Britain against North Britain. It
expresses the zeal of party and of a partizan. One can hardly conceive
such an ignorance of Scotland in England, as that a man of ability wishing
to traduce and ridicule the country, should sit down contented under such
a paucity of mischievous information. He writes under one simple
rule--negation. To deny food, to deny clothes, to deny houses, to deny
sunshine, grass, _rivers_ even, requires no mental effort of any kind, and
is the part of a dunce and an ignoramus. For any thing positive, the
Scotch are proud, have high cheekbones, and love brimstone and rebellion.
That is the amount of the picture. Famine consoles the two hungry lads who
mourn over the Fifteen and the Forty-five, with prophesying the invasion
and conquest of England by the Bute Administration--a glorious hope, a
national redress, and a private filling of empty purses and stomachs.
Churchill was himself poverty-stricken in mind, during the composition of
this blunder, to a degree that never befell any true poet.

An Englishman of this day must be puzzled to bring back the time when
Scotland was so completely a _terra incognita_ to her sister, as that this
rude and unlearned caricature could pass. Indeed, he hardly understands
the hate--he to whom prose and verse, from one great hand, and poetry
profusedly scattered like flowers all over the soil from another, have
made hallowed the land of romance, and of dreams more beautiful than
romance, and for whom the words, "Caledonia, stern and wild," mean any
thing but repulsion. But one must remember, that poetry was at the time at
a low ebb, almost stagnant in England, and that any thing that looked like
an image was aprodigy. If Gray and Collins now and then struck the lyre,
they stood apart from the prevailing prosaic and common-place tone of the
times. An Englishman of to-day knows the name of Home by one of the most
popular tragedies on his stage, if not one of the most vigorous, yet
amongst modern dramas, one of the most affecting; and he wonders when that
name is introduced by Churchill for the purpose of aggravating the
contempt of Scotland, represented as a region Boeotian in wit, quite as
much as by its atmosphere. He understands by what attraction Collins
addressed to Home his "Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands."
Political hatred, the dislike, the indignation, which may have been widely
enough diffused through the nation, at the interloping of Scotchmen in