298 Notes on Sport and Travel n 



in Scotland, and represent the national music, I care 

 not muchly for — they are rare, and will become 

 rarer as civilisation advances, as discoursers of 

 harmony, though, as authors affirm, they may still 

 be used medicinally in some diseases ; but that a 

 man of gentle blood should permit himself to walk 

 into the presence of ladies of delicacy and decency 

 with his upper lower limbs barely covered by an 

 absurdity, which has no more to do with his position 

 or nationality than a nose-ring or a scalp-lock, does, 

 I must confess, anger me deeply. And so for the 

 second North British delusion, the ' Kilt.' ^ 



When the Northern Scoto-Irish were first dis- 

 covered they seem to have had but little clothing 

 of any kind. Pinkerton informs us that Fordun, in 

 the sixteenth century, only mentions the Highland 

 people as amictu deformis, a term conveying the 

 idea of a vague savage dress of skins, possibly their 

 own. In TJie Book of Dress, printed in Paris in 

 1562, the Highland woman is dressed in sheep and 

 deer skins ; but this matters not much, for your 

 Frenchman ever imagined more than he saw, and I 

 am credibly informed that some of the daintiest 

 dames of our own day wear the skins of the chamois 

 or mountain goat next their own instead of clean 

 linen, to give suppleness and grace to their move- 

 ments, and to cause their outer garment to sit more 

 trimly and closely. 



1 There are good reasons for believing that this word is connected 

 with the old Saxon kittel or kiltel, a petticoat. — Ed. 



