proper disgust on coming, among the sights of this demesne, upon a hollow in the rock with an inscription recording the names of a set of gentlemen who, on such and such a date, had drunk it full of punch. But when from Dunkeld he takes his way on up Strath Tay, this Aristarchus almost forgets to be critical of scenes that “call aloud for the pencil.” The poet Gray, one of the earliest appreciative visitors to the Highlands, was not less admiring, though he gives a more matter-of-fact account of a “road winding through beautiful woods, with the Tay almost always in full view to the right, being here from three to four hundred feet over. The Strath-Tay, from a mile to three miles or more wide, covered with corn and spotted with groups of people then in the midst of their harvest. On either hand a vast chain of rocky mountains, that changed their face and opened something new every hundred yards, as the way turned or the cloud passed: in short, altogether it was one of the most pleasing days I have passed these many years.” Then, before leaving Atholl, he would exclaim, “Since I saw the Alps, I have seen nothing sublime till now!” And of the Highlands in general this precursor of the next century exclaims: “A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners and clergymen that have not been among them; their imagination can be made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet ditches, shell-grottoes and Chinese rails!” Many a visitor of our day, weather permitting, gets here from coach or rail a general impression of “nothing but sunshine and fresh breezes, and bleating lambs, and clean tartans.” To go behind this fair scenery, set as if for the joy of poets and painters, we might turn up some burn into the rough background, and look through Ruskin’s eyes at nooks easily coloured by his “pathetic fallacy”; he knew the Highlands as not all filled by tourists, sportsmen, and prosperous sheep-farmers.