Bonnie Scotland

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A. R. Hope Moncrieff. Bonnie Scotland

Bonnie Scotland

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I. THE BORDERS

CHAPTER II. AULD REEKIE

CHAPTER III. THE TROSSACHS ROUND

CHAPTER IV. THE KINGDOM OF FIFE

CHAPTER V. THE FAIR CITY

CHAPTER VI. THE HIGHLAND LINE

CHAPTER VII “ABERDEEN AWA’!”

CHAPTER VIII. TO JOHN O’ GROAT’S HOUSE

CHAPTER IX. THE GREAT GLEN

CHAPTER X. GLASGOW AND THE CLYDE

CHAPTER XI. THE WHIG COUNTRY

CHAPTER XII. GALLOWAY

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A. R. Hope Moncrieff

Painted by Sutton Palmer; Described by A.R. Hope Moncrieff

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The young advocate did not waste much of his genius on defending sheep-stealers and the like; but in those halcyon days of patronage, through the influence of his chief, the Duke of Buccleuch, he soon got the snug berth of Sheriff of Selkirk. This brought him to live at Ashestiel on the Tweed, where he spent his happiest days, writing his best poems, and beginning Waverley, to be laid by and forgotten for years. Selkirk, too, has the misfortune of lying off the main line; but strangers would do well to turn aside here for the wild pastoral scenes of St. Mary’s Loch and the “Dowie Dens of Yarrow.” Too many, like Wordsworth, put off this trip to rheumatic years; yet it may be easily done by the coach routes from Selkirk and from Moffat on the Caledonian line, that meet at Tibbie Shiels’ Inn, whose visitors’ book enshrines such a collection of autographs; and its homely fame scorns the pretensions of the new “hotel.” This is the heart of Ettrick Forest, where stands a monument of its shepherd, James Hogg, unfairly caricatured as the genial buffoon of the Noctes, but second only to Burns as a popular poet, and best known over the English-speaking world by his “Bird of the wilderness, blithesome and cumberless.” All the schooling he had was a few months in early childhood; he taught himself to write on slate stones of the hillside where he herded cows, and this art he had to relearn when he first tried to sing of green Ettrick—

In many a rustic lay,

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