of Lowland farmers up
the pass which led to his native glen, he no more considered himself as
a thief than the Raleighs and Drakes considered themselves as thieves
when they divided the cargoes of Spanish galleons. He was a warrior
seizing lawful prize of war, of war never once intermitted during
the thirty-five generations which had passed away since the Teutonic
invaders had driven the children of the soil to the mountains. That, if
he was caught robbing on such principles, he should, for the protection
of peaceful industry, be punished with the utmost rigour of the law
was perfectly just. But it was not just to class him morally with the
pickpockets who infested Drury Lane Theatre, or the highwaymen who
stopped coaches on Blackheath. His inordinate pride of birth and his
contempt for labour and trade were indeed great weaknesses, and had done
far more than the inclemency of the air and the sterility of the soil
to keep his country poor and rude. Yet even here there was some
compensation. It must in fairness be acknowledged that the patrician
virtues were not less widely diffused among the population of the
Highlands than the patrician vices. As there was no other part of the
island where men, sordidly clothed, lodged, and fed, indulged themselves
to such a degree in the idle sauntering habits of an aristocracy, so
there was no other part of the island where such men had in such a
degree the better qualities of an aristocracy, grace and dignity of
manner, selfrespect, and that noble sensibility which makes dishonour
more terrible than death. A gentleman of this sort, whose clothes were
begrimed with the accumulated filth of years, and whose hovel smelt
worse than an English hogstye, would often do the honours of that hovel
with a lofty courtesy worthy of the splendid circle of Versailles.
Though he had as little booklearning as the most stupid ploughboys
of England, it would have been a great error to put him in the same
intellectual rank with such ploughboys. It is indeed only by reading
that men can become profoundly acquainted with any science. But the arts
of poetry and rhetoric may be carried near to absolute perfection, and
may exercise a mighty influence on the public mind, in an age in which
books are wholly or almost wholly unknown. The first great painter
of life and manners has described, with a vivacity which makes it
impossible to doubt that he was copying from nature, the effect produced
by eloquence and