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The installation address recently delivered by the venerable and famous Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, amongst many other questions of wider interest, stirred several which appeal peculiarly to Scotchmen, and which, in some form or other, are rarely absent from their thoughts. The questions to which we refer are:—Whether Scotland still possesses a separate nationality, and, if so, in what this nationality consists, and has consisted, since the political autonomy of the country ceased? Whether it is of such value to Scotland, and to the kingdom generally, as to render its preservation desirable? and lastly, supposing the latter question to be answered in the affirmative,— By what means, if any, can its existence be perpetuated?
It is true that these questions were rather suggested than stated by Lord Brougham, and that the answers which he would have given to them were rather indicated than announced. But even indications of opinion from such a quarter deserve at all times our veiy serious consideration, and more particularly when they have reference to a subject regarding which Lord Brougham is probably more in a position than any living man to make up his mind. That even he has done so, is more than anything which he said would warrant us in assuming, for he is too wise to dogmatize on a subject which, in some of its aspects at all events, is hidden by the future. But it seems to us that the solution which he hinted at had at least the merit of limiting the question, by placing the true issue before us ; and by showing us that if we possess now, and in any sense are to continue to occupy, a distinctive and individual position amongst the nations of Europe, that individuality is, and in future must more and more become, not political, or even institutional, but social, and, above all, intellectual.
Those of our readers who remember the line of argument which we adopted several years ago, when, alone amongst our contemporaries, we advocated those measures of University reform which have borne at least the one good fruit of Lord Brougham’s appointment, know that the train of thought which he has thus awakened is by no means new to the pages of the North British Review. Our object in the present article shall be to test its validity, and, in so far as we are able, to follow it out into its practical consequences. We commence with a slight historical retrospect of the various phases through which the question of Scottish nationality has passed in the minds of our countrymen, since the union of the crowns in 1807.
“A Scotchman,” said Dr Johnson, “must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth: he will always love it better than inquiry; and, if falsehood flatters his vanity, will not be very diligent to detect it.” The remark, for anything we know, may convey to us a caution of which we are still in want in prosecuting such an inquiry as we contemplate; and it is not long since we were reminded of it by a conversation with a friend, who boasted a name which placed his Caledonian antecedents far beyond question. We had mentioned to him a fact, which we believe was dragged to light some two or three years ago by the unsparing figures of the Kegistrar-General, and which seemed little to the credit of Scottish morals,—the extraordinarily large proportion of illegitimate births north of the Tweed. “That fact,” he replied, with a decision which the Doctor might have envied, “proves, not the immorality of Scotland, but the w orthlessness of statistics.”
But though the unexpected appearance of so provoking a fact as this will occasionally call forth illustrations of the truth of Dr Johnston’s remark even in the present generation of Scotchmen, there can be little doubt that it touched our grandfathers far more nearly. So much indeed were his northern contemporaries aggravated by this, and other sayings of a similar import, which proceeded from the same sarcastic oracle, that towards the end of last century a sort of Scottish controversy arose, in which there is reason to fear that along with other less objectionable weapons, the long bow was pretty unsparingly bent on both sides.
This literary warfare, in which, perhaps for the last time, those feelings of jealousy which had so long kept alive a family feud between the nearest of national relatives, found articulate utterance, exhibited itself as a perpetual “aside” to the great Ossianic controversy, and was, no aoubt, the means of lending to it an asperity which zeal for the main issue could never have awakened. Several of the stoutest champions of the bard had not a drop of Celtic blood in their veins, or a spark of Celtic feeling in their hearts; and if the Son of Fingal had been an Irishman or a Welshman, they would have discussed the authenticity of his pretended works with as little passion as if they had been inquiring into the individuality of Homer, or endeavouring to discover the extent to which the Socrates of Plato, the Socrates of Xenophon, or the Socrates of Aristophanes, or any, or all, or none of them, is to be regarded as the historical Socrates.
But in professing to inquire whether there was, in the poems in question, any appreciable element of thought or feeling which could not have been communicated to them by a man not differing in essentials from an Englishman, they felt as if they were inquiring whether, in Scottish character itself, there was anything more special, more permanent, and more worthy of preservation, than those trifling external peculiarities which always distinguish the inhabitants of different portions of the same country. To have submitted in silence to the transformation of one Celtic bard into a myth—nay, if need had been, to have suffered all the "colleges” of all the bards, and senachies, and pipers, to go screaming out of the world of reality into the shadowy regions of the second sight,—would probably have caused no very bitter regret to such men as Blair, or Gregory, or Karnes; but, for Scotchmen of that day, to be driven from one of the historical groundworks of a separate national character, was a very different matter, and they fought hard accordingly.
This was, as we have said, perhaps the last occasion on which Scottish national feeling, as represented by persons of respectability and intelligence, assumed an attitude of hostility to England; and it is curious to contrast it with the deeper manifestations of the same sentiment which appeared in the generation which preceded, and its more superficial appearances in those which have followed.
To such men as Belhaven and Fletcher of Saltoun, Scottish nationality meant a separate and independent national life,— moral, social, and political. The national party that opposed the Union knew nothing of half measures. Either Scotland was to cease, and there were to be Scotchmen no longer, or they were both to exist as they had existed since the war of independence, and as, relying on what seemed to them the respectable authority of Buchanan, they supposed them to have existed from the beginning of time. The idea of political identity with a larger, richer, and more powerful nation—of a system of centralization which should embrace all the springs of internal government and external defence, whilst it left untouched, not only the private rights of the citizen and his religious convictions, which, for a time at least, might be protected by positive stipulation, but his modes of thinking and speaking, his habits of living and acting—everything, in short, which, in our sense, constitutes a Scotchman,— was, to them, utterly unintelligible. It was equivalent to saying that the same thing was at once to be, and not to be.
