Memories and Portraits | Page 7

world of gardens, to lead a semi-scenic
life, costumed, disciplined and drilled by proctors. Nor is this to be
regarded merely as a stage of education; it is a piece of privilege
besides, and a step that separates him further from the bulk of his
compatriots. At an earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly
different experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of
a bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the
public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has
been wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of restraint, and
nothing of necessary gentility. He will find no quiet clique of the
exclusive, studious and cultured; no rotten borough of the arts. All
classes rub shoulders on the greasy benches. The raffish young
gentleman in gloves must measure his scholarship with the plain,
clownish laddie from the parish school. They separate, at the session's

end, one to smoke cigars about a watering-place, the other to resume
the labours of the field beside his peasant family. The first muster of a
college class in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so
many lads, fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish
embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and
afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices. It was in these early days,
I think, that Professor Blackie won the affection of his pupils, putting
these uncouth, umbrageous students at their ease with ready human
geniality. Thus, at least, we have a healthy democratic atmosphere to
breathe in while at work; even when there is no cordiality there is
always a juxtaposition of the different classes, and in the competition of
study the intellectual power of each is plainly demonstrated to the other.
Our tasks ended, we of the North go forth as freemen into the humming,
lamplit city. At five o'clock you may see the last of us hiving from the
college gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green
glimmer of the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor
lies in wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the masters
of the world; and some portion of our lives is always Saturday, LA
TREVE DE DIEU.
Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his
country's history gradually growing in the child's mind from story and
from observation. A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck, outlying
iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights; much of heathery
mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters. Breaths come to him in
song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories
in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of
oat-meal, who rode so swiftly and lived so sparely on their raids.
Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise, and constant resolution are the fibres of the
legend of his country's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland have
been tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish history -
Flodden, Darien, or the Forty-five were still either failures or defeats;
and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the Bruce combine
with the very smallness of the country to teach rather a moral than a
material criterion for life. Britain is altogether small, the mere taproot
of her extended empire: Scotland, again, which alone the Scottish boy
adopts in his imagination, is but a little part of that, and avowedly cold,
sterile and unpopulous. It is not so for nothing. I once seemed to have

perceived in an American boy a greater readiness of sympathy for lands
that are great, and rich, and growing, like his own. It proved to be quite
otherwise: a mere dumb piece of boyish romance, that I had lacked
penetration to divine. But the error serves the purpose of my argument;
for I am sure, at least, that the heart of young Scotland will be always
touched more nearly by paucity of number and Spartan poverty of life.
So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained. That Shorter
Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was yet
composed in the city of Westminster. The division of races is more
sharply marked within the borders of Scotland itself than between the
countries. Galloway and Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber, are like
foreign parts; yet you may choose a man from any of them, and, ten to
one, he shall prove to have the headmark of a Scot. A century and a
half ago the Highlander wore a different costume, spoke a different
language, worshipped in another church, held different morals, and
obeyed a different social constitution from his fellow-countrymen
either of the south or