ar communication by high
roads with the southern counties. All the ways beyond it have, I
believe, been made by the soldiers in this century. At Inverness
therefore Cromwell, when he subdued Scotland, stationed a garrison, as at
the boundary of the Highlands. The soldiers seem to have incorporated
afterwards with the inhabitants, and to have peopled the place with an
English race; for the language of this town has been long considered as
peculiarly elegant.

Here is a castle, called the castle of Macbeth, the walls of which are
yet standing. It was no very capacious edifice, but stands upon a rock
so high and steep, that I think it was once not accessible, but by the
help of ladders, or a bridge. Over against it, on another hill, was a
fort built by Cromwell, now totally demolished; for no faction of
Scotland loved the name of Cromwell, or had any desire to continue his
memory.

Yet what the Romans did to other nations, was in a great degree done by
Cromwell to the Scots; he civilized them by conquest, and introduced by
useful violence the arts of peace. I was told at Aberdeen that the
people learned from Cromwell's soldiers to make shoes and to plant kail.

How they lived without kail, it is not easy to guess: They cultivate
hardly any other plant for common tables, and when they had not kail they
probably had nothing. The numbers that go barefoot are still sufficient
to shew that shoes may be spared: They are not yet considered as
necessaries of life; for tall boys, not otherwise meanly dressed, run
without them in the streets; and in the islands the sons of gentlemen
pass several of their first years with naked feet.

I know not whether it be not peculiar to the Scots to have attained the
liberal, without the manual arts, to have excelled in ornamental
knowledge, and to have wanted not only the elegancies, but the
conveniences of common life. Literature soon after its revival found its
way to Scotland, and from the middle of the sixteenth century, almost to
the middle of the seventeenth, the politer studies were very diligently
pursued. The Latin poetry of _Deliciae Poetarum Scotorum_ would have
done honour to any nation, at least till the publication of _May's
Supplement_ the English had very little to oppose.

Yet men thus ingenious and inquisitive were content to live in total
ignorance of the trades by which human wants are supplied, and to supply
them by the grossest means. Till the Union made the