d plummet, which it is ever perilous to
overhang. Very extensive territorial properties, wherever they exist,
create almost necessarily--human nature being what it is--a species of
despotism more oppressive than even that of great unrepresentative
governments. It used to be remarked on the Continent, that there was
always less liberty in petty principalities, where the eye of the ruler
was ever on his subjects, than under the absolute monarchies.[23] And in
a country such as ours, the accumulation of landed property in the hands
of comparatively a few individuals has the effect often of bringing the
territorial privileges of the great landowner into a state of
antagonism with the civil and religious rights of the people, that
cannot be other than perilous to the landowner himself. In a district
divided, like Orkney, among many owners, a whole country-side could not
be shut up against its people by some ungenerous or intolerant
proprietor,--greatly at his own risk and to his own hurt,--as in the
case of Glen Tilt or the Grampians; nor, when met for purposes of public
worship, could the population of a parish be chased from off its bare
moors, at his instance, by the constable or the sheriff-officer, to
worship God agreeably to their consciences amid the mire of a
cross-road, or on the bare sea-beach uncovered by the ebb of the tide.
The smaller properties of the country, too, served admirably as
stepping-stones, by which the proprietors or their children, when
possessed of energy and intellect, could mount to a higher walk of
society. Here beside me, for instance, was my friend Mr. Garson, a
useful and much-esteemed minister of religion in his native district;
while his brother, a medical man of superior parts, was fast rising into
extensive practice in the neighboring town. They had been prepared for
their respective professions by a classical education; and yet the
stepping-stone to positions in society at once so important and so
respectable was simply one of the smaller holdings of Orkney, derived to
them as the descendants of one of the old Scandinavian Udallers, and
which fell short, I was informed, of a hundred a-year.

Mr. Garson's dwelling, to which I was welcomed with much hospitality by
his mother and sisters, occupies the middle of an inclined hollow or
basin, so entirely surrounded by low, moory hills, that at no
point,--though the radius of the prospect averages from four to six
miles,--does it command a vi