Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

J >> John Wilson >> Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2




We love the people too well to praise them--we have had too heartfelt
experience of their virtues. In castle, hall, house, manse, hut, hovel,
shieling--on mountain and moor, we have known, without having to study
their character. It manifests itself in their manners, and in their
whole frame of life. They are now, as they ever were, affectionate,
faithful, and fearless; and far more delightful surely it is to see such
qualities in all their pristine strength--for civilisation has not
weakened, nor ever will weaken them--without that alloy of fierceness
and ferocity which was inseparable from them in the turbulence of feudal
times. They are now indeed a peaceful people; severe as are the
hardships of their condition, they are, in the main, contented with it;
and nothing short of necessity can dissever them from their dear
mountains. We devoutly trust that there need be no more forced
emigration--that henceforth it will be free--at the option of the
adventurous--and that all who will, when the day cometh, may be gathered
to their fathers in the land that gave them birth. Much remains to be
done not only to relieve but enlighten; yet Christian benevolence has
not been forgetful of their wants; schools and churches are arising in
remote places; and that they are in good truth a religious as well as a
moral people is proved by the passionate earnestness with which, in
their worst destitution, they embrace every offer of instruction in the
knowledge that leads to everlasting life. The blessing of Heaven will
lie on all such missions as these; and the time will come when we shall
be able to contemplate, without any pain, the condition of a race who,
to use the noble language of one, though often scornful and sarcastic
overmuch, yet at heart their friend, "almost in an hour subsided into
peace and virtue, retaining their places, their possessions, their
chiefs, their songs, their traditions, their superstitions and peculiar
usages--even that language and those recollections which still separate
them from the rest of the nation. They retained even their pride, and
they retained their contempt of those who imposed that order on them,
and still they settled into a state of obedience to that government, of
which the world produces no other instance! It is a splendid moral
phenomenon, and reflects a lustre on the Highland character, whether of
the chiefs or the people, which extinguishes all past faults, and which
atones for what little remains to be amended. A peculiar political
situation was the cause of their faults; and that which swept away the
cause, has rendered the effects a tale of other times."


END OF VOL. II.

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