Ti Certain Delusions of the Noi^th Britons 297 



informed that, though those northern parts of Britain 

 contain innumerable statues to him they call ' Albert 

 the Good/ — who indeed was good, but did them but 

 little — there exists not one to the honour of the late 

 Duke of Cumberland, whom they even despitefully call 

 * Billy the Butcher,' to whom they owe much of their 

 prosperity, happiness, and escapement from savagery, 

 he having caught them in a corner and knocked 

 the nonsense out of them once and for ever, in that 

 way they being happier than the Irish of Hibernia. 



But it is not of the old Scots and Saxons of 

 North Britain that we have now to speak ; they 

 knew what they wanted, and had a very happy 

 knack of getting it when occasion offered, without 

 particularity. It is of the new, or composite, Scotch 

 or Scottsman, and his delusions, that we will dis- 

 course. And, indeed, these delusions are becoming 

 so strong and so spread abroad by the writers of 

 vain romances that, unless they be put down, civilisa- 

 tion may be arrested and we be returned to the 

 state of our first parents or worse. That the North 

 Briton may imagine that Haggis (being French) is 

 national and peculiar is of small account ; we can 

 smell it from afar, and if we like it not (some 

 likening it to a boiled bagpipe) avoid it, which is 

 the last thing I myself should do, deeming it delect- 

 able. That he should dream that Andrea Ferrara's 

 broadswords were his ' claymores ' and were made 

 in Scotland concerns me not, thanks to Peel and his 

 Police ; that the bagpipes were originally invented 