It is true that their own previous history had made Scotchmen familiar with international relations of an unusually intimate kind. Before the union of the Scottish Crown with that of England, it had for a brief period been united with that of France. On this occasion, a complete legal internationalization was effected.1 But long before this event, circumstances had brought about, between the citizens of the two countries, a contact far closer than commonly results from political alliances. Before they were made Frenchmen in law, Scotchmen were continually becoming Frenchmen in fact; and for generations they seem to have accomplished the transmutation with scarcely less frequency, and with even greater facility, than they became Englishmen after the union of the crowns, or than they do at present, when there are said to be more Scotchmen in London than in Edinburgh. But the frequency with which it was renounced took nothing from the completeness of the national character whilst it remained. A Scotchman was not less a Scotchman, that he might become a Frenchman when he chose; nay, he was all the more a Scotchman on that account, because the faculty of abandoning it was one of the distinctive marks of the genuineness of the character.1 And as it was with France before the accession, so it had been with England from that period down to the Union;—the Scotch, as before, had continued “praising Scotland and leaving it.” But to the patriot who left it, as much, perhaps more, than to him that remained, it was an autonomous nation, distinct and separate from every nation on earth, and the amalgamation of which with any other nation, if not exactly a conquest, would still have been a lowering of the personal dignity, a diluting of the spirit of every citizen that it contained. That many Scotchmen should go to England and become Englishmen, was an idea altogether in keeping with previous modes of thinking and acting; but that all Scotchmen in Scotland should become Englishmen, in any sense however limited—nay, that Scotland itself should become a sort of lesser England,—was, to men like Fletcher or Belhaven, a notion strange and intolerable. In addition to the historical peculiarities which thus marked the Scottish feeling of country, it had specialties too and returns the compliment in favour of Frenchmen. Mr Chambers mentions two instances, the one in 1615, the other in 1627, in which the peculiar privileges of the Scotch were recognised. On the latter occasion, a hundred and twenty English and Scottish ships were seized. “The Scotch, however, continued to make themselves appear as still connected with France by an ancient league,—a league which, it is to be feared, only existed as a friendly illusion common to the two nations. Out of deference to this notion, the Scotch vessels were all dismissed, while the English were retained." The "friendly illusion" unquestionably was the statute above quoted, which probably retained its validity till the Union.
A Scotchman’s nationality has something abstract, and, in a certain sense, ideal about it. It is not so much as the scene of actual comfort and wellbeing, as in the light of the centre of his conceptions of social perfection, that he loves Scotland. He holds it dear, not so much for what it is, or ever has been, to him or to his,—for to both it has probably proved but an areda nutrixy—as for what he conceives or hopes it may become, or under more favourable circumstances might have been made, through his own instrumentality or that of others; and hence it is, that, though the greatest of grumblers ' at home, he is the staunchest of patriots abroad. To the Englishman, his country is the vine and fig-tree under which ne dwelleth in safety and in joy; to the Scotchman, it is the banner under which he fights, the shibboleth by which he is known amongst the nations.
But notwithstanding the prevalence of the feelings which we have described, the wiser counsels of the Unionists prevailed, and the measure which, since the accession, had been proposed in so many forms, was at length brought to the test of a peaceable experiment. At first, it seemed almost as if the results which had been predicted by the national party were to be realized. A species of social collapse, of which these gloomy anticipations were in no small measure the cause, actually occurred ; and during the forty years between the Union and the final suppression of the rebellion, the capital of Scotland particularly laboured under a depression of spirit unknown at any other period of its history. But whilst local seemed thus to be absorbed by central life, the fact was, that neither had yet received the benefits which they were mutually in a condition to confer; and it was only as each of these .influences came into fuller operation, that men became gradually aware, that what so often before, and so often since, has been regarded as one of the insoluble problems of politics, had for once received a practical solution.
In the case of centralization and localization, as in the case of all other tendencies that are natural and human, the conflict into which they are often betrayed, arises, not from qualities which are inherent in them, but from attendant circumstances which impede or vitiate the action of one or both. Their complete development and unfettered activity, so far from aggravating or perpetuating their opposition, are the only effectual means for bringing it to a close. Assuming them both to be sound and healthy principles, it is an error in fact, as it is a solecism in language, to say that either may be carried too far. Whilst a sound principle is adhered to, it can never become a false principle. No amount of local or individual energy or freedom can be excessive, for they are the very blood and life of central power. No central power can be too vigorous, prompt, or omniscient, for it is thus only a more perfect instrument for the development of local energy and the vindication of individual freedom. But every true principle has its corresponding false principle, and the former is always in greatest danger of encountering the latter when it has been most successful in asserting its own exclusive recognition. If the result of the encounter be, that the true principle is paralysed, the field for a time is left open to error. A return to truth in such circumstances is practicable only by means of another true principle, which, if carried out in isolation, is liable to be similarly neutralized. Of these phenomena we have many examples. Before the time of Alexander, the principle of localization in the small states of Greece reached a point at which, in place of progressing, it wore itself out in hopeless encounters with misrule. It was not the excess of local energy, but its exclusiveness, which ultimately called for what was perhaps the only remedy—centralization. But the centralizing principle which came into operation on that occasion, was not the genuine action of the community itself; it came not from within, but from without, and it came accompanied from the first by its own evil genius—despotism. The result was its own speedy annihilation, and the destruction of the Grecian world. Had the two principles been in operation from the first, or had the latter come to the aid of the former, whilst it was still capable of resuscitation, the results might have been very different. Now, all this is plain enough in the far past; but for those wTho have grown up under the exclusive dominion of one principle to fix on the point at which it stands in need of aid from the other, is a very difficult matter, and it is.not surprising that it puzzled our fathers. Who, for example, amongst them or amongst us, has ever been able to say with certainty whether the Germans, by giving greater prominence to central power, would be restoring or destroying the balance between principles which, in Germany and everywhere, are as indispensable to social organic existence as the centrifugal and centripetal forces are to physical nature?
Experience has at length enabled us to assert with confidence, that, far from being irreconcileable enemies, these principles are inseparable friends and indispensable coadjutors : that the highest attainable degree of activity in each is that in which it aids the other most effectually; and conversely, that the point at which it is most helpful is the highest to which its own action can reach in the circumstances. But though we are thus enabled to decline, chiefly from the Scottish and the kindred instance of the Irish Union (for they are the leading historical precedents on the point), what seems very much to resemble an universal political taw, it is doubtful whether, in similar circumstances, we should feel more secure than did those who, on these two memorable occasions, dealt with what must be at all times one of the nicest and most delicate questions of political adjustment. By the help of that practical sagacity, which has so often supplied to our countrymen the place of deeper insight, and by the blessing which God rarely withholds from honest intention, we know that they were marvellously successful on both occasions.
Of the extent to which this was the case in the former instance we shall have proof enough, if we glance at the results which may fairly be attributed to the arrangements which they made.
