wild clans, and hunted Covenanters. Breaths come to him in
song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories
in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of
oatmeal, who rode so swiftly and lived so sparely on their raids.
Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise, and constant resolution are the fibres of
the legend of his country's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland
have been tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish
history--Flodden, Darien, or the Forty-five--were still either failures
or defeats; and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the
Bruce combine with the very smallness of the country to teach rather a
moral than a material criterion for life. Britain is altogether small,
the mere taproot of her extended empire; Scotland, again, which alone
the Scottish boy adopts in his imagination, is but a little part of
that, and avowedly cold, sterile, and unpopulous. It is not so for
nothing. I once seemed to have perceived in an American boy a greater
readiness of sympathy for lands that are great, and rich, and growing,
like his own. It proved to be quite otherwise: a mere dumb piece of
boyish romance, that I had lacked penetration to divine. But the error
serves the purpose of my argument; for I am sure, at least, that the
heart of young Scotland will be always touched more nearly by paucity of
number and Spartan poverty of life.

So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained. That Shorter
Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was yet composed
in the city of Westminster. The division of races is more sharply marked
within the borders of Scotland itself than between the countries.
Galloway and Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber, are like foreign parts; yet
you may choose a man from any of them, and, ten to one, he shall prove
to have the headmark of a Scot. A century and a half ago the Highlander
wore a different costume, spoke a different language, worshipped in
another church, held different morals, and obeyed a different social
constitution from his fellow-countrymen either of the south or north.
Even the English, it is recorded, did not loathe the Highlander and the
Highland costume as they were loathed by the remainder of the Scots. Yet
the Highlander felt himself a Scot. He would willingly raid into the
Scottish lowlands; but his courage failed him at the border, and he
regarded England as a perilous, unhomely land. When th