(glazed, however) for a window, and a low thatch, the fire very commonly on the floor, and the peat reek escaping through an opening in the roof. There was no spirit of enterprise to improve the ground about the habitations, or to make communication easier when the public road (itself due to English military energy) did not happen to be close at hand. In a word, there was nothing of that fruitful discontent which leads the advancing races to incessant improvements. Without the neighbourhood of the Lowland Scotch and the visits of the English, the Highlanders would certainly have remained in a very early stage of civilisation. That early stage has its qualities and merits. The Highlanders have good manners. Poor or rich, they are naturally gentlemen, and they show a fine endurance of hardship which, from the stoic and heroic side, is evidently superior to the love of luxury that develops itself so wonderfully in the South. [Sidenote: Absence of the Fine Arts in the Highlands.] [Sidenote: Poverty of Highland Literature.] The Highlanders have, of themselves, no fine arts. Their degree of civilisation has developed no ecclesiastical architecture; they got no further than the building of a few rude small castles. They have not any graphic arts, and in those industrial products which are akin to art they have never got beyond the design of a brooch or the arrangement of the crossing stripes in a plaid. Their vernacular literature consists of little more than a few poems, said to be touching and pathetic in their simplicity. The one literary success in connection with the Highlands has been Macpherson’s _Ossian_. [Sidenote: The Lowlanders.] [Sidenote: Repugnance to Polish.] [Sidenote: Sabbatarianism.] Now, on all these points, let us compare the Lowlanders. We see at once that the difference of race is accompanied by a difference of aptitudes and of traditions. Good manners are not inbred in them, though they are acquired in the superior classes as a part of culture. In the lower classes there is a sluggish indisposition to be polite, a sort of repugnance to polish of manner as if it were an unmanly dandyism, a feeling that answers to a plain man’s dislike to jewellery and fine clothes. Even in religion the difference is discernible. It is true that the Highlanders are not Roman Catholics like the Irish, but they have little of the Protestant Pharisaism which is common in the Lowlands. If a map of Scotland were shaded in proportion to the malignity of Sabbatarianism, the darkest places would not be far north of the Clyde, nor west of the Kyles of Bute. [Sidenote: Industrial Triumphs of the Lowlanders.] [Sidenote: Their Intellectual Distinction.] [Sidenote: Fine Arts at Edinburgh.] [Sidenote: French Ideas about Scotland.]