X. 



MOUNTAINS. 



It is curious to note how much the taste and 

 liking for mountain scenery and mountain-climb- 

 ing are a mere growth of the last hundred years 

 or less, utterly unknown not only to our practical 

 medieval ancestors, but even to our recent do- 

 mestic predecessors of the eighteenth century. 

 The early settlers in America never descanted on 

 the beauty of the scenery. To the contemporaries 

 of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Burke, mountains 

 were seldom envisaged as beautiful, picturesque, 

 attractive, or inviting ; they were always spoken 

 of only as rugged, frowning, terrible, and forbid- 

 ding. It was the toils and dangers of mountain 

 travelling, not its pleasures and delights, that the 

 eighteenth century most vividly realized. When 

 sturdy old Sam Johnson himself consented for a 

 while to desert his beloved Fleet Street and go on 

 an exploring expedition among the unknown 

 wilds of the Western Hebrides, his diary is full 

 of the fatigues and horrors of Scotch locomotion, 

 but hardly breathed a single word of the beauties 



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