter put very plainly by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, who told him
how he himself had given up dining with the Scotts, because of the state
in which he frequently found the lady of the house. That bit of
hushed-up scandal would explain why the husband shrank from describing a
mother’s influence, as touching a sore point in his own family life. His
letters and diaries also dwell far more upon his children than upon
their mother.
From this whispered aside, let us turn back to the Grahams of Menteith.
At last the race began to flourish steadily in the new dukedom seated on
Loch Lomond, forgetting its feuds with Argyll and overcoming its
guerrilla neighbours, Macgregors and such-like. The Grahams may now look
on themselves as a great clan that has absorbed the sentiment of the
heather and the forest among which they made clearings. But they surely
came from the south, one sept of them seen by Scott at home in the
Debatable Land on the English border. The very name has a hint of darkly
dubious origin. One ancient warrior of the race is said to have broken
through the Roman wall, which, in memory of that exploit, became known
as Graham’s Dyke. But the name Graham’s Dyke turns up in other distant
parts of Britain--as, for instance, on Harrow Weald by the house of that
dealer in modern “magic and spells,” Mr. W. S. Gilbert, where it is
more plausibly interpreted as Grim’s Dyke, a name given in awe by rude
Saxons to what seemed the work of supernatural hands, such as near
Brighton, with a flourish of legend, has been bluntly christened the
Devil’s Dyke. The Grahams had best look out for another forefather.
_Quelle généalogie!_ as a Czar of Russia exclaimed in amazement, when he
had interpreted to him at the Mansion House that an unknown uniform
denoted _un frère aîné de la Trinité_.
We know how more than one “Dyke” was run across the country as a barrier
against naked hosts of the North. But this part of the Highland line had
a natural boundary in the Forth, of which the saying was that it
“bridled the wild Highlandman.” Swimming is an accomplishment given by
Scott to Malcolm Graeme and other of his heroes; but it was not common
among Highlanders of the last generation; and I am doubtful how far a
poet had authority for the statement--
We _swam_ ower to fause English ground
And danced ourselves dry to the pibroch’s sound.
The young Forth, known in its cradle as the _Avon Dhu_, soon gathers
strength as it drains the flats of Flanders Moss, which is taken to be
the dregs of a forest cut down by Roman soldiery; and its only safe
passage, even that impracticable in spate weather, was by the Fords of
Frew, where Rob Roy made his bold escape from Montrose’s horsemen. This
point proved so important as to be guarded by a fortalice, when there
was no wale of bridges on the Highland line. Scott confesses to an
anachronism in accommodating Aberfoyle with a bridge in Rob Roy’s day.
The first bridge was at Stirling, one of great antiquity, as shown by
the part it played in Wallace’s victory over the English knights
heedlessly divided on the crossing. A public-spirited tradesman of
Stirling, Robert Spittall, “Tailor to King James IV.” built a bridge
over the Teith at Doune, as an inscription upon it records. Once across
this, an invading army from the North had still to pass the Forth, its
bridge guarded by Stirling Castle.
The value of this double line of defence for the Lowlands was well shown
in 1715. When Mar lay so long idle at Perth with the largest Jacobite
army ever mustered could he have held it together, his inactivity was
caused not only by want of skill and decision, but by the fact of the
Forth fords being swollen by a wet winter, while Argyll had broken down
the Teith Bridge at Doune. Mar found it easier to ship a detachment
across the Firth of Forth than to get over the river near its source, an
enterprise in which sly Rob Roy seems to have been in vain expected to
guide him. When he did advance on Stirling it was by Allan Water, above
which he met Argyll on Sheriffmuir, for that strange battle in which
both sides were half-losers, half-winners.
Argyll’s moral victory appears to have been partly due to the Ochil
boglands being frozen so as to bear the heavy regular dragoons. A little
later and the frost would have been hard enough to make the unbridged
rivers passable, as the Highland army could retreat from Perth across
the ice-bound Tay. When Charles Edward advanced upon the Lowlands it was
in a dry September that let him easily over the Forth, to march on in
bravado within cannon-shot of Stirling Castle. To hinder his retreat he
found Stirling Bridge broken down, which was repaired in haste for
Cumberland’s march to the north.
