Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

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like what they expected, with much more such matter as
I have often heard and expect again to hear. Then I
may answer, but not in my own words, ' Since you decry
my account, why did you not write it yourself."
If you said that these mountains consisted of " granite
and plum pudding rock," you need not care though I
contradict you ; since this is not your trade, my good Sir
Walter, as it is mine. " Pish," said Queen Elizabeth,
when a dancing master's excellence was proposed as an
exhibition, " 1 will not see him, 'tis his profession." I
have no merit, therefore, in saying* that they are all
formed of Hypersthene rock ; and how should you know
any thing of Hypersthene rock, when I was obliged to
invent the term myself. But then I must claim the
merit of having discovered a new rock before i«venting
a new name ;
and I suppose that even the Virgin Queen
-would have condescended to praise the bero of the kit,
if he had contrived a new pirouette, or found a way of
doing with one leg what his predecessors had done with
two. Nature would have committed an error had she
not made a place unlike to all the world, of a rock unlike
every other.,' I J^Ctive you to gruess what an addition this
double discovery made to iny' liappinesis; though I have
since found the ?ame substance in Airdnamurchan. As
to our learnad ^ijejen'^ I hold with Jier, even against my
own interests. We hear every day of such a man being
a great lawyer, a»d;oFswith.ahoth'^r a^ a great preacher,
fidler, physician, aiid so on. It the ceiitury produces
one Greek scholar, he is exalted as high as the Golden
Calf, and the world forgets to say " Pish, 'tis his profes-
sion." What matters it that th€ pedagogue, who has
been employed, daily and all day long, full forty years, ver-
berating hie haec hoc into the inferior sensorium of his
unlucky and successive generations of pupils, understands
Cordery or the Anthology better than he who has been go-
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