Lost Leaders

Lost Leaders

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Lost Leaders, by Andrew Lang, Edited
by W. Pett Ridge
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Title: Lost Leaders
Author: Andrew Lang
Editor: W. Pett Ridge
Release Date: August 14, 2005 [eBook #16529]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOST
LEADERS***

Transcribed from the 1889 Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. edition by David
Price, email [email protected]

LOST LEADERS by ANDREW LANG
LONDON

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., 1 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1889

PREFACE.
These articles are reprinted, by the permission of the Editor, from the
Daily News. They were selected and arranged by Mr. Pett Ridge, who,
with the Publishers, will perhaps kindly take a share in the
responsibility of republishing them.

LOST LEADERS.
SCOTCH RIVERS.
September is the season of the second and lovelier youth of the river-
scenery of Scotland. Spring comes but slowly up that way; it is June
before the woods have quite clothed themselves. In April the angler or
the sketcher is chilled by the east wind, whirling showers of hail, and
even when the riverbanks are sweet with primroses, the bluff tops of
the border hills are often bleak with late snow. This state of things is
less unpropitious to angling than might be expected. A hardy race of
trout will sometimes rise freely to the artificial fly when the natural fly
is destroyed, and the angler is almost blinded with dusty snowflakes.
All through midsummer the Scotch rivers lose their chief attractions.
The bracken has not yet changed its green for the fairy gold, the hue of
its decay; the woods wear a uniform and sombre green; the waters are
low and shrunken, and angling is almost impossible. But with
September the pleasant season returns for people who love "to be quiet,
and go a-fishing," or a-sketching. The hills put on a wonderful harmony
of colours, the woods rival the October splendours of English forests.
The bends of the Tweed below Melrose and round Mertoun--a scene
that, as Scott says, the river seems loth to leave--may challenge
comparison with anything the Thames can show at Nuneham or
Cliefden. The angler, too, is as fortunate as the lover of the picturesque.
The trout that have hidden themselves all summer, or at best have
cautiously nibbled at the worm- bait, now rise freely to the fly.

Wherever a yellow leaf drops from birch tree or elm the great trout are
splashing, and they are too eager to distinguish very subtly between
flies of nature's making and flies of fur and feather. It is a time when
every one who can manage it should be by the water-side, and should
take with him, if possible, the posthumous work of Sir Thomas Dick
Lauder on the "Rivers of Scotland."
This book, as the author of "Rab and his Friends" tells us in the preface,
is a re-publication of articles written in 1848, on the death- bed of the
author, a man of many accomplishments and of a most lovable nature.
He would lie and dictate or write in pencil these happy and wistful
memories of days passed by the banks of Tweed and Tyne. He did not
care to speak of the northern waters: of Tay, which the Roman invaders
compared to Tiber; of Laxford, the river of salmon; or of the
"thundering Spey." Nor has he anything to say of the west, and of
Galloway, the country out of which young Lochinvar came, with its
soft and broken hills, like the lower spurs of the Pyrenees, and its
streams, now rushing down defiles of rock, now stealing with slow foot
through the plains. He confines himself to the limits of the Scottish
Arcadia; to the hills near Edinburgh, where Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd
loved and sang in a rather affected way; and to the main stream and the
tributaries of the Tweed. He tells, with a humour like that of Charles
Lamb in his account of his youthful search for the mysterious
fountain-head of the New River, how he sought among the Pentland
Hills for the source of the brook that flowed past his own garden. The
wandering stream led him through many a scene renowned in Border
history, up to the heights whence Marmion surveyed the Scottish forces
encamped on Borough Moor before the fatal day of Flodden. These
scenes are described with spirit and loving interest; but it is by
Tweedside that the tourist will find his most pleasant guide in Lauder's
book. Just as Cicero said of Athens, that in