"WILLIAM AND HAHY.

299

law and police, trade and industry, have done far more thanpeople of romantic dispositions will readily admit, to develope-in our minds a sense of the wilder beauties of nature. A tra-veller must be freed from all apprehension of being murdered orstarved before he can be charmed by the bold outlines and richtints of the hills. He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies bythe abruptness of a precipice from which he is in imminentdanger of falling two thousand feet perpendicular; by the boil-ing waves of a torrent which suddenly whirls away his baggageand forces him to run for his life; by the gloomy grandeur of apass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just strippedand mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose nextmeal may probably be on his own eyes. About the year 1730,Captain Burt, one of the first Englishmen who caught a glimpseof the spots which now allure tourists from every part of thecivilised world, wrote an account of his wanderings. He wasevidently a man of a quick, an observant, and a cultivatedmind, and would doubtless, had he lived in our age, havelooked with mingled awe and delight on the mountains of In-vernessshire. But, writing with the feeling which was universalin his own age, he pronounced those mountains monstrous ex-crescences. Their deformity, he said, was such that the moststerile plains seemed lovely by comparison. Fine weather, hecomplained, only made bad worse; for, the clearer the day,the more disagreeably did those misshapen masses of gloomybrown and dirty purple affect the eye. What a contrast, he ex-claimed, between these horrible prospects and the beauties ofRichmond Hill!* Some persons maythink thatBurtwas amanofvulgar and prosaical mind: but they will scarcely venture to passa similar judgment on Oliver Goldsmith. Goldsmith was one of thevery few Saxons who, more than a century ago, ventured to explorethe Highlands. He was disgusted by the hideous wilderness,* Captain Burt’s Letters from Scotland.

CII-VP.

XIII.

Ib89.