It was not till the dynastic question which had been pending since the Revolution was finally set at rest by the suppression of the second Rebellion, that the Union began to bear its fruits to Scotland. When that event occurred, it was not the central government alone that was strengthened, though to most persons at the time the gain probably appeared to be wholly on that side. The policy of those who had opposed the Union seemed now for the first time to be placed beyond all further hope of success ; and yet, strangely enough, at that very moment, the substance of what they had contended for was attained, and this not as a direct result of the principles of the victorious party, but as a consequence of increased life and energy in those local influences, the partial diminution of which perhaps all parties had anticipated. As coincidences, far too remarkable to be accounted for on any other principles than those of cause and effect, we may mention that simultaneously with the consolidation of the central power, the trade, manufactures, and commerce of Scotland increased beyond all former precedent, agriculture was developed, the capital of the kingdom swelled to twice its former dimensions, a fresh impulse was communicated to literature, an indigenous school of philosophy arose, the medical schools of the country for the first time attained to the position which they have since maintained, and the Church and the Bar were adorned with more distinguished names than either of them could have boasted during the previous century.
Even the accession, which was in itself a sort of imperfect union, effected a decided improvement in the manners, and gave a sensible impulse to the industry of Scotland. The condition of society during Queen Mary’s time, and the part of her son's reign which was spent in Scotland, as exhibited in the unquestionably authentic documents collected by Mr Chambers, was scarcely in any respect, except in the seeds of fixture energy which it contained, superior to that of Spain or Mexico at the present day. Cromwell’s rule was noted as a period of further advance, and Dr Johnson was not altogether in error when, after his own cecular fashion, he asserted that “Cromwell civilised the Scotch by conquest, and introduced by useful violence the arts of peace.” Whether he had sufficient data for maintaining that amongst the arts thus acquired the making of shoes and the planting of “kail” fall to be included, may be more of a question ; but there is little doubt that the prevailing notions regarding the dispensation of justice must have been rendered more precise by this means. On this subject Mr Chambers relates a well-known anecdote, too characteristic to be omitted. “Some one in a subsequent age,” he tells us, “was lauding to the Lord President Gilmore the remarkable impartiality of CromwelFs judges, and the general equity of their proceedings, when the Scottish judge answered, in his rough way, 'Deil thank them, they had neither kith nor kin!’” Even at present, there is reason to believe that we derive far more benefit morally, than we do intellectually, or even materially, from our connection with England. But for English influences, but for the salutary check which the appeal to the House of Lords, and still more to the columns of the Times exerts, many of the peculiarities of earlier days might not impossibly reappear amongst us. The Scotchman has not the Englishman’s love of fair play; his newspapers, except those of the extremest political shades, are habitually silent before authority; and such a publication as Punch, even if we possessed the wit, would be impossible in Scotland, from mere want of moral courage.
It is by no means inappropriate, even at the present day, that we should call to mind the actual features of tne society of independent Scotland; for it is forgetfulness of our real condition in former times, and of the besetting sins which still cleave to us, which lies at the bottom of all such manifestations of mistaken national enthusiasm as have for their object a partial repeal of the political union, by the creation of a separate department of State for Scotland, presided over by a separate secretary; and which leads to those childish disputes about lions and unicorns, whereby Scotland is made ridiculous every half-century. It is true that such proposals receive no support in Scotland that is at all likely to endanger the entirely cordial relations of the united kingdoms; but it does not follow that they are entirely innoxious to Scotland itself. Those by whom they are advocated, if they possess little wisdom, are by no means deficient in generous sentiments, and in energies which, if directed to saner ends, would be productive of substantial benefits to their country.
But it is not so much by misdirecting the enthusiasm which still shows itself from time to time in favour of Scottish nationality, as by extinguishing it in some minds, and preventing it from developing itself in others, that these false views of our national history and character, and, consequently, of what ought to be the objects of our national life, are injurious to the best interests of Scotland. When the only arguments ever used in favour of Scottish nationality are based upon assumptions as to the advantages which we enjoyed as a separate nation, which can easily be shown to be destitute of historical support; and when the only object which those who use them have in view is the restoration of some modified form of political independence, which can with equal facility be demonstrated to be both undesirable and impossible; it is not surprising that the opinion should have gained ground, that to all intents and purposes, and in every sense, it is a mere piece of antiquarian sentimentalism, which those who have anything in the shape of serious occupation had better banish from their minds at once and for ever. The two nations, it is said, if two nations they can still be called, did not differ, at the period at which our authentic history begins, in blood, in language, or in manners. With the exception of a few outlying counties, which in each were peopled by the earlier race, they were kindred offshoots from the great Teutonic stem. For a time they were separated by an unhappy war, which has long since been forgotten. A political amalgamation has led, or is daily leading, to its natural result, a complete social assimilation. The stream is thus all in one direction, and that the right direction, and why should any of us set our faces against it? Now, that •there is much in this view which meets with our cordial assent, is plain, we trust, from what we have said already, and will be plainer from what we have yet to say. But the question which it is our present object to discuss is, whether this view exhausts the whole subject of the relations in which we stand, and ought to stand, to our southern fellow-countrymen. Are there, or are there not, peculiarities in the institutions of Scotland, but still more in the social, and most of all in the intellectual character of Scotchmen, which have not been as yet, and which need not necessarily be, affected by the political union of the countries, and which it is for the mutual advantage of both that we should consciously and designedly perpetuate?
Nothing is so lifeless as uniformity; and should it appear that our national peculiarities are neither discreditable to ourselves nor injurious to our neighbours, the additional variety which they give to the colouring of our insular existence might in itself be a sufficient argument for their preservation. The merest Cockney, when he crosses the Tweed, is pleased to feel that the moral as well as the physical landscape has cnanged, and that he has really done something more than pass over a bridge. But, for reasons which we shall presently explain, we believe that these peculiarities have a very much higher value than this, and that, if we can succeed in drawing a line of demarcation between the living and the dead amongst Scottish national characteristics, and in pointing to substantial interests for which Scotchmen may still legitimately contend, we shall confer a benefit on both nations, and a benefit which Englishmen will not be slow to appreciate.
