Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, August 1847

There was a man of Crete, born of a nymph, fed by the nymphs, if indeed he was fed at all, for no one saw him eat. In his youth, this marvellous Cretan had been sent by his father to bring home some stray sheep, and turning aside into a cave for shelter from the noontide heat, had fallen asleep. He slept on for fifty years. Either supernatural knowledge comes in sleep, or Epimenides invented this fable to stop all inquiries as to where, or how, he had passed the early period of his life. He attained the age of one hundred and fifty-four—some say three hundred years.

This remarkable person, supposed to know by what means the anger of the gods might be propitiated, was called to Athens. What means he devised for this purpose may easily be conjectured. After the performance of certain religious ceremonies, the foundation of a new temple, and the sacrifice of a human victim, the Athenians were restored to their usual tranquillity.

"The religious mission of Epimenides to Athens," observes Mr Grote, "and its efficacious as well as healing influence on the public mind, deserve notice as characteristics of the age in which they occurred. If we transport ourselves two centuries forward to the Peloponnesian war, when rational influences and positive habits of thought had acquired a durable hold upon the superior minds, and when practical discussion on political and judicial matters were familiar to every Athenian citizen, no such uncontrollable religious misery could well have subdued the entire public; and if it had, no living man could have drawn to himself such universal veneration as to be capable of effecting a cure. Plato, admitting the real healing influence of rites and ceremonies, fully believed in Epimenides as an inspired prophet during the past, but towards those who preferred claims to supernatural power in his own day, he was not so easy of faith: he, as well as Euripides and Theophrastus, treated with indifference, and even with contempt, the Orpheotelestæ of the later times, who advertised themselves as possessing the same patent knowledge of ceremonial rites, and the same means of guiding the will of the gods, as Epimenides had wielded before them.... Had Epimenides himself come to Athens in those days, his visit would probably have been as much inoperative to all public purposes as a repetition of the stratagem of Phyê, clothed and equipped as the goddess Athena, which had succeeded so completely in the days of Peisistratus—a stratagem which even Herodotus treats as incredibly absurd, although a century before his time both the city of Athens and the Demas of Attica had obeyed, as a divine mandate, the orders of this magnificent and stately woman to restore Peisistratus."—(Vol. iii. p. 116.)

There is nothing to which we are more averse than the converting ancient history into a field for the discussion of modern party politics. We are fully persuaded that the most thorough English Conservative may admire the Athenian republic; so far at least admire as to admit that it is impossible to conceive how, under any other form of government, the peculiar glories of Athens could have shone forth. And, indeed, an Athenian democracy differs so entirely from any political institution which the world sees at present, or will ever see again, that to carry the strife of our politics back into those times, in other than a quite general manner, is as futile as it is tasteless and vexatious. After this avowal, we shall not be thought disposed to enter into any needless cavil, upon this topic, with Mr Grote; we shall not, certainly, be upon the watch to detect the too liberal politician in the historian of Greece. An interest in the working of popular institutions is a qualification the more for his task; and the historian himself must have felt that it was no mean advantage he had acquired by having taken his seat in our house of parliament, and mingled personally in the affairs of a popular government. What the future volumes of the history may disclose, we will not venture to prognosticate; but, hitherto, we have met with nothing which deserves the opprobrium of being attributed to party spirit. There is a certain tone in some of his political observations which, as may be supposed, we should not altogether adopt; but many of them are excellent and instructive. Nothing could be better than the following remarks on the necessity of a "constitutional morality." He is speaking of the reforms of Cleisthenes.

"It was necessary to create in the multitude, and through them to force upon the leading ambitious men, that rare and difficult sentiment which we may term a constitutional morality,—a paramount reverence for the forms of the constitution, enforcing obedience to the authorities acting under and within those forms, yet combined with the habit of open speech, of action, subject only to definite legal control, and unrestrained censure of those very authorities as to all their public acts,—combined, too, with the perfect confidence in the bosom of every citizen, amidst the bitterness of party contest, that the forms of the constitution will not be less sacred in the eyes of his opponents than in his own. This co-existence of freedom and self-imposed restraint—of obedience to authority with unmeasured censure of the persons exercising it—may be found in the aristocracy of England, (since about 1688,) as well as in the democracy of the American United States; and, because we are familiar with it, we are apt to suppose it a natural sentiment; though there seem to be few sentiments more difficult to establish and diffuse among a community, judging by the experience of history. We may see how imperfectly it exists, at this day, in the Swiss cantons; and the many violences of the French Revolution illustrate, amongst various other lessons, the fatal effects arising from its absence, even among a people high in the scale of intelligence. Yet the diffusion of such constitutional morality, not merely among the majority of any community, but throughout the whole, is the indispensable condition of a government at once free and peaceable; since even any powerful and obstinate minority may render the working of free institutions impracticable, without being strong enough to conquer ascendency for themselves."—Vol. iv. p. 205.

