their quiet way. And hence perhaps the observant reader who
submits himself to the spirit that pervades this Journal may find in its
effortless narrative a truthfulness, a tenderness of observation, a
'vivid exactness,' a far-reaching and suggestive insight, for which he
might look in vain in more studied productions.

Another thing to note is the historic value that now attaches to this
Journal. It marks the state of Scotland, and the feeling with which the
most finely gifted Englishmen came to it seventy years since, at a time
before the flood of English interest and 'tourism' had set in across the
Border. The Wordsworths were of course not average English people. They
came with an eye awake and trained for nature, and a heart in sympathy
with nature and with man in a degree not common either in that or in any
other age. They were north-country English too, and between these and
the Lowland Scots there was less difference of fibre and of feeling than
there generally is between Cumbrians and Londoners. All their lives they
had been wont to gaze across the Solway on the dimly-outlined mountains
of the Scottish Border. This alone and their love of scenery and of
wandering were enough, apart from other inducement, to have lured them
northward. But that tide of sentiment, which in our day has culminated
in our annual tourist inundation, was already setting in. It had been
growing ever since 'The Forty-five,' when the sudden descent of the
Highland host on England, arrested only by the disastrous pause at Derby,
had frightened the Londoners from their propriety, and all but scared the
Second George beyond seas. This terror in time subsided, but the
interest in the northern savages still survived, and was further
stimulated when, about fifteen years after, the portent of Macpherson's
Ossian burst on the astonished world of literature. Then about eleven
years later, in 1773, the burly and bigoted English Lexicographer
buttoned his great-coat up to the throat and set out on a Highland
sheltie from Inverness, on that wonderful 'Tour to the Hebrides,' by
which he determined to extinguish for ever Macpherson and his impudent
forgeries. Such a tour seemed at that day as adventurous as would now be
a journey to the heart of Africa, and the stories which Johnson told of
the Hebrideans and their lives let in on his Cockney readers the
impression of a world as strange as any which Livingstone could now
report of. Then, in