It may be more by good luck than good guidance that the poet does not try for a stroke of local colour in letting his abstinent hero sit down to a supper of “Atholl Brose.” The above hints of character, which will be recognised by patient Excursionists, go to show how Daddy Wordsworth, though he had the advantage of a visit to the Atholl Highlands, made the common English mistake about their inhabitants. John Bull will not understand how Scotland is inhabited by two different stocks, whose differences were much less blended in that Wanderer’s youth. It could then be said that the Sabbath had not yet got above the Pass of Killiecrankie; and it will be remembered how the Captain of Knockdunder proposed to deal with any “sincere professor” who scrupled to join in a unanimous call to whatever pastor pleased the duke and his deputy. Even in the poet’s day nobody seems to have rebuked him when he drove his poor beast along Highland roads on Sunday. An Atholl man’s clearest memory of Covenanters would be the check given to the victors of Killiecrankie when Cleland’s Cameronians held Dunkeld against those ex-oppressors of “godly” Whigs. The most “moderate” Presbyterian ministers had sometimes to be inducted by force in the Highlands, where still many of the people cling to the old faith. The Sandemanians sent missionaries into Atholl, who were received with indifference or ridicule; it was only two generations later that such evangelical gospellers as J. A. Haldane and Rowland Hill succeeded in blowing up, through the far North, a new flame of Calvinist enthusiasm, which in our time has turned this end of Scotland into a sanctuary for strict Sabbatarianism, much relaxed among city folk and even among the descendants of westland Whigs. The Highlanders of the old dispensation had virtues of their own, but the poet was much left to himself when he conceived Glengarry as cradle for his idealised Scot, brought up among such a good Presbyterian family as would be more at home in the _Cottar’s Saturday Night_ upon the Carrick border--a picture quoted in full by Gilpin as an illustration of Highland manners! Pure livers were they all, austere and grave, And fearing God, the very children taught Stern self-respect, a reverence for God’s word, And an habitual piety, maintained With strictness scarcely known on English ground.