Sheriffmuir, if we may trust historians like Blind Harry, was arena of
an older and a bloodier battle, when Wallace is said to have
exterminated an English army ten thousand strong; and scattered standing
stones here are taken by the country-folk as memorials of that victory.
The little town of Dunblane, with its restored Cathedral and its
monuments of nobility, was well known to armies marching north and south
on the road up Strathallan into Strathearn. Prince Charlie and Butcher
Cumberland were lodged here in turn; and local legend makes the latter
narrowly escape an end worse than that of Pyrrhus. A servant lass whose
heart had been won by the Prince’s graciousness when she cleaned his
boots, undertook to souse the Duke with boiling oil thrown from a window
as he rode out of Dunblane; but the scalding douche lighted on his
horse’s haunch, so that he got off with being flung into the mud.
Doune Castle guarded another road into the Highlands by way of
Callander. In the ’45, as Captain Waverley found, it was held by the
Jacobites to secure their passage of the Teith, and seems to have been
the only spot in which they heard the mouse squeak rather than the lark
sing. For a time it had for commander that “Black Knee” nephew of Rob
Roy, who earned golden opinions in the neighbourhood by the considerate
way in which he exercised his authority, not allowing dubious
auxiliaries like Donald Bean Lean to have their will of the poor
country-folk’s cattle and chickens. Even then it was in no case to
stand a hot siege; and Scott found it “a noble ruin, dear to my
recollections from associations which have been long and painfully
broken.” It once made a stronghold for royal blood, the Dukes of Albany
and the “bonnie Earls of Moray,” none of them so well remembered as the
boy who came to dream among their memorials, and to retrace on pony-back
the ways of audacious caterans and adventurous knights.
Well-known was all this country to young Walter Scott, when he spent
long holidays at Cambusmore and other friendly mansions hereabout, his
hosts as little thinking as himself how this idle callant was one day to
increase the value of property in Menteith. Indeed, it is extraordinary
how much at home he shows himself in most parts of Perthshire, so far
from his native eyry. Through that heart of Scotland as we wandered
together, the tales by which I have tried to cheer the reader’s way are
mostly to be found transfused into his romances or tacked on them as
illustrations in his lively introductions and notes. If I have forborne
to repeat hackneyed epithets about the scenery of this region, it is
because I take for granted that its features are familiar in Scott’s
verse, which, let certain critics shut their ears as they will, still
plays to general admiration the drum and trumpet part in the orchestra
of British poets, not without interludes of sweeter strain that will be
remembered long after more elaborate compositions have been whistled
down the winds of fame.
We all know where to look for descriptions of Perthshire scenery; and I
am the less bound to labour on word-painting, since in my case it may be
hoped, after the words of another poet, that “the pictures for the page
atone.” The artist here has done his part for both of us. The author
modestly presents himself, rather, as a gossiping companion to the
guide-book, which, in its up-to-date form, dwells more on details of
useful information, and has less room for giving strangers some notion
what life was in this region before its flush of romance had died away
like an Alpine glow.
But soon now we are out of Perthshire, crossing the Forth into Stirling,
whose citadel, “the bulwark of the North,” has been our beacon as we
gossiped our way down the green Menteith Mesopotamia. The “Sons of the
Rock” may receive me with a frown, declaring their county and not mine
to be the true heart of Scotland, which I admit to have been for a time
its central ganglion, whence the nerves of civilisation thrilled out
through Highlands and Lowlands. We can both agree that the fat Lothians
and the smoky Clyde were mere excrescences, which made a narrow escape
of becoming no better than English borderlands. Stirling cannot at least
complain that I failed to do it due honour in _Bonnie Scotland_. Now
once more let us mount its castled rock to look back on such a prospect
of Perthshire that nowhere could one have a nobler standpoint for
bidding--
Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow!
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below!
Farewell to the forest and wild-hanging woods!
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods!
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
[Illustration: MAP ACCOMPANYING ‘THE HEART OF SCOTLAND,’ BY SUTTON
PALMER AND A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF. (A. AND C. BLACK, LONDON.)]
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