Away from Scotland, all true Scots carry over the world an outfit of which the colours, the trimmings, and the gewgaws come from the Highlands, while the hard-wearing qualities of the stuff are rather of Lowland manufacture. Both spinning and dyeing, I maintain, have best been done in Perthshire, a county of varied aspects, which set me the example of passing to a change of metaphor. It is in this central region that a right proportion of the Saxon dough and the Celtic yeast, baked for centuries by fires of love and war, have risen into the most crusty loaf of Scottish character. In the damp western Highlands and the cold north the baking may have been less effectual, producing a more spongy mass, not so full of nutriment, but more relished by some as a change from the stodginess of modern life. In some parts of the Lowlands, again, the dough turns out more dour and sour, not enough leavened by fermentations that leave it too leathery for all teeth. While all over Scotland there has been going on a more or less thorough interaction and coalescence of once repellent bodies, in Perthshire, I assert, the amalgamation has been most complete. “Hae ye been happy in yer jeels?” is a civil question I have heard one old wife ask of another. Here nature seems to have been happy in a due mixture of sweet and acid, shredded and stirred, boiled and moulded, with the success of Dundee marmalade.
The same fusion as between Highlander and Lowlander, between Norman and Saxon, it has been the work of time to bring about between Northerner and Southerner, the process there hindered by a fixed border-line of hostile memories, of variant creeds, customs, and laws, going to keep up natural antipathies. But such fences are now so much fallen down that there is little to stop different breeds from straggling on to one another’s fields, the movement indeed being mostly one way, since the leaner flock is more tempted from hill-sides eaten bare to the green pastures of the south. What is as yet a mechanical mixture tends to become a chemical one, as these wandering atoms find affinities in a fresh environment; then the substance of national life should be enriched, as every generation goes on incorporating the coarse good-humour and practical temper of the plainsman, with the generous affections and mettlesome hardihood of the mountaineer. The result as yet may be best seen in London, that crucible of blood and manners, where there are Englishmen who would fain affect to be Scots, and Scots who have forgotten all but their pride in Scotland. I met one such the other day in a train, who had his boy arrayed in a kilt, but neither of them knew what tartan it was. Where a Campbell wears the colours of a Cameron with indifference, he unconsciously continues what was begun by a Graham or a Gordon inventing a tartan for himself, and may end in plaid and tweed taking their turn of fashion with serge and broadcloth, when _Tros Tyriusque_ are indistinguishably mixed in one name and nature.