who, by the
way, are an English clergyman, a circumstance we had entirely forgotten,
and have published a Discourse against Drunkenness, dedicated to a
Bishop) pour forth the Lamentations of Jeremiah over the sinful
multitude of Small Stills! Hypocrisy! hypocrisy! where shalt thou hide
thy many-coloured sides?

Whisky is found by experience to be, on the whole, a blessing in so
misty and mountainous a country. It destroys disease and banishes death;
without some such stimulant the people would die of cold. You will see a
fine old Gael, of ninety or a hundred, turn up his little finger to a
caulker with an air of patriarchal solemnity altogether scriptural; his
great-grandchildren eyeing him with the most respectful affection, and
the youngest of them toddling across the floor, to take the quaich from
his huge, withered, and hairy hand, which he lays on the amiable
Joseph's sleek craniology, with a blessing heartier through the
Glenlivet, and with all the earnestness of religion. There is no
disgrace in getting drunk--in the Highlands--not even if you are of the
above standing--for where the people are so poor, such a state is but of
rare occurrence; while it is felt all over the land of sleet and snow,
that a 'drap o' the cretur' is a very necessary of life, and that but
for its 'dew' the mountains would be uninhabitable. At fairs, and
funerals, and marriages, and suchlike merry meetings, sobriety is sent
to look after the sheep; but, except on charitable occasions of that
kind, sobriety stays at home among the peat-reek, and is contented with
crowdy. Who that ever stooped his head beneath a Highland hut would
grudge a few gallons of Glenlivet to its poor but unrepining inmates?
The seldomer they get drunk the better--and it is but seldom they do so;
but let the rich man--the monied moralist, who bewails and begrudges the
Gael a modicum of the liquor of life, remember the doom of a certain
Dives, who, in a certain place that shall now be nameless, cried, but
cried in vain, for a drop of water. Lord bless the Highlanders, say we,
for the most harmless, hospitable, peaceable, brave people that ever
despised breeches, blew pibrochs, took invincible standards, and
believed in the authenticity of Ossian's poems. In that pure and lofty
region ignorance is not, as elsewhere, the mother of vice--penury cannot
repress the noble rage of the mountaineer as "he sings aloud old songs
that are the music of the heart;" while superstit