At this time the average Englishman knew little about the Lowlands and nothing about the Highlands of Scotland. The Londoner of the age of Anne would have looked upon any traveller who had made his way through the Highlands of Scotland with much the same curiosity as his descendants, a generation or two later, regarded Bruce when he returned from Abyssinia, and would probably have received most of his statements with a politer but not less profound disbelief. It was cited, as a proof of the immense popularity of the _Spectator_, that despite all the difficulties of intercommunication it found its way into Scotland. George the First had passed away, and George the Second was reigning in his stead, before any Englishman was found foolhardy enough to explore the Scottish Highlands, and lucky enough to escape unhurt, and publish an account of his experiences, and put on record his disgust at the monstrous deformity of the Highland scenery. But the Londoner in 1714 was scarcely better informed about the Scotch Lowlands. What he could learn was not of a nature to impress him very profoundly. Scotland then, and for some time to come, was very far behind England in many things; most of all, in everything connected with agriculture. In the villages the people dwelt in rude but fairly comfortable cottages, made chiefly of straw-mixed clay, and straw-thatched. Wearing clothes that were usually home-spun, home-woven, and home-tailored; living principally, if not entirely, on the produce of his own farm, the Lowland farmer passed a life of curious independence and isolation. To plough his land, with its strange measurements of "ox-gate," "ploughgate," and "davoch," he had clumsy wooden ploughs, the very shape of which is now almost a tradition, but which were certainly at least as primitive in {88} construction as the plough Ulysses guided in his farm at Ithaca. Wheeled vehicles of any kind, carts or wheelbarrows, were rarities. A parish possessed of a couple of carts was considered well provided for. Even where carts were known, they were of little use, they were so wretchedly constructed, and the few roads that did exist were totally unfit for wheeled traffic. Roads were as rare in Scotland then as they are to-day in Peloponnesus. An enterprising Aberdeenshire gentleman, Sir Archibald Grant, of Monymusk, is deservedly distinguished for the interest he took in road-making about the time of the Hanoverian accession. Some years later statute labor did a little--a very little--towards improving the public roads, but it was not until after the rebellion of 1745, when the Government took the matter in hand, that anything really efficient was done. A number of good roads were then made, chiefly by military labor, and received in popular language the special title of the King's highways. But in the early part of the century there was little use for carts, even of the clumsiest kind. Such carriage as was necessary was