This is generous, for we are not
blind to the fact of England being the most beautiful land on all the
earth. What are our woods to hers! To hers, what are our single trees!
We have no such glorious standards to show as her indomitable and
everlasting oaks. She is all over sylvan--Scotland but here and there;
look on England from any point in any place, and you see she is rich,
from almost any point in any place in Scotland, and you feel that
comparatively she is poor. Yet our Lowlands have long been beautifying
themselves into a resemblance of hers; as for our Highlands, though many
changes have been going on there too, and most we believe for good, they
are in their great features, and in their spirit unalterable by art,
stamped and inspired by enduring Nature.

We have spoken, slightly, of the sylvan scenery of the Highlands. In
Perthshire, especially, it is of rare and extraordinary beauty, and we
are always glad to hear of Englishmen travelling up the Tay and the
Earn. We desire that eyes familiar with all that is umbrageous should
receive their first impressions of our Scottish trees at Duneira and
Dunkeld. Nor will those impressions be weakened as they proceed towards
Blair Atholl. In that famous Pass, they will feel the power possessed by
the sweet wild monotony of the universal birch woods--broken but by grey
crags in every shape--grotesque, fantastical, majestic, magnificent, and
sublime--on the many-ridged mountains, that are loth to lose the green
light of their beloved forests, retain it as long as they can, and on
the masses of living lustre seem to look down with pride from their
skies.

An English forest, meaning thereby any one wide continuous scene of all
kinds of old English trees, with glades of pasture, and it may be of
heath between, with dells dipping down into the gloom, and hillocks
undulating in the light--ravines and chasms too, rills, and rivulets,
and a haunted stream, and not without some melancholy old ruins, and
here and there a cheerful cottage that feels not the touch of time--such
a forest there is not, and hardly can be imagined to be in Scotland. But
in the Highlands, there once were, and are still other forests of quite
a different character, and of equal grandeur. In his "Forest Scenery,"
Gilpin shows that he understood it well; all the knowledge, which as a
stranger, almost of necessity he wanted, Lauder has supplied in his
annotations; and the book should now be in the hands of