ped and mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose next meal may probably be on his own eyes. About the year 1730, Captain Burt, one of the first Englishmen who caught a glimpse of the spots which now allure tourists from every part of the civilised world, wrote an account of his wanderings. He was evidently a man of a quick, an observant, and a cultivated mind, and would doubtless, had he lived in our age, have looked with mingled awe and delight on the mountains of Invernessshire. But, writing with the feeling which was universal in his own age, he pronounced those mountains monstrous excrescences. Their deformity, he said, was such that the most sterile plains seemed lovely by comparison. Fine weather, he complained, only made bad worse; for, the clearer the day, the more disagreeably did those misshapen masses of gloomy brown and dirty purple affect the eye. What a contrast, he exclaimed, between these horrible prospects and the beauties of Richmond Hill![1] Some persons may think that Burt was a man of vulgar and prosaical mind: but they will scarcely venture to pass a similar judgment on Oliver Goldsmith. Goldsmith was one of the very few Saxons who, more than a century ago, ventured to explore the Highlands. He was disgusted by the hideous wilderness, and declared that he greatly preferred the charming country round Leyden, the vast expanse of verdant meadow, and the villas with their statues and grottoes, trim flower beds, and rectilinear avenues. Yet it is difficult to believe that the author of the Traveller and of the Deserted Village was naturally inferior in taste and sensibility to the thousands of clerks and milliners who are now thrown into raptures by the sight of Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond.[2] His feelings may easily be ex-
- ↑ Captain Burt's Letters from Scotland.
- ↑ "Shall I tire yon with a description of this unfruitful country, where I must lead you over their hills all brown with heath, or their valleys scarce able to feed a rabbit? . . . Every part of the country presents the same dismal landscape. No grove or brook lend their music to cheer the stranger." — Goldsmith to Bryanton, Edinburgh, Sept. 26, 1753. In a letter written soon after from Leyden to the Reverend Thomas Contarine, Goldsmith says, "I was wholly taken up in observing the face of the country. Nothing can equal its beauty. Wherever I turned my eye, fine houses, elegant gardens, statues, grottos, vistas presented themselves, Scotland and this country bear the highest contrast: there, hills and rocks intercept every prospect; here it is all a continued plain." See Appendix C, to the First Volume of Mr. Forster's Life of Goldsmith. I will cite the testimony of another man of genius in support of the doctrine propounded in the text. No human being has ever had a finer sense of the beauties of nature than Gray. No prospect surpassed in grandeur and loveliness the first view of Italy from Mount Cenis. Had Gray enjoyed that view from the magnificient road constructed in this century, he would undoubtedly have been in raptures. But in his time the descent was performed with extreme inconvenience and with not a little peril. He therefore, instead of breaking forth into ejacutations of admiration and delight, says most unpoetically, "Mount Cenis, I confess, carries the permission mountains have of being frightful rather too far; and its horrors were accompanied with too much danger to give one time to reflect upon their beauties." — Gray to West, Nov. 16, 1739.
