remember that, in the whole length and breadth of his native
country, there was no building even distantly resembling it.

But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count
England foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of

the empire, surprise and even pain us. The dull, neglected
peasant, sunk in matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a

startling contrast with our own long-legged, long-headed,
thoughtful, Bible-quoting ploughman. A week or two in such a place

as Suffolk leaves the Scotchman gasping. It seems incredible that
within the boundaries of his own island a class should have been

thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent, who hold our
own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with

a difference or, from another reason, and to speak on all things
with less interest and conviction. The first shock of English

society is like a cold plunge. It is possible that the Scot comes
looking for too much, and to be sure his first experiment will be

in the wrong direction. Yet surely his complaint is grounded;
surely the speech of Englishmen is too often lacking in generous

ardour, the better part of the man too often withheld from the
social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind evaded as with

terror. A Scotch peasant will talk more liberally out of his own
experience. He will not put you by with conversational counters

and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one
interested in life and man's chief end. A Scotchman is vain,

interested in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth
his thoughts and experience in the best light. The egoism of the

Englishman is self-contained. He does not seek to proselytise. He
takes no interest in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the

unkindest cut of all, he does not care to justify his indifference.
Give him the wages of going on and being an Englishman, that is all

he asks; and in the meantime, while you continue to associate, he
would rather not be reminded of your baser origin. Compared with

the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his demeanour, the vanity
and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar, and immodest. That

you should continually try to establish human and serious
relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull,

and desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue
something more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you

in the attitude of a suitor and a poor relation. Thus even the
lowest class of the educated English towers over a Scotchman by the

head and shoulders.
Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scotch and English

youth begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and
gather up those first apprehensions which are the material of

future thought and, to a great extent, the rule of future conduct.
I have been to school in both countries, and I found, in the boys

of the North, something at once rougher and more tender, at once
more reserve and more expansion, a greater habitual distance

chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on the whole wider
extremes of temperament and sensibility. The boy of the South

seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to
games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily

transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in
mind and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser

and a less romantic sense of life and of the future, and more
immersed in present circumstances. And certainly, for one thing,

English boys are younger for their age. Sabbath observance makes a
series of grim, and perhaps serviceable, pauses in the tenor of

Scotch boyhood - days of great stillness and solitude for the
rebellious mind, when in the dearth of books and play, and in the

intervals of studying the Shorter Catechism, the intellect and
senses prey upon and test each other. The typical English Sunday,

with the huge midday dinner and the plethoric afternoon, leads
perhaps to different results. About the very cradle of the Scot

there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity; and the whole of two
divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two

first questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely
inquiring, "What is your name?" the Scottish striking at the very

roots of life with, "What is the chief end of man?" and answering
nobly, if obscurely, "To glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever." I

do not wish to make an idol of the Shorter Catechism; but the fact
of such a question being asked opens to us Scotch a great field of

speculation; and the fact that it is asked of all of us, from the
peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly together. No

Englishman of Byron's age, character, and history would have had
patience for long theological discussions on the way to fight for

Greece; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days
kept their influence to the end. We have spoken of the material

conditions; nor need much more be said of these: of the land lying
everywhere more exposed, of the wind always louder and bleaker, of

the black, roaring winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone
cities, imminent on the windy seaboard; compared with the level

streets, the warm colouring of the brick, the domestic quaintness
of the architecture, among which English children begin to grow up

and come to themselves in life. As the stage of the University
approaches, the contrast becomes more express. The English lad

goes to Oxford or Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens,
to lead a semi-scenic life, costumed, disciplined and drilled by

proctors. Nor is this to be regarded merely as a stage of
education; it is a piece of privilege besides, and a step that

separates him further from the bulk of his compatriots. At an
earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly different

experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a bell
hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the

public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he
has been wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of

restraint, and nothing of necessary gentility. He will find no
quiet clique of the exclusive, studious and cultured; no rotten

borough of the arts. All classes rub shoulders on the greasy
benches. The raffish young gentleman in gloves must measure his

scholarship with the plain, clownish laddie from the parish school.
They separate, at the session's end, one to smoke cigars about a

watering-place, the other to resume the labours of the field beside
his peasant family. The first muster of a college class in

Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads,
fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish

embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades,
and afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices. It was in

these early days, I think, that Professor Blackie won the affection
of his pupils, putting these uncouth, umbrageous students at their

ease with ready human geniality. Thus, at least, we have a healthy
democratic atmosphere to breathe in while at work; even when there

is no cordiality there is always a juxtaposition of the different
classes, and in the competition of study the intellectual power of

each is plainly demonstrated to the other. Our tasks ended, we of
the North go forth as freemen into the humming, lamplit city. At

five o'clock you may see the last of us hiving from the college
gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green glimmer of

the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies
in wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the

masters of the world; and some portion of our lives is always
Saturday, LA TREVE DE DIEU.

Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his
country's history gradually growing in the child's mind from story

and from observation. A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck,
outlying iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights;

much of heathery mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters.
Breaths come to him in song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of

foraying hoofs. He glories in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the
iron girdle and the handful of oat-meal, who rode so swiftly and

lived so sparely on their raids. Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise,
and constantresolution are the fibres of the legend of his

country's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland have been
tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish history -

Flodden, Darien, or the Forty-five were still either failures or
defeats; and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the

Bruce combine with the very smallness of the country to teach
rather a moral than a material criterion for life. Britain is

altogether small, the mere taproot of her extended empire:
Scotland, again, which alone the Scottish boy adopts in his

imagination, is but a little part of that, and avowedly cold,
sterile and unpopulous. It is not so for nothing. I once seemed