Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of ScotlandHolmes, Daniel Turner
History
Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland
Holmes, Daniel Turner
Scottish literature -- History and criticism
The story goes on to state that the foot-weary Campbell lived for some
years a pensioner in Port-na-croish inn, and was buried at the expense
of the grateful innkeeper. I do not know any story that comes nearer
perfection.
NOTES ON THE TROSSACHS.
The Rev. Mr. Wilson, the cultured and genial minister of the Trossachs,
has recently published a most readable little book on the district he
knows so well. Perhaps no district indeed on the world's surface is so
well known (even to those who have never seen it), as the Trossachs.
Little did Sir Walter suspect, when he penned the stirring iambics of
_The Lady of the Lake_, that he was furnishing materials to the
pedagogue which would be parsed, analysed, and dissected by myriads of
pupils in all the schools of the British Empire. We shall all carry with
us to the grave the leading passages of that romantic lay: the
stag-hunt, the duel at Coilantogle Ford, the whistle that garrisoned the
glen, and the episode of the Fiery Cross. Such lines, we may say, have
gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
Happening to pass Strathyre station in July, 1907, I was requested by a
bright-eyed little Japanese gentleman in the compartment to tell him
where we were. On being informed, he (after casting an eye of pity on
the deplorable stork that is supposed to decorate the drinking-fountain
of the station), began to declaim, in capital English, the passage that
begins--
"Benledi saw the Cross of Fire,
It glanced like lightning up Strathyre,
O'er dale and hill the summons flew,
Nor rest nor pause young Angus knew;
The tear that gathered in his eye
He left the mountain breeze to dry."
Mr. Wilson's book to which I have alluded is a collection of the
impressions written down by eminent visitors to the locality, from
Dorothy Wordsworth to Queen Victoria. Carlyle, who was in Perthshire in
1818, wrote the following note, which, though short, is finely
characteristic of him: "The Trossachs I found really grand and
impressive, Loch Katrine exquisitely so, my first taste of the beautiful
in scenery. Not so, any of us, the dirty, smoky farm-hut at the
entrance, with no provision in it but bad oatcakes and unacceptable
whisky, or the Mrs. Stewart who somewhat royally presided over it, and
dispensed these dainties, expecting to be flattered like an
independency, as well as paid like an innkeeper." The foregoing note, by
itself, is good value for the cost of Mr. Wilson's book (two shillings,
namely), and raises regrets that the author of _Sartor_ did not travel
oftener through the Land of Cakes. (The only other place in the
Highlands where I have heard Carlyle spoken of, is Kyleakin in Skye,
where he was the guest of Lady Ashburton, and where (as the natives
say), the cocks and hens had to be removed out of ear-shot for his
convenience.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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