Now, though the Scotch of Dr Johnson’s time may scarcely have realized the possibility' of separating the social and intellectual from the political nationality of Scotland, or of preserving the former without a tinge of the jealous and hostile feeling out of which both had arisen, it was, we believe, very much less to the loss of their autonomy than of their individuality that they objected. The Scotchmen of that day were by no means insensible to the benefits, at least to the material benefits, of the Union. But though they were willing to acknow ledge that the prosperity of Scotland had been increased, its distinctive character, they feared, had been destroyed for ever. It had become a better land, but not a better Scotland; for its improvement had consisted, not in a development of its native qualities, but in an imitation, of those of England. That such was the only avenue to prosperity and progress ror the future, was insultingly asserted by Dr Johnson, and the other English writers of whom he was the type ; and their own belief in the truth of the assertion formed the grievance of his Scottish contemporaries, and more or less of all the grumblers who have followed them. Sir Walter Scott was not a grumbler indeed, chiefly, perhaps, because he was not a politician; but there can be little doubt that he too entertained tne same misgivings as to the possibility of a separate social and intellectual, apart from a separate political life; and that from a romantic, picturesque,and, it may be, somewhat antiquarian pointof view, he mourned overit all his aays. That he, in what he considered his more sober mood, believed all the disadvantages attendant on the loss of a separate national life to have been counterbalanced by far greater benefits, is probable. We know that from English antipathies he was as free, and that he appreciated the great and good qualities of Englishmen as fully, as any non-Englishman that ever existed. He was one of tnose who established a classical school on the English model in Edinburgh, and he sent his most promising son to be educated in England. Still all this was done under a sort of secret protest. There was at the bottom of the whole a feeling that he was conforming to what, to a person of his condition, had become a triste necessity. If he had thought it possible that, without prejudice to their interests and their prospects as British subjects, his children could have retained the special character of Scottish in combination with the general character of European gentlefolks, there is very little doubt that he would have preferred it to "their becoming Englishmen“ with a difference.” Was he right in believing this to ne impossible?
There is one very common assumption which has much to do with the prevalence of this belief, and which we regard as altogether erroneous. It is generally taken for granted that the existence of a separate national character in Scotland depends on the preservation of the peculiar form in which the common language of Britain has been, and still to a considerable extent is, tnere spoken. To this view Lord Brougham’s very interesting note will no doubt tend to give increased currency (Note vii., p. 63 of Brougham’s Installation Address). But though we entirety concur with Lord Brougham in holding the dialect of Scotland to be a sister, not a daughter, of that of England,2 and are glad to find that so competent a judge entertains so high an opinion of its value, we must confess to the gravest misgivings as to the possibility of its preservation as a national speech. That it has keen gradually and steadily, though very slowly, disappearing, and has existed less and less in each successive generation since the Union, seems to us incontestable. At that period, probably, no Scotchman ever spoke English, except for the purpose of communicating with an Englishman, or with a view to the publication of his sentiments in England.9 Some fifty years later we find Smollett, in the character of honest Matthew Bramble, expressing his sense of the inconveniences attending the use of the Scottish dialect, and suggesting the propriety of “employing a few natives of England to teach the pronunciation of our vernacular tongue,” by whose instrumentality, he wfas persuaded, that in u twenty years there would be no difference in point of dialect between the youth of Edinburgh and of London.” Thirty years afterwards, Dr Johnson regarded this change as already in course of being effected. “The conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities wear fast away; their dialect is likely to become, in half a century, provincial and rustic even to themselves. The great, the learned, the ambitious, and the vain, all cultivate the English phrase and the English pronunciation, and in splendid companies Scotch is not much heard, except now and then from an old lady.” At first it seems as if this were only a somewhat bombastical account of our daily experience, but such is by no means the case; for, however general the use of English may have been, there can be no doubt that, at the time of Johnson’s visit, Scotch was the household tongue even of the higher middle classes when no Englishman was present. In the generation which followed, and to which Sir Walter Scott belonged, a much more important innovation took place. It was then for the first time that Scotch ceased to form the substance of the national speech, and came to be used as a sort of Doric salt to give pungency and variety to English, which, though still spoken with a very marked accentuation, was the sole language of business, and of graver social communication. At this period, however, Scotch, with all the characteristics of a separate dialect, was still usually spoken to servants, invariably by them; and, as a necessary consequence, very frequently by children of the higher classes. Within the last thirty years even this has been changed; the lowland Scotch have ceased to be a bi-lingual people, and the language of Bums, when spoken by the upper classes at all, is spoken, not spontaneously, but as a small tour de force. No Scotchman, as a general rule, speaks to servants otherwise in Edinburgh than he would do in London; . and the speech of the lower classes, in the capital at all events, is distinguished from that of England chiefly by a stronger colouring of the accent, which still retains its hold on the whole people. Lord Brougham’s statement, then, that Scotch is “a national language, used by the whole people in their early years, and by many learned and gifted persons throughout life,” is a tradition of the past. The tone of voice of a Scotchman and an Englishman is still strikingly dissimilar, but the words which they employ, and, in a great degree, the pronunciation, are identical. The English of Edinburgh now stands to the English of London, very much in the same relation that the French of Geneva does to the French of Paris.
But is it correct to assume that all these changes have resulted from the political union, or even from the increased intercourse between the two nations? Did the speech of any people ever remain unchanged for a century and a half? and is there any reason to suppose that an older and ruder spoken dialect would not have assimilated itself to a later and more accurate written dialect, in Scotland itself, during that period of time, without the intervention of any foreign cause? That some change would have occurred is certain; and that it would have been a change in the same direction, if not perhaps quite to the same extent, is scarcely more doubtful. The accent, which is influenced less by education than by habit, is what one would have expected to be chiefly affected by the increased intercourse with England, and it is the accent alone which has remained nearly unchanged. But even the accent has undergone modification, and it is not unlikely that, in the course of another generation, it also will, in a great degree, disappear from the speech of the educated classes. Already tnere is one unequivocal indication of the* insecurity of its hold, viz., that it is frequently exaggerated for a purpose. From a belief that it is popular with the lower orders, almost all Presbyterian clergymen use it in the pulpit more broadly than in their habitual speech ; and several of the grand old Scottish lawyers who have recently disappeared, certainly gave themselves some trouble to preserve it on the bench,—perhaps from a feeling that, as patriarchs and old-fashioned grandees, the tones of a former generation became them better than those of the present. In the mouths of the late Lord Mackenzie and the late Lord Cockburn, it certainly had a striking, and by no means unpleasing effect; and no one who has had the privilege of hearing the brief admonitions with which it was their custom to preface their sentences of transportation and of death, will lightly forget the masculine pathos which they thus contrived to communicate to the tidings. These two eminent persons were perhaps the last who positively added to the grandeur of their demeanour by their use of the Scottish accent; for even in their case it was accent merely,—what they said, when written down, being, in point of language, nothing but vexy simple and terse, if sometimes quaint English.
