Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/253

Aberdeen : Its Literature, Bookmaking, and Circulating. 241 So, at the close of last century Aberdeen was chiefly known by Londoners for its " salmon and Finnan haddocks," and on the continent for its worsted stockings and its pickled pork to such base uses had the intellects of Aberdonians been turned ! If Aberdeen appeared in Maps issued in London, all know- ledge of it seems to have disappeared in Gazetteers. Writing in the Aberdeen Almanack of 1838, Dr. Joseph Robertson says " Our fair city seems to have existed and (lamentable to say) to exist chiefly as a target for Gazetteers and Cockneys, from Ptolemy downwards, at which to shoot the blunt arrows of their ignorance." Whether the Devana of the Romans was Aber- deen as presently situated, or the Roman Camp at Culter, has been to antiquaries as good a subject for dispute as a Donny- brook fair is to Irishmen for a harmonious breaking of heads. As Dr. Robertson says " One writer will have it here, another there ; " one " in the vast Atlantic one in Ayrshire one somewhere north of the Forth, or in the bogs of Ireland. The Encyclopaedia Metropolitana locates it on the Banks of the Forth which is spanned by a noble arch through which bridge, says the Penny Cyclopaedia, that river, or the Dee magnificently flows its Town-house is said to be ornamented with two towers and spires " (a prophetic announcement, and long before it was so) having two places of worship in its West Church, two Roman Catholic Chapels, and one Episcopalian, two Universities in a village called old Aberdeen and near by, a river Don with " a fine Gothic arch of 67 feet square " over it, and at which a canal from the harbour terminated ; the whole overlooked by a mountain, surnamed the "Buck, or Cabrath, 5,377 feet high." Another Gazetteer briefly describes it as a fishing village on the east coast of Scotland, the inhabitants of which live chiefly on fish and seaweed. That in the intervals of fishing the natives followed the noble Scottish profession of reivers cattle-lifters from the South in other words were simply thieves and robbers, was the universal English belief, and that all Aberdonians wore kilts was chronicled in the early and even later pictures of the Illustrated London News. Travellers in old times who have visited Aberdeen, vary in their accounts of it according to their varying moods of mind, the condition of the weather, or the parties they met. Richard Francks, the Englishman, visited it in 1658, and has nothing but praise to record. Dr. Johnson and his henchman, Boswell, came in 1773, and though the Doctor was handsomely treated and