Then follow, close on the extract we have just made, some observations upon the famous law of Ostracism, which are well deserving of attention, and which we would willingly quote did our space allow of it. Perhaps it would be difficult, in following out the several applications of this law, to show that it had exactly the beneficial operation which—arguing on the theory of the institution,—is here assigned to it. But, at the very lowest, this much may be said of the law of Ostracism, that it gives to the stronger of two factions a means of deciding the contest without appeal to force, before the contest rose to its maximum of bitterness, and without necessity or excuse for those wholesale banishments which afflicted the republics of Italy. If such an institution had existed in the Florentine republic, we should not have heard of those cruel banishments that Guelph and Ghibelline, Bianchi and Neri, inflicted upon each other; such banishments as that, for instance, in which its great poet Dante was involved.

Of one remarkable event, characterising the working of the Athenian government, we do not assent to the view presented to us by Mr Grote. His last published volume brings down the affairs of Greece to the battle of Marathon and the death of Miltiades. In the sentence passed on the hero of Marathon, the operation of a popular government has been often disadvantageously traced; the Athenians have been accused of fickleness and ingratitude. Mr Grote repels the charge. With some observations upon this defence, which forms the conclusion of the fourth and last of the published volumes, we shall bring our own notice to a close.

Ingratitude, we readily admit, is not the proper word to be used on such an occasion. A citizen serves the state, and is honoured; if he commits a crime against the state he is not, on this account, to go unpunished. His previous services invest him with no privilege to break the laws, or act criminally. What man, capable of doing, a patriotic action, would wish for such a privilege, or dream of laying claim to it?

Not gratitude or ingratitude—but justice or injustice—is the issue to be tried between Miltiades and the Athenian assembly. And although Mr Grote is supported, in some measure, by Dr Thirlwall in the judgment he gives on this transaction, we prefer to side here with the opinion expressed by the earlier historian, Mr Mitford: we view the sentence passed on Miltiades not as the triumph of law or justice, but of mere party-spirit, the triumph of a faction gained through the unreasonable anger of the people.

Though the extract is rather long, we must, in justice, give the narrative of Mr Grote in his own language.

"His reputation (that of Miltiades) had been great before the battle (of Marathon), and after it the admiration and confidence of his countrymen knew no bounds; it appears indeed to have reached such a pitch, that his head was turned, and he lost both his patriotism and his prudence. He proposed to his countrymen to incur the cost of equipping an armament of seventy ships, with an adequate armed force, and to place it altogether at his discretion; giving them no intimation whither he intended to go, but merely assuring them that if they would follow him, he would conduct them to a land where gold was abundant, and thus enrich them. Such a promise, from the lips of the recent victor of Marathon, was sufficient, and the armament was granted; no man except Miltiades knowing what was its destination. He sailed immediately to the island of Paros, laid siege to the town, and sent in a herald to require from the inhabitants a contribution of one hundred talents, on pain of entire destruction. His pretence for this attack was, that the Parians had furnished a trireme to Datis for the Persian fleet at Marathon; but his real motive (so Herodotus assures us) was vindictive animosity against a Parian citizen named Lysagoras, who had exasperated the Persian general Hydarnes against him. The Parians amused him at first with evasions, until they had procured a little delay to repair the defective portions of their wall, after which they set him at defiance; and Miltiades in vain prosecuted hostilities against them for the space of twenty-six days: he ravaged the island, but his attacks made no impression on the town. Beginning to despair of success in his military operations, he entered into some negotiation (such at least was the tale of the Parians themselves,) with a Parian woman named Timô, priestess or attendant in the temple of Demeter (Ceres) near the town-gates; this woman, promising to reveal to him a secret which would place Paros in his power, induced him to visit by night a temple to which no male person was admissible. He leaped the exterior fence and approached the sanctuary; but on coming near was seized with a panic terror and ran away, almost out of his senses; on leaping the same fence to get back, he strained or bruised his thigh badly, and became utterly disabled. In this melancholy state he was placed on ship-board; the siege being raised, and the whole armament returning to Athens."

"Vehement was the indignation both of the armament and the remaining Athenians against Miltiades on his return; and Zanthippus, father of the great Perikles, became the spokesman of this feeling. He impeached Miltiades before the popular judicature as having been guilty of deceiving the people, and so having deserved the penalty of death. The accused himself, disabled by his injured thigh, which even began to show symptoms of gangrene, was unable to stand or to say a word in his own defence; he lay on his couch before the assembled judges, while his friends made the best case they could in his behalf. Defence, it appears, there was none; all they could do was to appeal to his previous services; they reminded the people largely and emphatically of the inestimable exploit of Marathon, coming in addition to his previous conquest of Lemnos. The assembled dikasts or jurors showed their sense of these powerful appeals, by rejecting the proposition of his accuser to condemn him to death; but they imposed on him the penalty of fifty talents 'for his iniquity.'" (Vol. iv. p. 488.)

He died shortly after from his wound.