Making all due allowance, then, for the accidents of individual influence and for the caprices of fashion,—talcing into account the possibility of another Scottish poet, the probability of another gifted judge or two with antiquarian leanings, and the still greater likelihood of a Scoto-mania which, in place of kilts and Skye terriers, shall have the dialect of Scotland for its object,—we may still, without much rashness, assume that, in less than a century, there will be neither dialect nor accent by which to distinguish an educated Scotchman from an educated Englishman. There will still be Cockneys in London, and the lower class of Edinburgbers will be distinguished from Londoners, and from Englishmen in general, by what will still be called Scotch, but which in reality will resemble the standard dialect of the whole people quite as closely as the speech of the inhabitants of any of the provincial towns of England. Now, when this occurrence takes place, will every other characteristic by which Scotchmen are known likewise disappear; or will they, by being at length put fully in possession of what we must pay our neighbours the compliment of assuming to be a more finished language, be only enabled thereby to give fuller and freer expression to intellectual and moral peculiarities by which they are, and will continue to be, distinguished from the inhabitants of South Britain?
An answer to this question involves, to a certain extent, an anticipation of the future, and we are folly aware of the risk of error that attends all attempts at predicting the course of national events. Other assimilating influences besides identity of speech may intervene, and these influences may be not only of a kind which we should least of all expect in the particular instance, but, in an age and a country so progessive, they may be of a kind of which mankind hitherto has had no experience anywhere. All the length to which we can go with safety is to assert that, if there be a raaical and essential distinction between the genius of Scotchmen and of Englishmen, that distinction lies deeper than differences either of institutions or of speech, is their cause more probably than their effect, and in all likelihood will survive their total disappearance.
Is there, then, such a distinction as we here speak of between the inhabitants of the two divisions of this island? We reply in the affirmative, without hesitation and without reluctance, because, for reasons which will be presently apparent, we believe the difference to be of such a kind as to render the one national character the complement of the other. How far this diversity of type may have arisen from original or pre-historic diversity of blood,3 and how far it has been the result of the different circumstances of the two nations, and the different relations in which they have stood to other nations during the course of centuries which are within the range of authentic history, it would perhaps be impossible, and is not very important for our purpose, to determine. Its existing characteristics are what concern us here, and we shall endeavour to state them, not from preconceived notions of what might be anticipated, but from actual observation of what is.
It appears to us, then, that the Scottish intellect is more intense, more generally active, but in its highest manifestations less complete, than the English. This latter feature is usually attributed to certain imperfections in the higher educational institutions of Scotland, which are at present m the way of being removed. We believe that it is not wholly attributable to this cause, because we think we have observed that it is not greatly affected by an education almost exclusively English.
But, if less perfect in degree, Scottish intellect is more frequently high in kind. There is a greater number of Scotchmen lan of Englishmen, in proportion, who get beyond the condition of being mere recipients of knowledge. The tendency to generalize and form new combinations of thought is less the exception in Scotland. Speculation thus lies nearer to Scotchmen; they are more apt to betake themselves to the region of principle, and consequently they begin more and finish less than Englishmen. The germ of a discovery is, and will probably continue to be, very often Scotch, its completed form English; and in this respect the two nations seem destined, as it were, to play into each other’s hands.
Many illustrations might be mentioned, and many consequences pointed out, of this more general thoughtfulness of the Scotch as a nation. The Scotchman is more conscious and less spontaneous than the Englishman; and this peculiarity frequently exhibits itself in a species of mawoaise honte, which sometimes betrays him into awkwardness, and which, at other times, he conceals by an affectation of indifference, which exceeds even that for which the English are proverbial.
But a more important consequence is a tendency to run into logical extremes, and to carry out principles with a rigour and exclusiveness which shut out many of the incidental considerations which come to be important in shaping a course of action. This tendency, which is tnoroughly un-English, constituted the chief point of resemblance between the Scotch and their ancient allies the French. It exhibits itself both in politics and religion. A Scotchman’s political creed is more finished, more logically worked out and rounded off, more scientific, than an Englishman’s; but on that very account, perhaps, it is frequently less suited to the multifarious and contradictory requirements of human affairs. The “freedom” which “Broadens slowly down from precedent to precedent,” and which aims at no greater symmetry in its ultimate form than it exhibited at the various stages of its formation, has been an English conception from the first. The Scotchman has always some political theory, however imperfect; there is always a trace of thinking, and, as the result of it, the outline of some sort of scheme at the bottom of his views of life; and he never can get rid of the expectation that something like an ideal state of matters is to come about at last. According to him, political arrangements are to be fitted to social requirements—society is to be brought into harmony with ethical conceptions; and these, as they spring up in the natural man, are to be purified and elevated by Christian influences. The life of the ordinary Englishman, even the educated Englishman, is the reverse of all this. He lives de jour en jour, does his duty, eats his dinner, reads his Greek chorus and scans it, all with great relish and respectability, and never troubles himself about the end at all. And really, if men are to be but men at the end, as they were at the beginning, perhaps he is right. Still an extreme is possible on his side also: it is possible to exclude the influences of human reason from human affairs to an extent that God never designed, and that He will not bless: and if this is a contingency worth guarding against, it will be averted, we believe, more effectually by the intervention of a section of the same community, whose tendencies run in the opposite direction, than by any other means. The manner in which the genius of the one people supplements that of the other in this respect, is very apparent. The Scotchman brings back politics from a blind groping after the expedient to the region of principle; he urges the necessity of taking an observation, ascertaining our course, and looking at the chart which human possibilities has marked out, lest we heedlessly run our heads against some universal principle of nature, or some unalterable law of social life. The Englishman, though somewhat averse to the proceeding in the first instance, ultimately acquiesces in its propriety, and comes to the aid of the Scotchman with his precedents drawn from the rich treasury of a “land of old and just renown,” precisely at the point where his interposition is wanted. He points out to the Scotchman nnmberless sources of error, which his more limited experience might never have suggested; or, perhaps, availing himself of the hint which his neighbour’s too hasty generalization afforded, takes the task of observation into his own hands, and performs it with far greater completeness than he could have done.
In proof of the correctness of the view which we have taken of the political tendencies of Scotchmen, it may be mentioned that their representatives in Parliament are, as a body, less conservative than the English. From being more abstract, the Scotch are likewise, we fear, less loyal. Cousin has remarked, as a consequence of their more thoughtful temper, that they remained unaffected by the intoxication of loyalty which succeeded the Restoration; and it is certain that, whatever may have been the devotion of the Highlanders, the Lowland Scotch exhibited all along very little attachment to, or reverence for, the persons of their native princes. The cause, unquestionably, was no want either in veneration or imagination, but a greater facility in separating the person from the office, which their habits of abstraction nad given them.
