all the
dying refrains of ballad and the fading echoes of story, all the memory
of the wild past, each legend of burn and loch, seem to have combined
to inform your spirit, and to secure themselves an immortal life in your
song. It is through you that we remember them; and in recalling them, as
in treading each hillside in this land, we again remember you and bless
you.

It is not 'Sixty Years Since' the echo of Tweed among his pebbles fell
for the last time on your ear; not sixty years since, and how much is
altered! But two generations have passed; the lad who used to ride from
Edinburgh to Abbotsford, carrying new books for you, and old, is still
vending, in George Street, old books and new. Of politics I have not the
heart to speak. Little joy would you have had in most that has befallen
since the Reform Bill was passed, to the chivalrous cry of 'burke Sir
Walter.' We are still very Radical in the Forest, and you were taken
away from many evils to come. How would the cheek of Walter Scott, or
of Leyden, have blushed at the names of Majuba, The Soudan, Maiwand, and
many others that recall political cowardice or military incapacity!
On the other hand, who but you could have sung the dirge of Gordon,
or wedded with immortal verse the names of Hamilton (who fell with
Cavagnari), of the two Stewarts, of many another clansman, brave among
the bravest! Only he who told how

The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood

could have fitly rhymed a score of feats of arms in which, as at
M'Neill's Zareeba and at Abu Klea,

Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,
As fearlessly and well.

Ah, Sir, the hearts of the rulers may wax faint, and the voting classes
may forget that they are Britons; but when it comes to blows our
fighting men might cry, with Leyden,

My name is little Jock Elliot,
And wha daur meddle wi' me!

Much is changed, in the country-side as well as in the country; but
much remains. The little towns of your time are populous and excessively
black with the smoke of factories--not, I fear, at present very
flourishing. In Galashiels you still see the little change-house and the
cluster of cottages round the Laird's lodge, like the clachan of Tully
Veolan. But these plain remnants of the old Scotch towns are almost
buried in a multitude of 'smoky dwarf houses'--a living poet, Mr.
Matthew Arnold, has found the fitting phrase for these dwellings, once
for