On this narrative we must make one or two observations. The turn of expression which the writer has selected for conveying the meaning of the original Greek text of his authority, might lead us to imply that when the Athenians placed a force of seventy ships at the command of Miltiades they did not know on what kind of expedition he was about to employ them. "He would conduct them to a land where gold was abundant, and thus enrich them." Surely no one had an idea that it was a voyage of discovery, in search after some El Dorado that Miltiades was about to undertake. Every one in Athens knew that the fleet was to be directed against some of their neighbours: although, for very manifest reasons,—the advantage of taking their victim by surprise, and of leaving their general unfettered, to act according to circumstances,—the objects of attack were not revealed, and on this a perfect secrecy was allowed to be maintained. It should be also added to this account, that Zanthippes, father of Pericles, who made himself spokesman for the angry feeling of the Athenians, was also, as Dr Thirwall tells us, "the son of Ariphron, the chief of the rival house of the Alcmaonids," who were little pleased with the sudden rise of Miltiades.

From the same authority we may also learn, that "Paros was at this time one of the most flourishing amongst the Cyclades." Miltiades directed the expedition against Paros from personal motives, from vindictive animosity against a Parian citizen; but Paros was rich, and could therefore pay a ransom—the very object of the expedition; and the pretext under which alone Athens could extort a ransom or a tribute from its neighbours, that they had assisted the Persians, or failed in bringing aid to the common cause against them, applied to Paros; it had furnished, or was accused of having furnished, a trireme to Datis. Whatever baseness Miltiades betrayed in using a public force for his own private revenge, there is nothing to make it appear that the selection of Paros for the object of his attack was not in perfect consistency with the real public purpose of the enterprise.

What crime in all this had Miltiades committed against the Athenians? The injustice of the expedition they shared; for it would be childishness to suppose that they sent their general out with seventy ships, and had no idea that he would attack any one. The personal motives which led him to direct it against Paros, however mean and unworthy of him, are not shown to have been at variance with the professed objects of the expedition. Nor can any one doubt for a moment that if he had succeeded in extorting from the Parians, and others, a large sum of money, the Athenians would have welcomed him back with applause, as loud as the censure they bestowed on their defeated generals, who, instead of plunder, brought them back only the disgrace of having tried to plunder. There were those at hand ready to take advantage of the public irritation; they accused him, and obtained his condemnation. We are not claiming for Miltiades the praise of virtue; nor should we make any pathetic appeal in his behalf. He was not free from a moral delinquency; but, so far as the Athenians were concerned, his substantial offence was failure in his enterprise.

That his friends urged no other defence but that of his previous services, is no proof that other grounds for acquittal were not present to their minds. They were pleading before angry and irresponsible judges, whom it, was their object to soothe and propitiate. Would the strain of inculpatory observations that we have been making, have answered their purpose? To tell an angry man that he is angry, because he is disappointed, is not the way to abate his passion. That Miltiades had disappointed them was certain; undoubtedly the best method of defence was to remind them of the great services that he had formerly rendered them. It was not the demands of judicial reason his advocates had to satisfy: they were pleading before judges whose feelings of the moment were to be the law of the moment.

"Thus closed the life of the conqueror of Marathon. The last act of it," continues Mr Grote, "produces an impression so mournful, and even shocking—his descent from the pinnacle of glory, to defeat, mean tampering with a temple-servant, mortal bodily hurt, undefended ignominy, and death under a sentence of heavy fine, is so abrupt and unprepared—that readers, ancient and modern, have not been satisfied without finding some one to blame for it: we must except Herodotus, our original authority, who recounts the transaction without dropping a single hint of blame against any one. To speak ill of the people, as Machiavel has long ago observed, is a strain in which every one at all times, even under a democratical government indulges with impunity and without provoking any opponent to reply; and in this case the hard fate of Miltiades has been imputed to the vices of the Athenians and their democracy—it has been cited in proof partly of their fickleness, partly of their ingratitude. But however such blame may serve to lighten the mental sadness arising from a series of painful facts, it will not be found justified if we apply to those facts a reasonable criticism."

He thus vindicates the Athenians from the charge of fickleness, on the ground that it was not they, but Miltiades who had changed. The fugitive from Paros, and the victor of Marathon, were two very different persons. As any remarkable instance of fickleness we should certainly not be disposed to cite the case. The charge of ingratitude, we have admitted, is, presuming that he was guilty, entirely displaced. But when Mr Grote in his final summary says, "The fate of Miltiades thus, so far from illustrating either the fickleness or the ingratitude of his countrymen, attests their just appreciation of deserts," we must indeed demur. No, no: this was not the triumph of justice over the finer sensibilities of our nature, as Mr Grote would seem to imply. On the fairest review we can give to the whole of the circumstances, we find on the sentence passed upon Miltiades a gross instance of that old notorious injustice which pronounces an enterprise meritorious or criminal according to its success. The enterprise was altogether a disgraceful affair. But the Athenians must be supposed cognisant of the nature of the expedition for which they fitted out their seventy ships:—against them, we repeat, the only substantial offence committed was his failure; nor can we doubt that his welcome back to Athens would have been quite different had there been a different issue to the adventure. Justice there was none; unless it be justice for three freebooters to pass sentence upon the fourth.

