The Sun. — 1855-12-29 (London, England)

DESCRIPTION OP THE HIGHLANDS.  (From Macaulay's Ilittory.) It is not easy for a modern Englishman, who can pass ,n a day from his club in St. James's-street to his shooting-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 grandfathers, St. James's-street had as little 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 exeited no feeling 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 gigantic 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 deSance 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 bad 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 try, have done far more than people of romantic dispositions will readily admit to develop in our minds a sense of the wilder beauties of nature. A traveller must be freed from all apprehension of being murderel or starved before he can be charmed by the bold outlines and rich tint of the hills. He 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 perpendicular ; by the boiling waves of a torrent which suddenly whirls away his baggage, and forces him to ruu 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 wanderings .He was evidently a maa 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 mountain' of Inverness-shire. But, writing with the feeling which was universal is his own age, ho 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. 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 Katrina and Loch Lomond. His feelings may easily be explained. It was not till roads bad 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 Loehaber 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.