Memories and Portraits | Page 5

brunt of an
examination in the very law in question. Thereupon he looked me for a
moment full in the face and dropped the conversation. This is a
monstrous instance, if you like, but it does not stand alone in the
experience of Scots.
England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in religion, in
education, and in the very look of nature and men's faces, not always
widely, but always trenchantly. Many particulars that struck Mr. Grant
White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less forcibly; he and I felt
ourselves foreigners on many common provocations. A Scotchman
may tramp the better part of Europe and the United States, and never
again receive so vivid an impression of foreign travel and strange lands
and manners as on his first excursion into England. The change from a
hilly to a level country strikes him with delighted wonder. Along the
flat horizon there arise the frequent venerable towers of churches. He
sees at the end of airy vistas the revolution of the windmill sails. He
may go where he pleases in the future; he may see Alps, and Pyramids,
and lions; but it will be hard to beat the pleasure of that moment. There
are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many windmills
bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody country; their halting
alacrity of movement, their pleasant business, making bread all day
with uncouth gesticulations, their air, gigantically human, as of a
creature half alive, put a spirit of romance into the tamest landscape.
When the Scotch child sees them first he falls immediately in love; and
from that time forward windmills keep turning in his dreams. And so,
in their degree, with every feature of the life and landscape. The warm,
habitable age of towns and hamlets, the green, settled, ancient look of
the country; the lush hedgerows, stiles, and privy path-ways in the
fields; the sluggish, brimming rivers; chalk and smock-frocks; chimes
of bells and the rapid, pertly-sounding English speech - they are all new
to the curiosity; they are all set to English airs in the child's story that
he tells himself at night. The sharp edge of novelty wears off; the
feeling is scotched, but I doubt whether it is ever killed. Rather it keeps
returning, ever the more rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to
which you have been long accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a
relish to enjoyment or heightens the sense of isolation.
One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotchman's eye - the

domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the quaint,
venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm colouring of all.
We have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient buildings, above all in country
places; and those that we have are all of hewn or harled masonry.
Wood has been sparingly used in their construction; the
window-frames are sunken in the wall, not flat to the front, as in
England; the roofs are steeper-pitched; even a hill farm will have a
massy, square, cold and permanent appearance. English houses, in
comparison, have the look of cardboard toys, such as a puff might
shatter. And to this the Scotchman never becomes used. His eye can
never rest consciously on one of these brick houses - rickles of brick, as
he might call them - or on one of these flat-chested streets, but he is
instantly reminded where he is, and instantly travels back in fancy to
his home. "This is no my ain house; I ken by the biggin' o't." And yet
perhaps it is his own, bought with his own money, the key of it long
polished in his pocket; but it has not yet, and never will be, thoroughly
adopted by his imagination; nor does he cease to remember that, in the
whole length and breadth of his native country, there was no building
even distantly resembling it.
But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England
foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire,
surprise and even pain us. The dull, neglected peasant, sunk in matter,
insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast with our own
long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-quoting ploughman. A
week or two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotchman gasping.
It seems incredible that within the boundaries of his own island a class
should have been thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent,
who hold our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to
hold them with a difference or, from another reason, and to speak on all
things with less interest and conviction. The first shock of English
society is like a cold plunge. It is possible that the Scot comes looking
for too