Before concluding, we ought, perhaps, to take, some notice of the reform in our orthography of Greek words which Mr Grote is desirous of introducing, in order to assimilate the English to the Greek pronunciation. The principal of these is the substitution of k for c. Our own k, he justly observes, precisely coincides with the Greek k, while a c may be either k or s. He writes Perikles, Alkibiades. To this approximation of the English pronunciation to the Greek we can see nothing to object. A reader of Greek finds it a mere annoyance, and sort of barbarism, to be obliged to pronounce the same name one way while reading Greek, and another when speaking or reading English; and to the English reader it must be immaterial which pronunciation he finally adopts. Meanwhile, it must be allowed that the first changing of an old familiar name is a disagreeable operation. We must leave the popular and the learned taste to arrange it how they can together. Mr Grote has wisely left some names—as Thucydides—in the old English form; in matters of this kind nothing is gained by too rigid a consistency. It is not improbable that his orthography will be adopted, in the first place, by the more learned writers, and will from their pages find its way into popular use. Mr Grote also, in speaking of the Greek deities, calls them by their Greek names, and not by the Latin equivalents—As Zeus for Jupiter—Athene for Minerva.

BEN NEVIS AND BEN MUICH DHUI

It was on a bright, hot day of July, which threw the first gleam of sunshine across a long tract of soaking, foggy, dreary, hopeless weather, that we ascended Ben Nevis. The act was unpremeditated. The wet and fog of weeks had entered into our soul; and we had resolved, in the spirit of indignant resignation, that we would not attempt the hill. Accordingly we were stalking lazily along General Wade's road: we had left Fort William, and thought there might be a probability of reaching Fort Augustus to dinner,—when we were not ungratefully surprised to see the clouds tucking themselves up the side of the mountain in a peculiar manner, which gives the experienced wanderer of the hills the firm assurance of a glorious day. Soon afterwards, the great mountain became visible from summit to base, and its round head and broad shoulders stood dark against the bright blue sky. A sagacious-looking old Highlander, who was passing, protested that the hill had never looked so hopeful during the whole summer: the temptation was irresistible, so we turned our steps towards the right, and commenced the ascent.

It is one among the prevailing fallacies of the times, that to mount a Highland hill is a very difficult operation, and that one should hire a guide on the occasion. We lately witnessed a very distressing instance of the alarming prevalence of this notion, in a young Chancery barrister, fresh from Brick Court Temple, who asked us in a very solemn tone of voice, if we could recommend him to "a steady guide to the top of Arthur Seat." When matters have come to such a crisis, it is time to speak out; and we are able, on the ground of long experience, to say, that if the proper day be chosen, and the right method adopted, the ascent of our grandest mountains is one of the simplest operations in all pedestrianism. True, if people take it in the way in which pigs run up all manner of streets, and go straight forward, looking neither to the right nor to the left, they will run their heads against nature's stone walls, which are at least as formidable as man's. But let any one study the disposal of the ground, calculating the gradients and summit levels as if he were a railway-engineer for the time being—let him observe where the moss lies deep, and precipices rise too steep to be scrambled over; and he will be very obtuse indeed, if he is not able to chalk out for himself precisely the best way to the top. It is a good general rule to keep by the side of a stream. That if you do so when you are at the top of a hill, you will somehow or other find your way to the bottom, is, we are convinced, a proposition as sound as Newton's theory of gravitation. But in the ascent, the stream is often far better than a human guide. It has no interest to lead you to the top of some episodical hill and down again, and to make you scramble over an occasional dangerous pass, to show you how impossible it is that you could have found the way yourself, and how fortunate you are in having secured the services of an intelligent and intrepid guide. On the contrary, as long as you keep by the side of the stream you are always gaining ground and making your way towards the higher levels, while you avoid bogs: for the edge of a stream is generally the dryest part of a mountain.

Choosing the broadest and deepest scaur that is scratched down the abrupt side of the lower range of the mountain, we find it, as we anticipated, the channel of a clear dancing stream, which amuses us with its babble for several hundred feet of the ascent. Some time ere we had reached the base of the hill we had lost sight of the summit, and there was before us only the broad steep bank, with its surface of alternate stone and heather, and a few birch-trees peeping timidly forth from crevices in the rock. After a considerable period of good hard climbing, accompanied by nothing worthy of note either in the variations of the scenery or in the incidents encountered, we are at the top of this rampart; and behold! on the other side of a slight depression, in which sleeps a small inky lake, the bold summit of the mountain rises clear and abrupt and close, as one might see the dome of a cathedral from the parapet on the roof. Here we linger to take a last look of the objects at the foot of the hill, for ere we resume the ascent we shall lose sight of them. Already Fort William looks like a collection of rabbit-houses. The steam-boat on the lake is like a boy's Christmas toy. The waters have assumed that hard burnished metallic appearance which they convey to the eye raised far above them in a hot summer day. The far-stretching moss, with one or two ghastly white stones standing erect out of its blackness like druidical remains, carries the eye along its surface to the dusky and mysterious ruins of Inverlochy Castle, which has so sadly puzzled antiquaries to divine how its princely round towers and broad barbican could have been erected in that wild and remote region, where they stand patiently in their ruined grandeur, waiting till our friend Billings shall, with his incomparable pencil, make each tower and arch and moulding as familiar to the public eye as if the old ruin stood in Fleet Street.

