Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

BENBECULA. 87
" Traveller;" but it is the more generally believed; be-
cause nothing so tends to perpetuate a maxim, whether
false or true, as the clinquant of poetry. He who has
constructed a sonorous and successful couplet, may, like
Pope and Dry den, boast of more influence than all the
moralists who ever prosed.
If I were to refine on this maxim, it would be to say
that the attachment of a native is in the direct proportion
of the badness or the poverty of his country ; that he was
attracted to it in a ratio the inverse of all the obvious
causes of attraction. But, strictly speaking, neither is
true. The inhabitant of Benbecula, he of South Uist, of
Coll, or Tirey, is attracted by sand and rocks, by bog
and water, by rain and storm and poverty. The native
of Sky or Mull, of Rossshire or Sutherland, is no less
strongly attached to his cloudy and windy region, to his
rocky mountains, barren moors, and boisterous seas, than
he who may riot, could he feel them, in the romantic
beauties of Loch Cateran, or among the glassy waters
and wooded islands of Loch Lomond. The Hollander
loves his odoriferous canals and his submarine meadows,
no less than the native of the Valais or Chamouny does
the woody valley, the cascade, and the snow-topped
mountain that are supposed to bind him to his native
land. The Arab of the desert has drank camel's milk
and robbed his neighbours since the time of Ishmael;
nor would he exchange his sands and his tents, his starv-
ation and thirst,for all the green fields and rivers, the cities
and the cultivation, which the sun visits from its rising
to its setting. It is easier to tame a tyger than a New-
Hollander : dress him in a good coat and cram him with
beef and porter, and he takes the first opportunity to
strip himself naked and to return to his caterpillars and
putrid fish.