These are hints of what spirit was fermenting about Abernethy under the cold Georgian star, when in Scottish straths and glens plain living nourished much high or hot thinking. A coarser spirit was not wanting when, as Mr. Hall notes, the public-houses of the neighbourhood did their chief trade on Sundays, with people tramping into Abernethy to attend the Seceder meetings, and those of the Relief Church that soon set up another standard of dissent. He gives at some length an anonymous report of the “occasion” here in 1776, that is, the annual administration of the Sacrament, spread out over a week, when preaching flowed all day in a great tent, surrounded with booths and stands to supply refreshment to a crowd estimated by thousands, the whole encampment stretching out the best part of a mile. If the preacher failed in fire or unction, his hearers, as in the House of Commons, would drop off to the beer-barrels, flocking back to the tent when some popular Boanerges broached hotter eloquence. Such scenes, a survival of Covenanting conventicles, often degenerated into the scandals of Burns’s “Holy Fair”; and it is only in our time that they cease to be recalled by the “Preachings,” now abolished among the leading churches as having become too much of a worldly holiday.
Travellers of Mr. Hall’s period had no admiration for the “dreary glen of Abernethy,” nor much for the more richly planted Glenfarg into which it leads, the latter now the main pass from Fife into Perthshire. But this tourist parson duly admired the view from the Wicks of Baiglie, extolled by Scott as unmatched in Britain, yet commonly missed by railroad tourists since the leisurely day when the charms of Glenfarg inspired Ruskin, at the precocious age of seven, to verse which may be left unquoted. The Ruskin carriage, indeed, came by the new turnpike that shirks that higher ground where Scott gained life-long memories of the delight with which, as a boy of fifteen, making his first independent excursion, from the back of his pony he looked down on such an “inimitable landscape.”
This reminiscence of his touches a chord in my own heart, for it was on a boy’s pony that I, too, made wide