After all Carlyle was not wholly a typical Scotsman. His stock seems to have come from Cumberland, and his birthplace, not far from the Border, is one of Scotland’s less bonnie _airts_. He was very Lowlandish, indeed, in some features: in his perfervidness, in his intolerance, in the coarseness of mental grain that chuckles over abusive nicknames, and in volcanic stirrings of sympathy that enabled him to appreciate Burns. He was above all himself, _Der Einzige_, as he proclaimed others, a most portentous and vigorous force in literature, that has been transmuted into different modes of intellectual motion. Whatever rank this coruscating star may eventually take in the firmament of fame, its spectrum is not that of Scotland. At the best, he represents but one side of his country’s nature, as appears in his grudging and belittling view of Scott, who more fully unites the chequered elements of the national character. In a generation much blinded by literary superstitions and idolatries, Scotsmen should faithfully testify to Scott as the truest genius of their country. With him for guide, we entered his beloved Borderland; he has seldom been far from us as we passed through its scenes and monuments, and still on the rhinns of Galloway and in the dales of Dumfries, his shade attends us; nor does it wholly vanish as we cross the Solway viaduct into “Happy England,” pronounced by a recent American writer, after his lights, “a section more beautiful perhaps to the eye,” forsooth, than Bonnie Scotland, but “certainly not one which appeals more forcibly to the imagination.” Burns did something, Carlyle almost nothing, towards fusing angry memories of the past into one national sentiment. To the spells of that Wizard of the North we chiefly owe it that now “Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch!” as a romancer of our own time exclaims, who elsewhere recalls Stewart of Garth’s story how, when a Highland regiment landed at Portpatrick after long exile, the kilted veterans flung themselves down to kiss the ground of Galloway, so far from their native heath. THE END _Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_. * * * * * Typographical error corrected by the etext transcriber: frailities=> frailties {pg 250} End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Bonnie Scotland, by A.R. Hope Moncrieff