We have said that the tendency of which we speak exhibits itself in the religious as well as the political peculiarities of the Scotch. Their aaoption of, and unswerving adherence to, the most logical of all the reformed creeds might be mentioned, and often has been mentioned, as an instance. Another occurs to us which we do not remember to have seen noticed, but which is not less in point. There are thousands of Englishmen who believe in the real presence in the Holy Sacrament, in a sense differing not in degree only, but in kind, from the presence of Christ in prayer; and still they do not believe in transubstantiation or consubstantia-tion, and are in no danger of being led into any express or definite statement of what they do believe. They are perfectly contented to rest in an indefinite belief in something mysterious. With Scotchmen this is never the case; and, consequently, the moment that a Scotchman abandons the theory of a mere commemorative rite, his soul can find no rest till it arrives at a theoiy equally definite. He strides on boldly and fearlessly in the direction of transubstantiation.
Another peculiarity of the Scotch, in some degree, perhaps, attributable to the same tendency in the direction of the abstract, but far more, no doubt, to their historical antecedents, is, that they are less insular than the English,—that is to say, they differ less from the general type of Europeans. Much of the Scottish national character has all along been negative; it has consisted in an adaptability to the habits and modes of thought of other nations. On the Continent, the Scotch mark themselves far less strongly, and conform to foreign ways more easily and naturally, than the English. A continentalized Scotchman is a character with whom every one who has resided on the Continent is familiar; a continentalized Englishman, if not an unknown, is a veiy unusual phenomenon. The historical cause to which we have mainly ascribed this peculiarity is one which acts not as a tradition merely, but as a present influence. The Scotchman is not thrown back, like the Englishman, to seek for his continental sympathies in shadowy recollections of a connection, the traces of which have been obliterated by centuries of hostility and intentional divergence. He finds, on his arrival on the Continent, that his religion does not differ in essentials from that of a very large body, perhaps the largest body, of continental Protestants; that he has been accustomed to a legal system, in which a common origin with the systems of most of the continental nations is readily distinguishable, which for centuries had a common development with that of France, and which still ha as terminology ana nomenclature closely resembling it.4 The philosophical speculation of France in the beginning of last century was that which led to, and the philosophical speculation of Germany of the end of last and beginning of the present century was that which resulted from, the native school of speculative thought, in which, if he is an educated man, he has been trained, and if he is an uneducated man, he has unconsciously imbibed. Even in minor matters he is less a stranger than the Englishman. He has been educated at a University constituted after the con • tinental model, and he has been taught to pronounce the learned languages in a manner not essentially differing from that in which they are pronounced by continentals; nay, more, his mode of doing so, and even of speaking English, is such as to facilitate his acquisition both of the Romanic and the Teutonic languages of the Continent. The consequence of all this is, that when a Scotchman has acquired the language either of France or of Germany, he is no longer a stranger, either in his own eyes or in those of the people with whom he comes in contact. the national meaning of it, as it seems to us, is, that he should act as a connecting link between England, of which he is an integral part, and the nations thus allied to him in spirit.
For this purpose it is desirable that we should not attempt to eradicate, but rather to preserve and foster, those ancient ties of kindred and association oy which Scotland is bound to the Continent of Europe. Let the legal system of Scotland go on perfecting itself, not by an exclusive imitation of that of England, but by a development of its own original principles, keeping an open eye to the progress of those systems from which it was derived, and to which it still bears many features of resemblance. It will thus continue to have something to teach, as well as much to learn from, the wider experience of England. Let the schools and universities of Scotland, throwing off their imperfections, and, if possible, their poverty, still continue to lean in form, as they have done hitherto, more towards the general European than the exceptional English type. In this case, in place of rivalling, certainly unsuccessfully, the ancient and wealtny establishments of England, they will come to supplement them by representing phases of mental activity with which they cannot deal so conveniently, and with which probably most Englishmen would not think it desirable that they should intermeddle. What is best and soundest in continental thought will thus be prepared to amalgamate with that of England, by passing through an intermediate process of gradual nationalization; and those of the vouth of England who desire to become acquainted with it will have a mode of access more easy than direct contact opened to them by the schools and universities of the sister kingdom. Lord Brougham mentioned the great resort of foreigners to the University of Edinburgh as one of the leading characteristics of the institution.5 When, in addition to the fact that Edinburgh has all along been a sort of educational commune forum of the nations, we bear in mind that the Scotch themselves have by no means abandoned their ancient custom of visiting foreign schools of learning for purposes of study,* we shall have in view the two chief causes of such peculiarities of intellectual character as they still exhibit, and the two chief grounds of hope, that, notwithstanding the levelling effects of tM Union, they may retain their distinctive features unchanged.
Very much in the same manner as in her educational institutions, we can see, in the peculiar development which Protestantism has taken in Scotland, a source of benefit to England; and to that far greater nation throughout the world which speaks the tongue, owns the traditions, ana in some degree responds to the influences of England. The Scotch are, and, as a nation, certainly will continue to be, Calvinists and Presbyterians. To whatever extent the highest class, from English sympathies, from convenience, or other motives, may be now, or may hereafter become Episcopalians, let us not commit so egregious a blunder as to expect that the body of the people will abandon, however greatly they may modify, forms of belief and of Church government which they adopted deliberately, to which they have adhered so stoutly, and which, in so many ways, are in harmony with their national genius. But even this peculiarity, which High Churchmen of course must regard, if not as a fault, at the very least as an unalloyed misfortune, may possibly present itself in a very different light to English Episcopalians of more moderate and more liberal tendencies. To them it may not seem a matter of regret, that, at the other end of the island, there should be those who, by principle and practice, in form and in substance, keep alive a perpetual protest against the errors to which their own creed, and, still more, their own form of Church government, is unquestionably prone. However little they may relish Presbyterianism themselves, they may not be sorry that others should like it better, when they find it protecting the Church of England from clangers from within far more serious than any with which it menaces her from without.
