Macaulay, in his slap-dash style, has explained the want of taste for the picturesque in a bailie or such like of more romantic times. “He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the abruptness of a precipice from which he is in imminent danger of falling two thousand feet perpendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent which suddenly whirls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life; by the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just stripped and mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose next meal may probably be on his own eyes.” But Dr. Hume Brown (_Early Travellers in Scotland_) shows how there were bold and not unappreciative tourists in the Highlands before the era of return tickets. Whatever the guide-books say, it is certainly not the case that the Trossachs were discovered by Scott. In Dr. T. Garnett’s _Tour through the Highlands_, published 1800, he relates a visit [Illustration: THE RIVER TEITH, WITH LOCHS ACHRAY AND VENNACHAR, PERTHSHIRE] to the “Drosacks,” and speaks of the place as sought out by foreigners. Several years before the publication of the _Lady of the Lake_, Wordsworth, with Coleridge and his sister, on a Scottish tour, turned aside to this beauty-spot, which they duly admired in spite of the rain; and there they met a drawing-master from Edinburgh on the same picturesque-hunting errand. Dorothy Wordsworth’s _Journal_ tells us how the cottars were amused to hear of their secluded home being known in England; how two huts had been erected by Lady Perth for the accommodation of visitors; and how a dozen years before the minister of Callander had published an account of the Trossachs as a scene “that beggars all description.” The bad weather proved too much for Coleridge, who turned back from the tour here; and his muse seems not to have been inspired by this land of the mountain which he found also a land of the flood. Wordsworth, however, made several attempts to annex Scotland to his native domain. Truth to tell, the lake poet’s harp sounds sometimes out of tune across the Border, as witness his woeful travesty of the “Helen of Kirkconnel” story, and the philosophic considerations which he attributes to Rob Roy over what may have been that bold outlaw’s grave. There is one verse in his “Highland Reaper” which seems a perfect epitome of the future Laureate’s qualities, who, if he “uttered nothing base,” could come too near being commonplace. “_Will no one tell me what she sings?_” is surely in the flat tone which one irreverent critic describes as a “bleat.” “_Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow_”--is not this the false gallop of eighteenth-century verse, out of which Wordsworth vainly believed that he had broken his Pegasus? But in such pinchbeck setting, what a pearl of price-- For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago!