222 



COEEACH-BAH; OE, A PLEA FOE THE 

 WASTES. 



How shrunk are Scotland's rugged untamed desolations ! We 

 see those mushroom larch-plantations skirting the steeps of our 

 brown mountains, with their luxuriant verdure. The subsoil- 

 plough, tile-draining, and all the ingenious et-ceteras of modern 

 invention, have reclaimed many a bleak and barren moor, 

 which once only served for pasture to the hardy black cattle, 

 the unhoused hirsel of the hills. Thriving fields of yellow 

 grain, and glancing sickles, and merry voices swelling the 

 autumn gale, now enliven those wastes, once the chosen haunts 

 of the bittern and the whaup. Many of the lords of the 

 heather themselves have caught the improvement mania, and 

 either modernise their " own grey tower " or pull it down 

 building a splendid mansion in its honoured stead. The wild 

 feudo-Highland grounds and scenery must, of course, be made 

 to fit this upstart of a house ; and many a knoll, covered with 

 its tangled brushwood, and blazing with the yellow gold of the 

 whin and the broom, must be levelled and swept away, to 

 convert the whole into an English lawn. 1 



In addition to this we have the new law of entail, which 



1 " Fortunately for mankind, as some counterbalance to that wretched love of 

 novelty which originates in selfishness, narrowness, and conceit, and which especi- 

 ally characterises all vulgar minds, there is set in the deeper places of the heart 

 such affection for the signs of age, that the eye is delighted even by injuries which 

 are the work of time." ' Modern Painters,' by John Ruskin, M.A. 



