he boy
of the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself
to games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily
transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in mind
and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser and a
less romantic sense of life and of the future, and more immersed in
present circumstances. And certainly, for one thing, English boys are
younger for their age. Sabbath observance makes a series of grim, and
perhaps serviceable, pauses in the tenor of Scottish boyhood--days of
great stillness and solitude for the rebellious mind, when in the dearth
of books and play, and in the intervals of studying the Shorter
Catechism, the intellect and senses prey upon and test each other. The
typical English Sunday, with a huge midday dinner and the plethoric
afternoon, leads perhaps to different results. About the very cradle of
the Scot there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity; and the whole of two
divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two first
questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely inquiring, "What
is your name?" the Scottish striking at the very roots of life with,
"What is the chief end of man?" and answering nobly, if obscurely, "To
glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever." I do not wish to make an idol
of the Shorter Catechism; but the fact of such a question being asked
opens to us Scots a great field of speculation; and the fact that it is
asked of all of us, from the peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly
together. No Englishman of Byron's age, character, and history would
have had patience for long theological discussions on the way to fight
for Greece; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days
kept their influence to the end. We have spoken of the material
conditions; nor need much more be said of these: of the land lying
everywhere more exposed, of the wind always louder and bleaker, of the
black, roaring winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone cities,
imminent on the windy seaboard; compared with the level streets, the
warm colouring of the brick, the domestic quaintness of the
architecture, among which English children begin to grow up and come to
themselves in life. As the stage of the University approaches, the
contrast becomes more express. The English lad goes to Oxford or
Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens, to lead a semi-scenic
life, costumed, disciplin