auding. To mention the name of such a man in
connection with commerce or with any mechanical art was an insult.
Agriculture was indeed less despised. Yet a highborn warrior was
much more becomingly employed in plundering the land of others than
in tilling his own.

"The religion of the greater part of the Highlands was a rude
mixture of Popery and Paganism. The symbol of redemption was
associated with heathen sacrifices and incantations. Baptised men
poured libations of ale on one Daemon, and set out drink offerings
of milk for another. Seers wrapped themselves up in bulls' hides,
and awaited, in that vesture, the inspiration which was to reveal
the future. Even among those minstrels and genealogists whose
hereditary vocation was to preserve the memory of past events, an
enquirer would have found very few who could read. In truth, he
might easily have journeyed from sea to sea without discovering a
page of Gaelic printed or written.

"The price which he would have had to pay for his knowledge of the
country would have been heavy. He would have had to endure
hardships as great as if he had sojourned among the Esquimaux or
the Samoyeds. Here and there, indeed, at the castle of some great
lord who had a seat in the Parliament and Privy Council, and who
was accustomed to pass a large part of his life in the cities of
the South, might have been found wigs and embroidered coats, plate
and fine linen, lace and jewels, French dishes and French wines.
But, in general, the traveler would have been forced to content
himself with very different quarters. In many dwellings the
furniture, the food, the clothing, nay, the very hair and skin of
his hosts, would have put his philosophy to the proof. His lodging
would sometimes have been in a hut of which every nook would have
swarmed with vermin. He would have inhaled an atmosphere thick with
peat smoke, and foul with a hundred exhalations. At supper grain
fit only for horses would have been set before him, accompanied
with a cake of blood drawn from living cows. Some of the company
with whom he would have feasted would have been covered with
cutaneous eruptions, and others would have been smeared with tar
like sheep. His couch would have been the bare earth, dry or wet as
the weather might be; and from that