But let us return to the educational institutions of Scotland, for it is on them that Scottish nationality, if it is to be intellectual, must be mainly dependent for its life. The time has not yet arrived for criticising the proceedings of the subsisting University Commission. All that can be said of it at present is, that, by giving a freer constitution to the universities, it has done something to attract public attention to the exceedingly defective condition of all the faculties which they contain, excepting only the medical faculty in Edinburgh, and, perhaps, in Glasgow. If the Commissioners fail to supply deficiencies of the existence of which the public must now gradually become aware, and to place the faculties of arts and theology in all the universities, and of law in Edinburgh, on something like a footing of equality with the corresponding faculties in the other European universities which are organized on the professional system, it is, we should hope, by no means improbable that the influence of public opinion will ultimately supplement their labours. In so far, again, as they may withdraw the universities of Scotland from the general European type, and assimilate them to the great insular establishments of the sister kingdom, they will, if the view which we have taken of the character of Scottish national life be the correct one, commit a blunder which it may not be so easy to rectify. The immediate effect of such a proceeding will be to set the Scottish universities in rivalry with institutions with which, on their own ground, they cannot hope to contend on equal terms, and to deprive them of the distinctive character to which, in so great a measure, they have hitherto been indebted for their prosperity. In so far as this tendency goes (and we grieve to say there are indications of its going far), it will simply rob Scotland of a portion of what still remains to her of her national life, and deprive England of the supplementary intellectual life, which the distinctive character of the educational institutions of her neighbour at present affords her. The object which Englishmen have hitherto had in frequenting our Scottish seats of learning will be taken away, ana foreigners will, naturally and properly, prefer the genuine indigenous institutions of England, to such spurious and attenuated imitations of them as alone we can possibly hope to produce in Scotland. But we must not anticipate disasters.
There are two subjects which we regard as of very great importance in their bearings on the higher instruction, and, as such, on the intellectual nationality of Scotland, which are left untouched by the University Bill, and w’hich will probably remain for discussion when the Commissioners have terminated their labours. The one is the question as to the expediency of introducing, or rather of resuscitating, the system of collegiate residence in connection with the universities of Scotland; the other, an examination into the condition of the grammar schools, both in themselves and in their effects on the universities. The latter subject, which clearly fell beyond the scope of the University Bill, will, we hope, at no distant period, secure the attention of the Legislature, it is our belief that, in the matter of accurate scholarship at all events, the defects of Scottish education are rooted, not in the universities, but in the schools. Scholarship, in that sense, is a commodity which cannot be manufactured at a university either in Scotland or anywhere else; but there is no good and sufficient reason why it should not be, though many obvious and adequate explanations why it is not, produced in the schools of Scotland as it is in those of England and Germany. As regards the grammar schools, just as in the case of the universities of Scotland, no revolution is called for, and no institutions that are new or alien to those with which the countiy is familiar are requisite. There is no necessity for calling into existence an Eton or Harrow, a German Gymnasium, or even an Edinburgh Academy, in every provincial town. In all the county towns, and in a good many others, there are Grammar Schools, already, where the learned languages and the mathematics are taught. Far from being novelties, some of them are the very oldest educational institutions of the whole country. They exist, however, in very various states of efficiency, some of them being already very respectable classical schools, others differing in little else than in size from the ordinary parish schools of Scotland. Let these grammar schools, then, be brought under some sort of system, and let a function be assigned to them permanently distinct from that of the parish schools, so that they shall come to be recognised as stepping stones between the latter and the universities; let the salaries of their rectors be increased, either by a grant from the imperial treasury or from the corporations of the towns in which they are situated, or partly from the one source and partly from the other, but so as to secure, in every case, the services of at least one highly-educated and cultivated man, and where the extent of the school is such as to call for it, let him be furnished with one or more duly qualified and adequately remunerated assistants. Scarcely anything more is needed for the attainment of what we believe will be admitted to be for Scotland, and if for Scotland, then for the whole empire, an object of the very highest importance. In three or four of the larger towns, collegiate schools of a more complete description would inevitably arise out of, even if they did not form part of, such an arrangement.
The other subject to which we referred, that of collegiate or common residence for students, is one which rai^ht, though we scarcely hope that it will, be dealt with by the existing Commissioners, under the general powers which are granted to them to “ make rules for the management and ordering of the universities, and the manner of teaching therein.” It was less discussed during the University Reform agitation in Scotland tliau many other subjects of far inferior importance, not from insensibility to its significance on the part of the leaders of the movement, but chiefly, we believe, from a fear of dividing the suffrages of the general public, who were apparently agreed as to the propriety of the other measures of reform which were proposed. But now that the adoption of these measures must in the meantime be supposed to be secured, it may not be premature to commence the consideration of a question which, though possibly not calling for immediate decision, certainly merits that we should spare no pains in order ultimately to decide it with adequate forethought and information. We have no disposition to disagree with Lord Brougham as to the "great benefits that attend our plan of home instead of college residence,” as regards students whose parents are inhabitants of the town in which they study. But it is not between the advantages of home and of college residence that the question arises, but between those of college residence and of totally different arrangements which still less possess the characteristics of home.
It is probably known to most of our readers even in England, that the students at the Scottish universities, when not living with their parents, usually reside either in furnished lodgings or are boarded in private families, generally the former, and in either case entirely beyond the cognisance of the university authorities. From the hour at which their last lecture terminates in the afternoon, till that at which their first lecture commences the following moniing, nay, even between the hours of lecture, if they quit the college walls, these lads, commonly far younger than undergraduates at Oxford, have no more connection either with university or college than the other citizens of the town. The arrangement belongs, no doubt, to the continental university system, which has been adopted in Scotland with so much advantage in so many other particulars. But in all the universities of Scotland, with the exception of Edinburgh, and in some of those of the Continent, it is a modern innovation; and the question to be determined is, whether it is an improvement on the ancient system of residence, or the reverse! We believe it to be the latter, for the following reasons:-
It destroys the corporate feeling which exists so strongly in the Collegiate Residence.
English universities, and in so many ways conduces to the education (we use the word as opposed to instruction) which they communicate. In this respect, no meetings of General Councils, elections of Lord Rectors, or the like, can possibly supply the place of the daily and intimate social intercourse of years. Again, if it be possible to distinguish between moral and social training, the abolition of the collegiate system has deprived the student of the latter in even a greater degree than of the former, and is no doubt the cause of so many yonths quitting the universities of Scotland without carrying along with them qualities which are as indispensable as positive knowledge, or even moral worth, to a becoming and successful performance of the duties which, in old and refined societies, devolve on members of the professional class. Then, as regards knowledge itself,—from not becoming acquainted with each other, Scottish students are deprived of one of the most efficient means of intellectual training, viz., that sharpening of the wits which, under more favourable circumstances, young men seldom fail to communicate to each other. No direct teaching machinery can adequately supply this defect, for the simple reason that no teacher, whether professor or tutor, can enter into the difficulties and seize the points of view which are possible to his students, so easily and so fully as they can do for each other. An interchange of thought between the more and less advanced or capable, in different departments, thus becomes a positive means of progress. Solitude, moreover, which exercises a depressing effect on the spirits of most men at all periods of life, has a particularly baneful influence on those of the young, and often acts on the more thoughtful students in a manner which is prejudicial both to mental and bodily health.
