Memories and Portraits | Page 8

north. Even the English, it is recorded, did not
loathe the Highlander and the Highland costume as they were loathed
by the remainder of the Scotch. Yet the Highlander felt himself a Scot.
He would willingly raid into the Scotch lowlands; but his courage
failed him at the border, and he regarded England as a perilous,
unhomely land. When the Black Watch, after years of foreign service,
returned to Scotland, veterans leaped out and kissed the earth at Port
Patrick. They had been in Ireland, stationed among men of their own
race and language, where they were well liked and treated with
affection; but it was the soil of Galloway that they kissed at the extreme
end of the hostile lowlands, among a people who did not understand
their speech, and who had hated, harried, and hanged them since the
dawn of history. Last, and perhaps most curious, the sons of chieftains
were often educated on the continent of Europe. They went abroad
speaking Gaelic; they returned speaking, not English, but the broad
dialect of Scotland. Now, what idea had they in their minds when they
thus, in thought, identified themselves with their ancestral enemies?
What was the sense in which they were Scotch and not English, or
Scotch and not Irish? Can a bare name be thus influential on the minds
and affections of men, and a political aggregation blind them to the
nature of facts? The story of the Austrian Empire would seem to

answer, NO; the far more galling business of Ireland clenches the
negative from nearer home. Is it common education, common morals, a
common language or a common faith, that join men into nations? There
were practically none of these in the case we are considering.
The fact remains: in spite of the difference of blood and language, the
Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the Highlander.
When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other's necks in spirit;
even at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy in their talk. But from
his compatriot in the south the Lowlander stands consciously apart. He
has had a different training; he obeys different laws; he makes his will
in other terms, is otherwise divorced and married; his eyes are not at
home in an English landscape or with English houses; his ear continues
to remark the English speech; and even though his tongue acquire the
Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scotch accent of the mind.

CHAPTER II
. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES (2)
I AM asked to write something (it is not specifically stated what) to the
profit and glory of my ALMA MATER; and the fact is I seem to be in
very nearly the same case with those who addressed me, for while I am
willing enough to write something, I know not what to write. Only one
point I see, that if I am to write at all, it should be of the University
itself and my own days under its shadow; of the things that are still the
same and of those that are already changed: such talk, in short, as
would pass naturally between a student of to-day and one of yesterday,
supposing them to meet and grow confidential.
The generations pass away swiftly enough on the high seas of life;
more swiftly still in the little bubbling back-water of the quadrangle; so
that we see there, on a scale startlingly diminished, the flight of time
and the succession of men. I looked for my name the other day in last
year's case-book of the Speculative. Naturally enough I looked for it
near the end; it was not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I
began to think it had been dropped at press; and when at last I found it,
mounted on the shoulders of so many successors, and looking in that
posture like the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of some of
the dignity of years. This kind of dignity of temporal precession is

likely, with prolonged life, to become more familiar, possibly less
welcome; but I felt it strongly then, it is strongly on me now, and I am
the more emboldened to speak with my successors in the tone of a
parent and a praiser of things past.
For, indeed, that which they attend is but a fallen University; it has
doubtless some remains of good, for human institutions decline by
gradual stages; but decline, in spite of all seeming embellishments, it
does; and what is perhaps more singular, began to do so when I ceased
to be a student. Thus, by an odd chance, I had the very last of the very
best of ALMA MATER; the same thing, I hear (which makes it the
more