its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour,
unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city,
where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the
salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live
there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out,
"Oh, why left I my hame?" and it seems at once as if no beauty
under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can
repay me for my absence from my country. And though I think I
would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be
buried among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on
me with every year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh
street-lamps. When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand
forget its cunning!

The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman. You must pay
for it in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth. You
have to learn the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you
generally take to drink; your youth, as far as I can find out, is a
time of louder war against society, of more outcry and tears and
turmoil, than if you had been born, for instance, in England. But
somehow life is warmer and closer; the hearth burns more redly; the
lights of home shine softer on the rainy street; the very names,
endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round our hearts. An
Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon Chimborazo, and
neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower told me of
Mons Meg, it was like magic.


"From the dim shieling on the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;