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 The
author does not attempt elaborate word-pictures, that would seem pale
beside the artist's colouring. His design has been, as accompaniment to
these beautiful landscapes, an outline of Scotland's salient features,
with glimpses at its history, national character, and customs, and at the
literature that illustrates this country for the English-speaking world.
While taking the reader on a fireside tour through the varying "airts" of
his native land, he has tried to show how its life, silken or homespun, is
a tartan of more intricate pattern than appears in certain crude
impressions struck off by strangers. And into his own web have been woven
reminiscences, anecdotes, and borrowed brocade such as may make
entertaining stripes and checks upon a groundwork of information. The
mainland only is dealt with in this volume, which it is intended to follow
up with another on the Highlands and Islands.
Chapters
Robert
Hope Moncrieff
The Highlands and Islands of Scotland
Painted by W Smith Junior, Described by A R Hope
Moncrieff
Preface
IN Bonnie Scotland was promised a further volume that
should be devoted to the sterner and wilder aspects of Caledonia. That
book dealt with the main body of Highlands and Lowlands, more familiar to
the gentle tourist for whose patronage it was a candidate. This one, whose
title might have been qualified as West Highlands, deals with the less
visited side that is still Highland indeed, both in ruder natural features
and in a life holding out longer against the trimming and taming of
Sassenach intromissions. The author, as before, has tried to weave a
pattern of entertaining stripes and checks upon a groundwork of
information. all making a darker-hued tartan than is worn in the centre of
Bonnie Scotland. Another metaphor would put it that he has prepared a
brisk, perhaps frothy, but, it is hoped, not unpalatable, brew of "heather-ale," which contains in solution more solid ingredients than may
be manifest to every reader.
Contents
The Heart of
Scotland
Painted by Sutton Palmer, Described by A. R> Hope Moncrieff
Preface
"Bonnie Scotland" pleased
so many readers that it came to be supplemented by another volume
dwelling mainly on the western "Highlands and Islands," which was
illustrated in a different style to match their wilder and mistier
features. Such an addition gave the author's likeness of Scotland a
somewhat lop-sided effect; and to balance this list he has prepared a
third volume dealing with the trimmer and richer, yet not less
picturesque region oftenest visited by strangers—that is, Perthshire and
its borders. This is shown to be the Heart of Scotland, not only as
containing its most famous scenery, but as best blending Highland and
Lowland charms, and as having made a focus of the national life and
history. Pict and Scot, Celt and Sassenach, king and vassal, mailed
baron and plaided chief, cateran and farmer, Jacobite and Hanoverian,
gauger and smuggler, Kirk and Secession, here in turn carried on a
series of struggles whose incidents should be well known through the
Waverley Novels. But these famous romances seem too little known to
hasty readers of to-day; and some glimpses of Perthshire's past life may
not prove over familiar at least to strangers in a county where the
author is at home.
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