Several of these objections do not apply to the same extent in the case of the smaller universities either of Scotland or of Germany; but in Edinburgh and Berlin they reach a height which warrants us in regarding them as very serious evils. The same, probably, is the case wherever universities are situated in great cities, for of all solitudes that of a crowd is the saddest. The present writer knows the students of the University of London only by external observation on one single occasion; but if appearances then were not very deceptive, his observations are by no means inapplicable to their case. By youths of a more masculine and hopeful temper, the woes of solitude are warded off too frequently at the expense of running into dissipation. When lads of this description reside in lodgings, and no restraint is placed on their youtnful propensities, the consequences are often very deplorable. Nor is the case mended when they live in families, where, from the purest and worthiest motives, their habits are often injudiciously interfered with. There is a period of life between boyhood and manhood, when the individual character is forming itself, during which the restraints of family life are distasteful to most young men, when they conflict with habits and interrupt occupations, which, though not very orderly, are not necessarily vicious, and lead to disagreeable occurrences for which nobody is altogether to blame, ana which every one regrets. For this reason we believe that, of the two arrangements which alone are open to them in Scotland at present, that of furnished lodgings is generally to be preferred to family boarding.
The evils which we have enumerated, as it seems to us, can be avoided only by that judicious and moderate restraint which collegiate residence renders it easy to combine with social intercourse, and individual freedom and independence of action.
The objection which is commonly made to the adoption of the residence system in Scotland is the difficulty of adapting it to the circumstances of the very poor; and the objection is strengthened by referring to the still recent experience of St Andrews, where a certain old building, in which the poorer students were permitted to reside, is remembered, not as a centre of frugal comfort and refined enjoyment, but as a scene of veiy deplorable slovenliness, degenerating at last, it is said, into a positive “ pauper warren.”6 The force of the objection, as it seems to us, would be at once avoided if a style of living were adopted and adhered to, which, though perfectly simple ana unpretending, was still comfortable and gentlemanly, and if residence were then declared to be altogether voluntary,—an advantage which was offered to those whose circumstances permitted them to avail themselves of it, but by no means a regulation which was enforced on all. No greater indignity would be inflicted on the poorer students by a portion of their fellow-students living in common in a style slightly, it might be, beyond their means, than by the same persons living separately in private houses to which they have no access, and, in Edinburgh, even in a part of the town which they rarely visit. In the former case, some bond of union would exist in the fact of the place of residence being open to all who could afford to avail themselves of it; and by permitting the non-resident students to dine at the common table, as in Dublin, either regularly or occasionally; by compelling the use of an academic dress (if possible, not that of the English universities); attendance on the college chapel on Sundays; and similar arrangements,—this bond might veiy easily be strengthened and drawn closer.
It is worthy of consideration, moreover, that there is at all times a large class, probably the majority, of students at the Scottish universities whose circumstances place them between the extremes of riches and poverty. As Defoe said of their country, they are "Poor compared to rich, and rich compared to poor.”
To this class, collegiate residence, besides offering the advantages we have enumerated, would be a positive saving of money. The style of living would be pretty nearly that which they at present adopt, and, other things being equal, it has been established by the widest experience in all conditions, from London clubs to sailors’ homes, that men can always live more economically in bodies than as isolated individuals. By the courtesy of the superintendents of some of the Dissenting colleges in England, and also of the more recent establishments in connection with the Church, we have been able to ascertain the expense of living in these institutions; and we can assert with confidence, that it is generally greatly under thatfor which the same amount of personal comfort can be procured by the solitary student in Edinburgh. For sums ranging between fifty and seventy pounds a-vear, it has been found possible to furnish, even in London, all the comforts to which youths of this class are generally accustomed. If we state the expenses of a student of the same class in Edinburgh, under the present arrangements, at between seventy and a hundred pounds, we believe we shall be rather under than over the experience of their parents.
Finally, it seems to us that there are external defects in the national character of the Scotch, which, in a rather special manner, call for the mitigating influences of early and familiar intercourse with persons of refinement. Just as in the weightier matters to which we previously referred, so there is in trines a national tendency to run into extremes. A high-bred Scotchman perhaps exhibits in manner more ofpositive politeness than an Englishman, and there is a more finished, but at the same time a more conscious, elegance about his personal equipments and domestic belongings. The whole thing is often very exquisite. But the great boay of the nation, those to whom the character of “canny Scots”7 is more peculiarly applicable, do not willingly sacrifice to the graces. There are a thousand little arrangements by which ordinary life is brightened and beautified in England and on the Continent, which, as a general rule, one misses north of the Tweed. In Scotland there is a bareness of all beyond what is dictated by absolute utility, which is not pleasant, and, perhaps, not wise; and, corresponding to this, there is in the people a singular hardness and angularity of manner,—
“A manly surliness, with temper mix’d,
Is on their meanest countenances fix’d.”
In their anxiety to leave no mistake about the fortiter in the suaviter in modo is too frequently forgotten; and we can imagine nothing which would be more likely to convince them of the propriety, or more suited to habituate them to the practice of their union, than the custom of seating themselves daily during those years when the external manifestations, as well as the internal essence, of character are formed, at a table presided over by those whose occupation it was to teach, and surrounded by those whose object it was to learn, “the humanities.”
Expressions and tokens of affection which mark the intercourse of friends ana relatives in other countries, and amongst his own countrymen of the other class, seem to him foolish, if not wicked. In his intercourse with the external world, even when he is neither shy nor awkward, he is remarkable for an absence of manner and gesticulation. His leading characteristics seem to be, and to some extent are, caution, moderation, and an aversion to whatever he has not been accustomed to under the paternal roof. The Scot of the second class is the reverse of aU this. He exhibits his feelings more freely than an Englishman, and is less reserved in his general intercourse with the world; he has more manner and gesticulation, and, so far from being averse to foreign usages, has even an affinity for them, or, at all events, a very decided facility in acquiring them. The first is the general character of the Scot in Scotland; the second, of the Scot extra Scotiam agens. They are not the result of any diversity of blood, lineage, or even altogether of social position, but partly of the diversities of individual temperament, and the accidents of education; and, still more, of the tendency to carry matters to extremes, which we have already noted as an intellectual peculiarity of the whole people. |
