after his proclamation of ignorance it is amusing to observe how he assumes the position of teacher. The egotism of the introductory chapter reaches the height of sublimity. The expression, "I shall group my mountains," is delightful. One seems to gather that because he has "traversed nearly every path and route given in this book," he has taken the mountains under his patronage, and would retail them out to such as may put themselves under his care and guidance. "Your guide must always be your master, and as such you must acknowledge him. He knows the path, and, although you may be very clever, you don't." Again, "If you follow recognised pathspaths I hope to guide you along-you can, with a minimum of danger, gain heights," &c. But Mr Perry magnifies his office. "Remember when you are on a mountain your life is in the hands of your guide, and he has no wish to ruin his reputation by letting you kill yourself.” There is also a quantity of cheap moralising and advice, which reaches a climax in these sapient words: "I can confidently say that with ordinary care and common-sense the summits can be reached by all, yes, even by ladies, who, by the way, make excellent climbers." Why then "even by ladies"?

If the book were well done, the introduction might be overlooked, but it was surely unnecessary to publish a guide that dismisses most of the hills with six or eight lines of description, including such expressions as "the summit is easily reached," "pass to the left of a cottage and the hill is before you," "continue along until a favourable point is found for a direct ascent." The author speaks of "giving minute definition of paths and landmarks that are easily recognisable," and, indeed, a guide-book to be serviceable should be so clear that "the wayfaring man, though a fool," need not go astray even in a mist; but the traveller who puts his trust in this little book will, we fear, not get the enlightenment he is led to expect should he become involved in mist and bad weather. His instructions are to go right, left, or straight on, compass bearings being much too seldom given : even the feeble little maps do not give the direction by compass. would be interesting to know when our authority traversed the railway from Beaumaris to Red Wharf Bay, seven miles long. We observe that there is no “minute definition" in this instance. Such a railway certainly does not exist now, and probably never did during the present era.

It

There are several misspellings (perhaps as forgivable in Welsh as in Gaelic), but because the book is "printed in Holland," and Dutchmen do not possess mountains, is that any reason why an English writer, an English publisher, and a Dutch printer should conspire to perpetuate such a caricature of mountains as is the design on the cover? F. W. JACKSON.

"in those countries you are not to suppose that you shall find villages or enclosures. The traveller wanders through a naked desert, gratified sometimes but rarely with the sight of cows, and now and then finds heaps of loose stones and turf in a cavity between the rocks, where a being born with all those powers which education expands, and all those sensations which culture refines, is condemned to shelter itself from the wind and the rain."

. Also that "a

walk upon ploughed ground in England is a dance upon carpets compared to the toilsome drudgery of wandering in Skie." It is not surprising that Johnson at the age of sixty-four looked upon hilly country with aversion—the mountains interfered with his convenience; and he only mentions the hills in Skye once.

"Here are mountains that I should once have climbed,” he writes to his friend Mrs Thrale, "but to climb steeps is now very laborious, and to descend them dangerous.' No doubt at the Doctor's age he was right, still we feel somewhat disappointed that during his stay at Talisker he was apparently unconscious of the Coolin, and we receive but small consolation from his elegant epistolary communications when they tell us instead, that he was gratified sometimes but rarely with the sight of cows, and that Mr Boswell was affected almost to tears by the illustrious ruins at Iona.

All this shows us how the attitude of people towards the wilds of the Highlands has become completely changed in one century, for Johnson was not in any way peculiar in his ideas. Look where we will in the literature of that time we find the same sentiments. Pennant, who visited Skye the year before Dr Johnson, describes the Coolin as "a savage series of rude mountains," whilst Blaven "affects him with astonishment."

Thirty years later the only natural objects in the island that interested Forsyth, at least so far as one can judge from what he writes in "The Beauties of Scotland," were an "obelisk of uncommon magnitude" in the parish of Snizort (probably the Storr Rock), and a waterfall and seacave near Portree.

But a new school was growing up, and Sir Walter Scott

was one of the first to insist that a visit to the Highlands would reveal objects more interesting than cows, waterfalls, and sea-caves. People were beginning to find in the torrents, mountains, lochs, and pine woods, beauties they had not seen before. No longer were the hills chaotic masses of rock, ready at any moment to fall and overwhelm the valleys, no longer were the moors and glens expanses of uniform barrenness or gloomy mountain fastnesses; but at the beginning of this century (1815) we find Robson writing of one of the most remote and wild regions of the Highlands, namely, the head of Glen Tilt, "Of all the romantic scenes which are presented to those who explore the recesses of the Grampians, none will be found to possess a more picturesque combination of wild and characteristic beauty than this;" and in the preface to his accurate and delightful volume on the scenery of the Grampian mountains he says, "With the man of taste few districts in this kingdom have equal claim to admiration." Robson was not a Scotchman, but a London artist, yet one only has to look at his sketches, and read the letterpress of his book, to see how well he appreciated mountain form, and how he understood in no uncertain manner that which now delights us moderns in the Highlands. His water-colour picture of Loch Coruisk* is an honest attempt to accurately reproduce the wonderful colour and savage beauty of the grandest of all Scotch lochs, and one is only sorry that he has introduced into the foreground a fully dressed Highlander-a legacy, no doubt, of that old feeling that made Dr Johnson crave for cows, and that even now survives at the end of this century in the pretty sketches of Scotch hills where the foreground is animated with Highland cattle.

Since Robson's time many people have been to the Highlands and to Skye and the Coolin. Turner visited them, and the impression produced may be seen from his drawing of Loch Coriskin; and this drawing is described by Ruskin, in "Modern Painters," as "a perfect expression of the Inferior Mountains," yet any one who had really seen the Coolin would hardly be justified in asserting that the draw

* In the South Kensington Museum.

ing (Fig. 29, vol. iv., "Modern Painters") was the perfect expression of the hills round Sgurr Dubh, even though it may be the perfect expression of an inferior mountain.

Fortunately the Coolin are never inferior mountains, unless we measure them by the number of feet they rise above the sea. "Comparative bulk and height," says the late Sheriff Nicolson, “are of course important elements in mountain grandeur, but outline and features are, as with human beings, even more important." Clachlet at Easter covered with snow, and seen from the Moor of Rannoch, towers up into the heavens, at a distance of a few miles, just as grandly as a peak five times its altitude does, thirty miles away in the Himalayas.

It is the atmosphere that adds both dignity and charm to these Scotch hills, making them appear far bigger than they would in the clearer air of the larger mountain ranges, and giving them all the softened colour and perspective so necessary to emphasise the real beauty of true mountains. Their form also helps them in no small degree. The long flowing lines of the lower slopes gradually rising from the moorland below, and the beautifully carved corries that nestle into their sides, all tend to strengthen and serve as a fit substructure for their more wild and broken summits.

At their feet lie no valleys with dirty white streams tearing down between mud banks, their sides are not disfigured with monotonous pine forests of a uniform and dull light green colour, but the heather and the grey rocks, lichen covered, mingle together on their slopes, lighting up with every flash of sunshine or deepening into every shade of brown and purple gloom as the storm clouds sweep over their summits; whilst below brown trout streams wander between the wild birches and Scotch firs, staying here in some dark pool hidden away under the rocks covered with ferns and heather, flashing out again there into the sunshine over the pebbles and across the low-lying moor.

Those who have seen the Coolin from the moors above Talisker in the twilight; or have watched them on a summer's evening from Kyle Akin, rising in deep purple velvet, broidered with gold, out of the "wandering fields of barren foam," whilst