2io THE LIFE OF JAMES J). FORBES. [CHAP. 



mountain guides did not exist, and railways were un- 

 known. 



He laboured, and other men have entered into his 

 labours. The theodolite has been planted on peaks which 

 in his time were deemed inaccessible by travellers, and 

 fatal by guides ; for even then, legends of air too rarefied 

 to support life, and of avalanches started by the human 

 voice, still lingered among their crags the 'trailing 

 skirts ' of that departing night of superstition, which 

 had before peopled them with dragons and chimseras. 

 Stories, too, of savage rudeness, if not of crime, hung 

 about many of the less frequented valleys of the Alps. 

 The fact that a pass had never been crossed by man 

 before, was then a reason for avoiding it ; it is now an 

 invincible attraction towards it : and Forbes, although 

 by no means the first of English mountaineers, contri- 

 buted greatly to this change of feeling, by the popularity 

 given by his writings to those Alpine regions which he 

 was among the first to explore. 



To attempt a portrait of the traveller himself, is im- 

 possible. Many who were the companions of his pro- 

 fessorial work, many who knew the tenderness of his 

 friendship, and the deeper tenderness of his domestic 

 life and all this encased within a shell of cautious and 

 sensitive reserve which left on some the impression of 

 hardness had seen only half his nature. When on his 

 travels he was another man, and yet the same. To an 

 artist's appreciation of beauty (and he was no contemp- 

 tible artist), combined with carefully trained powers of 

 observation, there was added the outburst of a sunny 

 and joyous spirit. How he drank in the pure mountain 

 air, how unwearied was his light active step, and how, 

 at the sight of a fresh gleam of sunlight on the land- 

 scape, a cloud shadow, a flower even, he would break 

 off his perpetual merry whistle for an exclamation of 

 delight above all, the chivalrous pleasure in confronting 

 difficulties and dangers, which belonged to his strong and 

 noble character there are but few now left who can 

 remember. Of the companions and the guides of his 



