Penelope's Progress: Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in ScotlandWiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
General
Penelope's Progress: Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland
Wiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
Americans -- Scotland -- Fiction; Scotland -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
The Scotch butler is not in the least like an English one. No man
could be as respectable as he looks, not even an elder of the kirk,
whom he resembles closely. He hands your plate as if it were a
contribution-box, and in his moments of ease, when he stands behind
the "maister," I am always expecting him to pronounce a benediction.
The English butler, when he wishes to avoid the appearance of
listening to the conversation, gazes with level eye into vacancy; the
Scotch butler looks distinctly heavenward, as if he were brooding on
the principle of coordinate jurisdiction with mutual subordination. It
would be impossible for me to deny the key of the wine-cellar to a
being so steeped in sanctity, but it has been done, I am told, in
certain rare and isolated cases.
As for toilets, the men dress like all other men (alas, and alas, that
we should say it, for we were continually hoping for a kilt!), though
there seems to be no survival of the finical Lord Napier's spirit.
Perhaps you remember that Lord and Lady Napier arrived at Castlemilk
in Lanarkshire with the intention of staying a week, but announced
next morning that a circumstance had occurred which rendered it
indispensable to return without delay to their seat in Selkirkshire.
This was the only explanation given, but it was afterwards discovered
that Lord Napier's valet had committed the grievous mistake of packing
up a set of neck-cloths which did not correspond _in point of date_
with the shirts they accompanied!
The ladies of the "smart set" in Edinburgh wear French fripperies and
_chiffons_, as do their sisters everywhere, but the other women of
society dress a trifle more staidly than their cousins in London,
Paris, or New York. The sobriety of taste and severity of style that
characterize Scotswomen may be due, like Susanna Crum's dubieties, to
the _haar_, to the shorter catechism, or perhaps in some degree to the
presence of three branches of the Presbyterian church among them; the
society that bears in its bosom three separate and antagonistic kinds
of Presbyterianism at the same time must have its chilly moments.
In Lord Cockburn's time the "dames of high and aristocratic breed"
must have been sufficiently awake to feminine frivolities to be both
gorgeously and extravagantly arrayed. I do not know in all literature
a more delicious and lifelike word-portrait than Lord Cockburn gives
of Mrs. Rochead, the Lady of Inverleith, in the Memorials. It is quite
worthy to hang beside a Raeburn canvas; one can scarce say more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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