Off we start with the lake to the left, taking care to keep the level we have gained. A short interval of walking in a horizontal direction, and again we must begin to climb. On this side the porphyry dome is round and comparatively smooth—scarcely so abrupt as the outer range of hill which we have just ascended. But wending north-eastwardly when near the summit, we came suddenly to a spot where a huge fragment of the dome had, as it were, been broken off, leaving a ghastly rent—how deep it were difficult for the eye to fix, but the usual authorities tell us that the precipices here are 1500 feet high. When we reached their edge, we found that the clouds, which had been completely lifted up from the smoother parts of the mountain, still lingered as if they had difficulty in getting clear of the ragged edges of the cavernous opening, and moving about restlessly like evil spirits, hither and thither, afforded but partial glimpses of the deep vale below. Though Ben Nevis was at this time rather deficient in his snowy honours, considerable patches lay in the unsunned crevices of the precipice. It was a fine thing to occupy one's-self in tilting over huge boulders, and to see them gradually approach the edge of the gulf, and then leap thundering into the mist.

Turning our eyes from the terrible fascinations of the precipice to the apex of the hill now in full view, a strange sight there met our eyes—a sight so strange that we venture to say the reader no more anticipates it than we did, at the moment when we looked from the yawning precipice to what we expected to be a solitary mountain-top. "Pooh!" the reader will say, "it was an eagle looking at the sun, or a red-deer snuffing with his expanded nostrils the tainted air." We shake our heads. "Well, then, it was a waterspout—or, perhaps, a beautiful rainbow—or something electric, or a phenomenon of some sort." Utterly wrong. It was neither more nor less, reader, than a crowd of soldiers, occupying nearly the whole table-land of the summit! Yes, there they were, British troops, with their red coats, dark gray trousers, and fatigue caps, as distinctly as we ever saw them in Marshall's panoramas! We were reminded of the fine description which Scott gives of the Highland girl who was gazing indolently along the solitary glen of Gortuleg on the day of the battle of Culloden, when it became suddenly peopled by the Jacobite fugitives. "Impressed with the belief that they were fairies—who, according to Highland tradition, are visible to men only from one twinkle of the eyelid to another—she strove to refrain from the vibration, which she believed would occasion the strange and magnificent apparition to become invisible." But whether the eye winked or not, there they were—substantial able-bodied fellows; what could it mean? Had Colonel Mitchell discovered a new system for protecting the country by fortifying the tops of mountains which an enemy never comes near? Could it be some awkward squad sent to be drilled on this remote spot that it might escape the observation of the sarcastic public? Such were the theories as suddenly rejected as they were suggested. It was vain to speculate. No solution we could devise made the slightest approach to probability; and our only prospect of speedy relief was in pushing rapidly forward. A very short sentence from the good-humoured looking young fellow who received our first breathless and perplexed inquiry, solved the mystery,—"did you never hear of the Ordnance Survey?" Yes, indeed, we had heard of it; but our impression of it was as of something like a mathematical line, with neither breadth nor thickness; but here it was in substantial operation. The party were occupied in erecting a sort of dwelling for themselves—half tent, half hut. Though in fatigue dresses, and far from being very trim, it was easy to see that they were not common soldiers. They belong, we believe, to the educated corps of sappers and miners; and a short conversation with them showed that the reputation of intelligence and civility long enjoyed by that distinguished body has not been unjustly earned. Though not blind to the magnificence of the panorama of mountain, lake, and distant far-stretching forest-land that lay beneath our feet as we conversed, they did not conceal their consciousness that the prospect of passing some months on such a spot was not particularly cheering to round-cheeked comfortable Englishmen, accustomed at Sandhurst and Addiscombe to comforts even superior to those of the Saut Market. The air was unexceptionably pure and abundant—yet the Bedford level might have been preferable as a permanent residence. Many were the reflections that occurred to us of the feelings of a set of men thus cut off from the earth, down on which they looked, like so many Jacks on a huge bean-stalk. What a place to encounter the first burst of the November storm in, beneath the frail covering of a tent! How did their friends address letters to them? Would a cover addressed "Mr Abel Thompson of the Royal engineers, Top of Ben Nevis," be a document to which the post-office would pay any more regard than to a letter addressed to one of the fixed stars? Could they ask a friend to step up to dinner, or exchange courtesies with the garrison of Fort William, into whose windows they might peep with their telescopes?

In the course of conversation with our new friends, we alighted on a subject in which we have long taken an interest. They had already conducted some operations on Ben Muich Dhui, and they were now commencing such surveys on Ben Nevis, as would enable them finally to decide which of these mountains has the honour of being the highest land in the United Kingdom. Competition has of late run very close between them; and the last accounts had shown Ben Muich Dhui only some twenty feet or so a-head. We freely confess that we back Ben Muich Dhui in this contest. It is true that Ben Nevis is in all respects a highly meritorious hill. We must do justice to his manly civility and good humour. We have found many a crabbed little crag more difficult of access; and, for his height, we scarcely know another mountain, of which it is so easy to reach the top. He stands majestic and alone, his own spurs more nearly rivalling him than any of the neighbouring hills. Rising straight from the sea, his whole height and magnificent proportions are before us at once, and the view from the summit has an unrivalled expanse. Still there are stronger charms about the great centre of the Cairngorm range. Surrounded by his peers, he stands apart from the every-day world in mysterious grandeur. The depth and remoteness of the solitude, the huge mural precipices, the deep chasms between the rocks, the waterfalls of unknown height, the hoary remains of the primeval forest, the fields of snow, and the deep black lakes at the foot of the precipices, are full of such associations of awe, and grandeur, and mystery, as no other scenery in Britain is capable of arousing. The recollections of these things inclined us still to favour Ben Muich Dhui; and before separating from these hermits of her Majesty's ordnance, we earnestly requested, if they had any influence in the matter, that they would "find" for our favourite, to which we shall now introduce our readers.

