enough might be given in proof of this statement; but no Scotsman, and no stranger who has travelled in Scotland so as to see its typical features of scenery and social life-whohas not hurried on with the annual crowd but has, instead, lingered by the way and sauntered into Highland glen and Lowland dale, where the old fashions still continue, will need any written authorities to help him to the truth on this subject. As to the Food, we see from the illustrations above, that Scotland was barely able to supply her children with the mere necessaries of life. Oats and barley were the only grains cultivated; and if we add colewort or ‘lang kale,' the one pot herb in the cottagers' croft, or 'kale yaird,' the three articles of food have been named on which the Scottish people subsisted, and were almost entirely dependant. Oats, barley, kale! Not a varied stock of victual, truly. The oats, ground into meal, supplied the porridge and brose for breakfast and supper, and the griddle bread or oatcake. The kale made the chief article of the dinner; and was used either as a boiled mess without beef or mutton, or with the broth or water of it thickened with oat or pease meal, when it was called 'kale brose.' Neither potatoes nor wheat were grown. Barley and pease were also ground, and made into 'bannocks' or 'scones;' and these with the 'kebbuck' or cheese, which was of a poor quality, made the peasant's midday meal. Red fish or salmon in some parts, 'braxy' mutton and the 'mart' or Martinmas ox, which lasted through the winter and spring, were items of food used in the better class of cottages. The ordinary drink was a mild ale called 'twopenny;' claret and a little brandy were used by the gentry; tea and coffee were unknown, and usquebagh or whisky was as yet the special beverage of the Highlanders. Any other commodities, beyond the dairy produce, were only to be had for money; and as the greater part of the wages were then paid in kind, they were not within the reach of the majority of the people.

There had been no possibility of more than this. It has been said that it would have been infinitely better for Scotland if it had been conquered by Edward I. and become English

sion and a heavy inheritance of poverty, suspiciousness and prejudice; and instead of having to begin in the eighteenth century to undo the effects of those years, it would have been as fair and flourishing as Yorkshire and Kent, and with them would have been further advanced in the social art and in intellectual range and serenity. Whether these would have been the blessed results of conquest we do not know; nor does it matter now. The bulk of the Scottish people enthusiastically preferred a royal line and a Church of their own to an English king and an English hierarchy; and were willing in the eyes of the philosopher were fanatically willing to part with every comfort and present opportunity of progress, for the dear symbols of national independence. They secured them both; but although the character of the people must have acquired a distinctive, perhaps an imperishable quality in these struggles, their cost in a material aspect was incalculable. No matter. It was enough that peace was in the land, and that the oppressors could oppress no more. No scantiness of fare, no roughness of raiment, no meanness of dwelling weighed for a moment against these blessings. The Norman castle, with its fair broad desmesnes, and its nestling village homes hid in ivy and honeysuckle, had no existence north of the Tweed, and had not created the men and manners which were found everywhere, in strictly rural districts, south of the Palatine palace of Durham. Pastoral quiet, with kine knee deep in grass, every landscape with its ancient towers of learning, whither the tramp of armed men had seldom or never come; the rich fairs and richer guilds and companies which had for centuries been a bright and notable feature in English life, were all unknown to poor and barren Scotland. Her people knew nothing of these things, and did not care for them. Their desires had been whetted on less material objects; their traditions and fireside legends were of simple men and women whom persecution had changed into heroes and heroines, and whose names were sacred to the nation. For many weary generations they had been face to face with a declared and powerful enemy, and

of defence or revenge. The priceless treasures of national independence and liberty of conscience only had been preserved to them. Every energy and every penny had been spent in securing these, the foundations of modern national greatness, -and so Scotland, in 1707, was alike without commercial spirit and industrial skill, the artist's creations and the philosopher's triumphs;-known only, like some other mountain-lands, as the nurse of rugged, uncompromising natures.

IV.

One other aspect of the Physical condition of Scotland at this time remains to be shown; an aspect, the special force of which the reader will feel as exhibiting the state of its agriculture and commerce, and as affecting the common weal of its people.

