hill in Scotland," which raises "its respectable head upon the right, though its form is rather marred by the regularity of its line." Ben Lomond and "Doniquaick," in the grounds at Inveraray, are the only hills named in the whole of this Highland tour, as recorded in two large volumes. His delight throughout is in water, in river banks, and wood; and after describing Hamilton Palace and its grounds, he tells us, "I do not remember ever meeting with a scene of the kind which pleased me more than the wild river views about Chatelheraut," on the banks of the Avon.

He is

Now there are two or three noteworthy things about this book. In the matter of scenery, this worthy and cultivated gentleman is clearly ahead of his time. He is struggling in a purblind and priggish kind of way to throw behind him the spirit of conventionality and artificiality with which the eighteenth century regarded Nature. rising rapidly out of the region of well-bred, mealy-mouthed shepherds and shepherdesses. He has a genuine interest in country objects and in natural landscape; and though he thinks that Nature has made many mistakes, that much of her ruder work should be kept out of sight, and only her more refined parts submitted to close inspection; that a mountain, in particular, should be skilfully manipulated, like some faded beauty, and gazed at from a distance, through a transparency of luminous haze, with her weak points veiled behind a gauze of delicate mist, or touched up by the rouge of a setting sun: though he condemns Arthur's Seat as being like a bulbous excrescence on the nose, and reserves his highest raptures for those scenes in which Nature has surrendered herself to the art of some skilful tire-woman in the person of duke or marquis : nevertheless, in spite of all that, it marks a great advance that he should care to travel leisurely through Highlands as well as Lowlands, enduring much discomfort, expecting to find natural beauty, and prepared to consider in a fair judicial spirit the claims for recognition advanced by different kinds of scenery. The very tone of superiority and condescension which he adopts towards mountains comes partly from the consciousness that he is a pioneer as a nature-seeker, and must not push his idiosyncrasy too

science. But anything so preposterous as to walk right across country, or to go up any mountain, except the merest pimple of a hill for the sake of some "prospect," would never have occurred to him.

We now come to the first Guide-books, properly so-called -books written not for the information and entertainment of the arm-chair reader, but intended to help the tourist along the road, and furnish him with all the "necessary information respecting routes, conveyances, accommodations, amusements, curiosities, scenery, antiquities, and historical associations." These awful words, taken from the preface to "Nelson's Handbook to Scotland (Rev. John Wilson), 1860," prepare us at once for the melancholy descent, in a literary point of view, from the traveller who travels for travelling sake, is himself interested in all he sees, and gives the best he has for readers of the same kidney as himself, to the purveyor of practical information for the average Tourist: that strange compound of curiosity without intelligence, of money without manners, of modest attainments and immoderate self-satisfaction, that has taken such a craze for locomotion during the last half-century, and done so much to deform those fair parts of the earth which have been opened up-almost created-for its benefit. This new Tourist-power has pushed itself with unappreciative imitation into every scene which has been admired sufficiently by other people to make it "the thing" to go and see it; its first object, in its so-called travels, being to get itself carted as comfortably as may be along the proper routes from one good hotel to another-for, alas! the tribe has done to death the good old name of inn. “I suppose this is what they call Scotch mist," said a smug member of the genus to me on the coach-top as we drove into a bit of white, dry mist, on the top of the Cairnwell. "Yes," said I," and it's English mist, and Irish mist, and Welsh mist too; it's generally called mist all the world over." A cockgrouse got up and crew. "Did you ever eat grouse?' asked the intelligent traveller, addressing another tourist, a middle-aged female who sat near. "I did once," she answered," and thought it very nasty." "Yes," he rejoined pensively; "it must be purely an acquired taste."

Under these influences, " the detested bondage of guidehood," as John Hill Burton called it, has had to yield to the still more detestable slavery of the modern guide-book: a jumble of condensed extract of information, on every conceivable subject, distilled into numbered paragraphs, laid out in alphabetical order, and distributed with nice judgment over big print, little print, and middle print— to say nothing of asterisks, capitals, and italics-according to a scale of merit in which the Hotel always occupies the highest place, and what interests the mountaineer, the lowest. But as the proverb says, Nemo repente: the downfall to the lowest depths of utility was not made all

at once.

The earliest Guide-book I have seen- "The Scottish Tourist, 1825"-is dedicated to Sir Walter Scott. It begins with the ominous warning that "tours in Scotland have of late become so fashionable that no apology seems necessary," &c.; and then there is a fine patriotic touch in the next paragraph: "But it is not its scenery alone that renders Scotland so highly interesting. It was never conquered!" Thus Fashion and Patriotism are to form "the Scottish tourist's" bicolor: the former instinct to be gratified by a complete enumeration of every gentleman's seat encountered on the road, with the name of its proprietor (initials, unhappily, often left blank): the latter by an immense and somewhat indiscriminating expenditure of epithets on the beauties of the country-our friends the mountains (in default of closer acquaintance) being described with the least knowledge, the largest adjectives, and often in the smallest print.

Of Loch-na-gar (described from hearsay): "No description can give any adequate notion of the 'steep frowning glories' of this scene-they must be seen to be appreciated aright." At the head of Glen-lin-beg (sic)," the huge mountains seem to approach so closely as to cause a twilight gloom even at mid-day." The tourist, with much difficulty, ascends Ben-Mac-Dhui, where he is "the highest subject in the United Kingdom, being by the most recent measurements ten to twenty feet higher than Ben Nevis. He may, on a clear day, perceive the ocean on three sides of him—

the Atlantic, the Moray Firth, and the German Ocean" (in the early guide-books, I notice, all views worth noticing include these three oceans); "but the chief objects of interest are the ten thousand tops-the almost boundless ocean of mountains in every direction, and the tremendous yawning gulf under the spectator. In fact... the prospect will amply repay the toil of attaining the summit."

In a similar style, the north shoulder of Benvenue "stretches in vast undulating masses into the lake, thus unapproachable in that direction; in short, all that is stupendous and wild in mountain scenery here unite." On Loch Lomond "the sublime and beautiful are admirably combined, including lovely islands and numerous gentlemen's seats." The ascent of Ben Lomond is divided into three stages: at the top "a view more fraught with objects calculated to produce sublime sensations is nowhere to be met with." Of course it includes the German Ocean; the blue mountains of Cumberland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man; apparently also about two hundred of the Hebrides. Nor

is science forgotten: "The botanist will here have a high treat in the sudden transition from the vulgar vegetables of the plain to the elegant natives of the Alpine regions; and the partisans of the igneous theory will have ample food for their system also."

The ascent of Ben Nevis also is made, or professed to be made, whence the tourist "casts his eye, with conscious pride, from one of the greatest points of elevation in the British dominions," over the inevitable German Ocean, and all the hills then known to the map from Ross-shire to Colonsay, "each of them surrounded by an assemblage of other mountains."

The future glories of Oban, that paradise of the modern tourist, are described with fine prophetic skill: "Its situation is extremely healthy, having good accommodation for bathing, excellent inns for the convenience of strangers, and markets amply supplied with provisions at moderate prices. It is thus a delightful summer residence."

In 1834 was published a very superior book to this: "Guide to the Highlands and Islands," by the brothers George and Peter Anderson, already so well spoken of,