FORT A UG USTUS. 391 



interested me in some degree as the scene of the most 

 pleasing portion of the most pleasing work of Mrs 

 Grant of Laggan. Her earlier Letters from the Moun- 

 tains, written when she was a very young lady, and 

 yet, though young, intellectually at her best, for she 

 afterwards became stiff and pompous, date from Fort 

 Augustus. She speaks in them, pleasingly enough, of 

 her walks, and of the young Moderate chaplain, whose 

 wife she afterwards became. The Fort itself, though 

 fast hastening to decay, will make, like all other modern 

 places of strength, but an indifferent ruin. For the 

 purposes of the landscape-painter one baronial castle, in 

 the style of Castle Urquhart, would be worth a dozen of 

 the most regular fortifications run to decay, Vauban ever 

 erected ; but when regular fortifications shall have run 

 to decay, baronial castles shall have gone out of existence 

 altogether ; and so in the millennium, the ruins that 

 tell of war and bloodshed will be very ungainly-looking 

 things. The village beside the Fort consists of a scat- 

 tered group of houses, a few of them exceedingly neat 

 and genteel, with native ladies in them that look like 

 the ladies elsewhere, but the greater part neglected- 

 looking and poor. The village has its church, and 

 Romance could doubtless be fine upon the clustered 

 cottages associated with the place of devotion. It seems 

 an argument for an establishment embodied in stone and 

 lime. Alas for the fact, however. A mean-looking 

 man, in shabby black,' comes regularly down to every 

 steamboat as it passes the locks, and stretching out his 

 fiery nose over the side, looks beseechingly for a dram. 

 And this mean-looking, red-nosed man is the minister 

 of the village. 



' As we passed through the piece of canal which 

 stretches between Loch Ness and Loch Oich, I saw a 