Our public are certainly not amenable to the charge of neglecting what is worth seeing, because it is distant and inaccessible. On the top of the Righi, where people go to behold the sun rise over the Alps, we have seen the English congregated in crowds on the wooden bench erected for that purpose, making it look like a race-course stand, and carrying on a bang-up sort of conversation—

Right against the eastern gate
Where the great sun begins his state,—

as if it were a starting-post, and they were laying bets on the events of the day. The Schwartzwald, the Saxon Schweitz, nay, even the wild Norrska Fiellen, swarm with British tourists; and we are credibly informed that loud cries of "boots" and "waiter," with expostulations against the quality of the bottled porter and the airing of the beds, may be heard not far from Mount Sinai. Yet, in the centre of our own island there is a group of scenery, as unlike the rest of the country as if we had travelled to another hemisphere to see it—as grand and beautiful as the objects which our tourists cross half the globe to behold—which is scarcely known to those who profess to say that they have visited every thing that is worth seeing in their own country. The answer to this will probably be, that railway travelling has brought the extremities of Europe together—that Switzerland is but four days from London—that it is as easy to get to Chamouni as to Braemar—and that the scenery of the Alps must be finer than any thing to be seen in Scotland. Even this broad proposition may be questioned. It was with no small pride that one night, after a hard walk from Martigny to Chamouni, we heard a distinguished Englishman, who has been able to compare with each other the finest things both physical and mental which the world has produced, and whose friendly face greeted us as we emerged from the dark valley into a brilliantly lighted hotel—stand up for old Scotland, and question if there were any thing, even in the gorgeous vale of Chamouni itself, to excel our purple mountains and narrow glens. But if we should be disposed to give the preference to the Alps, on that principle of politeness, which actuated an Aberdeen fisherman, who had found his way under the dome of St Paul's, to exclaim—"Weel, that jist maks a perfect feel o' the Kirk o' Fitty"—we think there is something inexpressibly interesting in beholding, in the middle of this busy island of steam-engines and railways, of printing machines and spinning jennies, one wide district where nature is still as supremely lord of all—where man feels as much separated from all traces of the workmanship of his fellows, as in the forests of Missouri, or the upper gorges of the Himalayas. But it is not true that the Cairngorm range of mountains is a distant place to tourists. It is in the very centre of their haunts. They swarm in the valleys of the Spey and the Tay, at Laggan, Blair Athol, and Braemar, and want but enterprise or originality enough to direct their steps out of the beaten paths which have formed, since Scottish touring became fashionable forty years ago, the regular circles in which these creatures revolve. They care not in general to imbibe the glories and the delights of scenery, but confine themselves to the established Lions, which it is good for a man to be able in society to say that he has seen. "Well, I can say I have seen it," says your routine tourist—whereby, if he knew the meaning of his own words, he would be aware that he conveyed to mankind a testimony to his folly in having made any effort to look at that which has produced no impression whatever on his mind, and in looking at which he would not be aware that he saw any thing remarkable, unless the guide-book and the waiter at the inn had certified that it was an object of interest. It is true, that to see our friends the Cairngorm hills, one must walk, and that somewhat stiffly—but this is seldom an obstacle in any place where pedestrianism is not unfashionable. In the Oberland of Switzerland, we have seen green-spectacled, fat, plethoric, gentlemen, fresh from 'Change, wearing blouses and broad straw hats, carrying haversacks on their shoulders, and tall alpenstocks in their hands to facilitate the leaping of the chasms in the glaciers—looking all the time as if the whole were some disagreeable dream, from which they hoped to awaken in their easy-chair in the back office in Crane Alley. No! when personages of this kind adopt the pilgrim's staff, we may be sure that there is a good fund of pedestrianism still unexhausted, could the means of stimulating it be found. But it is high time that we should point out the way to our favourite land of precipices, cataracts, and snow.

