The Sun.
London, England, 1855-12-29 00:00:00

DESCRIPTION OF THE EIGI3LANDS.

(Prom Macaulay's llistory.)
It is not easy for a modern Englishman, who can pass
in a day from his club in St. James's-street to his shoot-
ing-box among the Grampians, and who finds in his
shooting-box all the comforts and luxuries of his club,
to believe that, in the times of his great grand-
fathers, St. James's-street had as Thtle connection with
the Grampians as with the Andes. In the south of our
island scarcely anything was known about the Celtic
part of Scotland ; and what was known excited no feel-
ing but contempt and loathing. The crags and the glens,
the woods and the waters, were indeed the same that
now swarm every autumn with admiring gazers and
sketchers. The Trosachs wound as now between gigan-
tic walls of rook tapestried with broom and wild roses.
Foyers came headlong down through the birchwood with
the same leap and the same roar with which he still
rushes to Loch Ness ; and, in defiance of the sun of
June, the snowy scalp of Ben Cruechan rose, as it still
rises, over the willowy islets of Loch Awe. Yet none
of these sights had power, till a recent period, to attract
a single poet or painter from more opulent and more
tranquil regions. Indeed, law and police, trade and indus-
try, have done far more than people of romantic disposie
tions will readily admit to develop in our Dried,' a sense
of the wilder beauties of nature. A traveller must be freed
from all apprehen,ion of being murdered or starved
before he can be charmed by the bold outlines and rich
tint of the bills. lie is not likely to be thrown into
ecstasies by the abruptness of a precipice from which he
is in imminent danger of falling two thousand feet per-
pendicular ; by the boiling waves of a torrent which sud-
denly whirls away his baggage, and forces him to run
for his life ; by the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he
finds a corpse which marauders have just stripped and
mangled ; or by the screams of those eagles whose next
meal may probably'be on his own eyes. About the year
1730, Captain Burt, one of the first Englishmen who
caught a glimpse of the spots which now allure tourist
from every part of the civilised world, wrote an account
of his wauderings .11e was evidently a mai of a quick,
an observant, and a cultivated mind, and would doubt-
less, had he lived in our age, have looked with mingled
awe and delight on the mountains of Inverness-shire.
But, writing with the feeling which was universal in
his own age, he pronounced those mountains monstrous
excrescences. Their deformity, be said, was such
that the most sterile plains seemed lovely by com-
parison. 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-bill. 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 wilder-
ness, and declared that he greatly preferred the charm-
ing 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 dife
ficult 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
Katrina and Loch Lomond. 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 Corn-
hill, that stranger. could be enchanted by the blue
dimples of the lakes and by the rainbows which over-
hung the waterfalls, and could derive a solemn pleasure
even from the clouds and tempests which lowered on the
mountain tops.