t.

In looking at an extensive prospect, or travelling through a large vale,
the Trough of the Clyde for instance, I could not help thinking that in
England there would have been somewhere a tower or spire to warn us of a
village lurking under the covert of a wood or bank, or to point out some
particular spot on the distant hills which we might look at with kindly
feelings. I well remember how we used to love the little nest of trees
out of which Ganton spire rose on the distant Wolds opposite to the
windows at Gallow Hill. The spire of Inverary is not of so beautiful a
shape as those of the English churches, and, not being one of a class of
buildings which is understood at once, seen near or at a distance, is a
less interesting object; but it suits well with the outlandish trimness
of the buildings bordering on the water; indeed, there is no one thing of
the many gathered together in the extensive circuit of the basin or vale
of Inverary, that is not in harmony with the effect of the whole place.
The Castle is built of a beautiful hewn stone, in colour resembling our
blue slates. The author-tourists have quarrelled with the architecture
of it, but we did not find much that we were disposed to blame. A castle
in a deep glen, overlooking a roaring stream, and defended by precipitous
rocks, is, no doubt, an object far more interesting; but, dropping all
ideas of danger or insecurity, the natural retinue in our minds of an
ancient Highland chieftain,--take a Duke of Argyle at the end of the
eighteenth century, let him have his house in Grosvenor Square, his
London liveries, and daughters glittering at St. James's, and I think you
will be satisfied with his present mansion in the Highlands, which seems
to suit with the present times and its situation, and that is indeed a
noble one for a modern Duke of the mountainous district of Argyleshire,
with its bare valleys, its rocky coasts, and sea lochs.

There is in the natural endowments of Inverary something akin to every
feature of the general character of the county; yet even the very
mountains and the lake itself have a kind of princely festivity in their
appearance. I do not know how to communicate the feeling, but it seemed
as if it were no insult to the hills to look on them as the shield and
enclosure of the ducal domain, to which the water might delight in
bearing its tribute. The hills near the lake are smooth, so smooth that
they might have been shaven or swept;