shmen who caught a glimpse of the spots
which now allure tourists from every part of the civilised world, wrote
an account of his wanderings. He was evidently a man of a quick, an
observant, and a cultivated mind, and would doubtless, had he lived in
our age, have looked with mingled awe and delight on the mountains of
Invernessshire. But, writing with the feeling which was universal in
his own age, he pronounced those mountains monstrous excrescences. Their
deformity, he said, was such that the most sterile plains seemed lovely
by comparison. Fine weather, he complained, only made bad worse; for,
the clearer the day, the more disagreeably did those misshapen masses
of gloomy brown and dirty purple affect the eye. What a contrast, he
exclaimed, between these horrible prospects and the beauties of Richmond
Hill! [318] Some persons may think that Burt was a man of vulgar and
prosaical mind: but they will scarcely venture to pass a similar
judgment on Oliver Goldsmith. Goldsmith was one of the very few Saxons
who, more than a century ago, ventured to explore the Highlands. He
was disgusted by the hideous wilderness, and declared that he greatly
preferred the charming country round Leyden, the vast expanse of verdant
meadow, and the villas with their statues and grottoes, trim flower
beds, and rectilinear avenues. Yet it is difficult to believe that
the author of the Traveller and of the Deserted Village was naturally
inferior in taste and sensibility to the thousands of clerks and
milliners who are now thrown into raptures by the sight of Loch Katrine
and Loch Lomond, [319] His feelings may easily be explained. It was not
till roads had been cut out of the rocks, till bridges had been flung
over the courses of the rivulets, till inns had succeeded to dens of
robbers, till there was as little danger of being slain or plundered
in the wildest defile of Badenoch or Lochaber as in Cornhill, that
strangers could be enchanted by the blue dimples of the lakes and by
the rainbows which overhung the waterfalls, and could derive a solemn
pleasure even from the clouds and tempests which lowered on the mountain
tops.

The change in the feeling with which the Lowlanders regarded the
highland scenery was closely connected with a change not less remarkable
in the feeling with which they regarded the Highland race. It is not
strange that the Wild Scotch, as they were sometimes called, should,
in the seventeenth century, have been consider