We shall suppose the traveller to be at Braemar, which he may have reached by the Deeside road from Aberdeen, or in the direction of Spital of Glenshee through the pass of the Vhrich-vhruich, (have the goodness, reader, to pronounce that aloud,) or from the basin of the Tay by the ancient Highland road through Glen Tilt, and the Ault-Shiloch-Vran. Even the scenery round Braemar is in every way worthy of respect. The hills are fine, there are noble forests of pine and birch, and some good foaming waterfalls; while over all preside in majesty the precipices and snow of Lochin-ye-gair. Still it is farther into the wilderness, at the place where the three counties of Aberdeen, Inverness, and Banff meet, that the traveller must look for the higher class of scenery of which we are sending him in search. As Braemar, however, contains the latest inn that will greet him in his journey, he must remember here to victual himself for the voyage; and, partial as we are to pedestrianism, we think he may as well take a vehicle or a Highland poney as far on his route as either of them can go: it will not long encumber him. The linn of Dee, where the river rushes furiously between two narrow rocks, is generally the most remote object visited by the tourist on Dee-side. There is little apparent inducement to farther progress. He sees before him, about a mile farther on, the last human habitation—a shepherd's cabin, without an inch of cultivated land about it; and he is told that all beyond that is barrenness and desolation, until he reach the valley of the Spey. The pine-trees at the same time decrease in number, the hills become less craggy and abrupt, and the country in general assumes a bleak, bare, windy, bog-and-moor appearance, that is apt to make, one uncomfortable.

Of the various methods of approaching Ben Muich Dhui, the most striking, in our opinion, is one with which we never found any other person so well acquainted as to exchange opinions with us about it. We did once, it is true, coax a friend to attempt that route; he had come so far with us as the edge of the Dee, but disliked crossing it. In the superabundance of our zeal, we offered to carry him over on our shoulders; but when we came to the middle of the stream, it so happened that a foot tripped against a stone, and our friend was very neatly tilted over our head into the water, without our receiving any considerable damage, in our own proper person. He thereafter looked upon us, according to an old Scottish proverb, as "not to ride the water with;" and perhaps he was right. So we proceeded on our journey alone. Our method was to cross right over the line of hills which here bound the edge of the river. Though not precipitous, this bank is very high—certainly not less than a thousand feet. When you reach the top, if the day be clear, the whole Cairngorm range is before you on the other side of the valley, from summit to base, as you may see Mont Blanc from the Col de Balm, or the Jungfrau from the Wengern Alp. From this bird's-eye view, you at once understand that peculiar structure of the group, which makes the valleys so much deeper and narrower, and the precipices so much more frightful, than those of any other of the Scottish mountains. Here there are five summits springing from one root, and all more than four thousand feet above the level of the sea. The circumference of the whole group is as that of one mountain. We can imagine it to have been a huge, wide, rounded hill, Ben Muich Dhui being the highest part, and the whole as smooth and gentle as some of the Ural range, where you might have a fixed engine, and "an incline," without levelling or embanking. But at some time or other the whole mass had got a jerk; and so it is split from top to bottom, and shivered, and shaken, and disturbed into all shapes and positions, showing here and there such chasms as the splitting in two of mountains some three thousand feet or so in direct height must necessarily create. Having to his satisfaction contemplated the group from this elevation, the traveller may descend into Glen Lui Beg, as we shall presently describe it.

Returning to the Dee,—about a mile below the Linn, the stream of the Lui forces a passage through the steep banks and joins the river. We enter the glen from which this stream flows by a narrow rocky pass, through which the trees of the Mar forest struggle upwards. As we proceed, the trees gradually become more scarce, the rocky barrier is left behind us, and we are in a long grassy glen shut out from the world. This is Glen Lui. A better introduction to the savage scenery beyond, for the sake of contrast, there could not be. Every thing here is peace and softness. Banks lofty, but round and smooth, intervene to hide the summits of the mountains. The stream is not stagnant, but it flows on with a gentle current, sometimes through sedge or between grassy banks; elsewhere edged by a beach of the finest yellow sand. The water is beautifully transparent, and even where it is deepest you may count the shining pebbles below. A few weeping birches here and there hang their graceful disconsolate ringlets almost into the stream; the grass is as smooth as a shaven lawn, and much softer; and where a few stones protrude through it, they are covered with a cushion of many-coloured mosses. But with all its softness and beauty, the extreme loneliness of the scene fills the mind with a sense of awe. It surely must have been in such a spot that Wordsworth stood, or of such a scene that he dreamed, when he gave that picture of perfect rest which he professed to apply to a far different spot, Glen Almon—a rough, rocky glen, with a turbulent brook running through it, where there never was or can be silence:

"A convent—even a hermit's cell
Would break the silence of this dell—
It is not quiet—is not ease,
But something deeper far than these.
The separation that is here
Is of the grave, and of austere
And happy feelings of the dead."

Nor in Glen Lui can one feel inclined to join in the charge of mysticism which has been raised against this last simile. Its echoes in the heart at once associate themselves with a few strange, mysterious, round mounds, of the smoothest turf, and of the most regular, oval, or circular construction, which rise here and there from the flat floor of the valley. It needs no archæological inquiry to tell us what they are: we feel that they cover and have covered—who call tell how many hundred years?—the remains of some ancient people, with whom history cannot make us acquainted, and who have not even the benefit of tradition; for how can there be traditions in places where no human beings dwell?

"A noble race, but they are gone!
With their old forests wide and deep;
And we have fed our flocks upon
Hills where their generations sleep.
Their fountains slake our thirst at noon,
Upon their fields our harvest waves;
Our shepherds woo beneath their moon—
Ah, let us spare at least their graves!"

