cient boundaries of the sanctuary or consecrated
ground.

Martin was a man not illiterate: he was an inhabitant of Sky, and
therefore was within reach of intelligence, and with no great difficulty
might have visited the places which he undertakes to describe; yet with
all his opportunities, he has often suffered himself to be deceived. He
lived in the last century, when the chiefs of the clans had lost little
of their original influence. The mountains were yet unpenetrated, no
inlet was opened to foreign novelties, and the feudal institution
operated upon life with their full force. He might therefore have
displayed a series of subordination and a form of government, which, in
more luminous and improved regions, have been long forgotten, and have
delighted his readers with many uncouth customs that are now disused, and
wild opinions that prevail no longer. But he probably had not knowledge
of the world sufficient to qualify him for judging what would deserve or
gain the attention of mankind. The mode of life which was familiar to
himself, he did not suppose unknown to others, nor imagined that he could
give pleasure by telling that of which it was, in his little country,
impossible to be ignorant.

What he has neglected cannot now be performed. In nations, where there
is hardly the use of letters, what is once out of sight is lost for ever.
They think but little, and of their few thoughts, none are wasted on the
past, in which they are neither interested by fear nor hope. Their only
registers are stated observances and practical representations. For this
reason an age of ignorance is an age of ceremony. Pageants, and
processions, and commemorations, gradually shrink away, as better methods
come into use of recording events, and preserving rights.

It is not only in Raasay that the chapel is unroofed and useless; through
the few islands which we visited, we neither saw nor heard of any house
of prayer, except in Sky, that was not in ruins. The malignant influence
of Calvinism has blasted ceremony and decency together; and if the
remembrance of papal superstition is obliterated, the monuments of papal
piety are likewise effaced.

It has been, for many years, popular to talk of the lazy devotion of the
Romish clergy; over the sleepy laziness of men that erected churches, we
may indulge our superiority with a new triumph, by comparing it with the
fervid activity of those who suffer them to fall.

Of the destr