If the demands of the commerce of the country as to shipping were few, its demands as to roads were still fewer. Roads as we know them, and as the Romans knew them, had no existence either in fact, or in the imagination of the people in any portion of Great Britain in the eighteenth century. Nothing, in the altered state of things in which we live, would more astonish the men of those days than our roads, our bridges, and our modes of travelling; and nothing is more likely to escape us when trying to form a correct idea of olden times, than the fewness of roads then in existence and the frightful state in which they were always kept. They were roads only by courtesy. They were in no instance the work of the surveyor, the engineer, and the surfaceman. They had no regard to directness or to level. Marked out in most cases from the forest by the hoofs of the cattle that for generations had tramped over them, and worn in later times by the pack horses which journeyed painfully through them, and left to the drought of summer and the storms of winter, they were, as they could not but be, simply abominable either with dust or mire. Occasionally the bed of a river was the only road between two places; most of the roads, however, were cattle tracks and nothing else. A week's rain in summer made them

and no horseman would long brave; while a wet winter all but put an end to trafficking and travelling. If such was the general condition of the roads and lanes in the south down till the middle of the century, and if even Kensington, as Lord Harvey tells us, was separated sometimes from London by an impassable gulf of mud, in Scotland they must have been a good deal worse, if that was possible. The roads in Perthshire, says Penny, were in a miserable state. Many were mere hilly tracts, on which carriages could not venture, and were totally unfit for foot-passengers.'* That is, they were no

better than our worst field and farm roads, ruts and ditches through which no one could pass unless on horseback, and not even then without discomfort and danger. In Tweeddale it. was the same. Somerville assures us that 'the parish roads even to the church and to the market towns were unfit for wheel carriages, and in bad weather were altogether unpracticable. There were few bridges over the rivers. The Tweed throughout its whole length was crossed by only two;'† and these, the one at Peebles and the other at Berwick, were sixty

miles apart. There were no main, well-kept highways piercing the country from point to point and joining the cross lanes; there was not a single turnpike in 'broad Scotland.' There were no carriage-ways out of sight of the capital. The great post road between Edinburgh and London was little. better than a track; and although it was the main communication between the two kingdoms, its northern half was notoriously unfit for carriages, for in 1746 while the Duke of Cumberland contrived to reach Durham in a coach and six, so bad were the roads north of it he was compelled to go forward on horseback.

Strange as it may appear, no one knew how to make roads; and mending those which did exist meant filling up the biggest ruts with stones of any size and shape, and the smaller ruts with mire or clay. Nor was there any right system of assuring even this amount of repair. Statute Labour was

Traditions of Perth, p. 131-2. See the whole passage.

+ Life and Times, p. 355.

the legitimate mode of doing this, but Statute Labour was disliked by all and shirked by many. Each farmer was bound to give so many men, and each tenant so many days, to the repairing of the parish roads. But there was no uniform and convenient system of employing this; it was left to interest and caprice; and in many cases the peasant was required to contribute his share of labour when he could least afford to give it. At the best, Statute Labour like some other forms of direct taxation, was an objectionable arrangement, and amid the general indifference of town and country to the necessity for good roads, came to be looked upon as a vexation and a thing to be evaded. Road-making, in fact, like agriculture, was both unknown and unheeded. Turnpikes were nearly a century distant. Telford and Macadam, like Watt and Stephenson, belong to our own day.

How unhappily then was Scotland placed as to Agriculture, and how completely were its food supplies controlled by circumstances! The country was one in a geographical sense, but many of its parishes were quite isolated, and in winter almost inaccessible. Its rural population was a series of groups or families, many of which had only intercourse with one another in the open months of the year. It could not be otherwise. Twenty miles of moor, or an unbridged river, or a considerable range of hills were insurmountable natural barriers to intercourse. No means were at hand of overcoming them. Consequently there were towns in the same county far more widely sundered for all practical purposes than London and Aberdeen are at the present day. People knew little outside of the bounds of their own glen or parish, and the world beyond their narrow horizon was altogether unknown. From the same cause, namely, want of roads, the farmer had no means of improving his farm and had no motive to do so. Shut in upon himself and with no opportunity of enlarging his knowledge he could only be slovenly in his home, and slovenly and stationary in his mode of farming.

The inevitable result of this ignorance of national economics was Dearths and Famines. And so common were these, so