"Stop!" says a voice, "the quotation is utterly inappropriate—how can there be flocks where not even a single sheep feeds—how can shepherds woo beneath the moon where there are no damsels to woo?" Granted; but the lines are pretty—they were the most appropriate that we could find, and they blend in with one's feelings on this spot; for, if it be a strange and melancholy sight in the Far West, beyond the Atlantic, to alight upon the graves of a tribe of Indians whose history has become extinct, is it not more strange still to look, in the centre of this busy island, which has lived in history eighteen hundred years, on these vestiges of an old extinct race, not turned up by the plough, or found in digging the foundation of a cotton mill, but remaining there beneath the open sky, as they were left of old, no successors of the aboriginal race coming to touch them? Standing in Glen Lui, and remembering how fast we are peopling Australia and the Oregon, one's mind becomes confused about the laws of emigration and colonisation. Yet how soon may all this be changed. Perhaps the glen may turn out to be a good trunk level—the granite of Ben Muich Dhui peculiarly well adapted for tunnelling, and the traffic something of an unknown and indescribable extent: and some day soon the silence may be awakened with the fierce whistle of the train, and the bell may ring, and passengers may be ordered to be ready to take their places, and first, second, and third class tickets may be stamped with the rapidity of button-making—who knows? Nobody should prophesy in this age what may not be done. We once met a woful instance of a character for great sagacity utterly lost at one blow, in consequence of such a prediction. The man had engaged to eat the first locomotive that ever came to Manchester by steam from Liverpool. On the day when this marvel was accomplished, he received a polite note enclosing a piece of leather cut from the machinery, with an intimation that when he had digested that, the rest of the engine would be at his service. But the reader is getting tired of Glen Lui, and insists on being led into more exciting scenery.

After being for a few miles such as we have tried to describe it, the glen becomes narrower, and the scenery rougher. Granite masses crop out here and there. The pretty dejected weeping birches become mixed with stern, stiff, surly pines, which look as if they could "do any thing but weep," and not unnaturally suggest the notion that their harsh conduct may be the cause of the tears of their gentler companions. At last a mountain thrusts a spur into the glen, and divides it into two: we are here at the foot of Cairngorm of Derrie, or the lesser Cairngorm. The valley opening to the left is Glen Lui Beg, or Glen Luithe Little—containing the shortest and best path to the top of Ben Muich Dhui. The other to the right is Glen Derrie—one of the passes towards Loch A'an or Avon, and the basin of the Spey. Both these glens are alike in character. The precipitous sides of the great mountains between which they run, frown over them and fill them with gloom. The two streams of which the united waters lead so peaceful a wedded life in calm Glen Lui, are thundering torrents, chafing among rocks, and now and then starting unexpectedly at our feet down into deep black pools, making cataracts which, in the regular touring districts, would be visited by thousands. But the marked feature of these glens is the ancient forest. Somewhere we believe in Glen Derrie there are the remains of a saw-mill, showing that an attempt had been at one time made to apply the forest to civilised purposes; but it was a vain attempt, and neither the Baltic timber duties, nor the demand for railway sleepers, has brought the axe to the root of the tree beneath the shadow of Ben Muich Dhui. There are noble trees in the neighbouring forest of Braemar, but it is not in a state of nature. The flat stump occurs here and there, showing that commerce has made her selection, and destroyed the ancient unity of the forest. In Glen Derrie, the tree lives to its destined old age, and whether falling from decay, or swept to the ground by the tempest, lies and rots, stopping perhaps the course of some small stream, and by solution in the intercepted waters forming a petty peat-bog, which, after a succession of generations, becomes hardened and encrusted with lichens. Near such a mass of vegetable corruption and reorganisation, lies the new-fallen tree with its twigs still full of sap. Around them stand the hoary fathers of the forest, whose fate will come next. They bear the scars and contortions of many a hard-fought battle with the storms that often sweep the narrow glen. Some are bent double, with their heads nearly touching the earth; and among other fantastic forms it is not unusual to see the trunk of some aged warrior twisted round and round, its outer surface resembling the strands of a rope. A due proportion of the forest is still in its manly prime—tall, stout, straight trees, lifting their huge branches on high, and bearing aloft the solemn canopy of dark green that distinguishes "the scarcely waving pine." We are tempted to have recourse to poetry again—we promise it shall be the last time on this occasion: there are, however, some lines by Campbell "on leaving a scene in Bavaria," which describe such a region of grandeur, loneliness, and desolation, with a vigour and melody that have been seldom equalled. They were first published not many years before his death, and it seemed as if the ancient harp had been re-strung to more than its old compass and power—but, alas! when we spoke of these verses to himself, we found that, like all of his that were fitted for immortality, they had been the fruit of his younger and better days, and that a diffidence of their merit had retarded their publication. Let the reader commit these two stanzas to memory, and repeat them as he nears the base of Ben Muich Dhui.

"Yes! I have loved thy wild abode,
Unknown, unploughed, untrodden shore;
Where scarce the woodman finds a road,
And scarce the fisher plies an oar;
For man's neglect I love thee more;
That art nor avarice intrude,—
To tame thy torrents' thunder-shock,
Or prune thy vintage of the rock,
Magnificently rude.