to those of music, and the love of classical learning to both. For, 
in order to cherish high sentiments in the minds of all, every consi- 
derable family had an historian who recounted, and a bard who sung, 
the deeds of his clan, and of its chieftain ; and all, even the lowest 
in station, were sent to school in their youth, partly because they 
had nothing else to do at that age, and partly because literature was 
thought the distinction, not the want of it the mark of good birth. 
The severity of their climate, the height of their mountains, the dis- 
tance of their villages from each other, their love of the chase and of 
war, with their desire to visit and be visited, forced them to great 
bodily exertions. The vastness of the objects which surrounded 
them — lakes, mountains, rocks, cataracts — extended and elevated their 
minds ; for they were not in the state of men who only know the 
way from one towm to another. Their want of regular occupations 
led them, like the ancient Spartans, to contemplation, and the powers 
of conversation ; powers which they exerted in striking out the original 
thoughts which nature had suggested, not in languidly repeating those 
which they had learned from other people. They valued themselves, 
without undervaluing other nations. They loved to quit their own coun- 
try, to see and to hear, adopted easily the manners of others, and were 
attentive and insinuating wherever they went. When strangers came 
amongst them, they received them not with a ceremony which for- 
bids a second visit, not wdth a coldness w'hich causes a repentance of 
a first, not with an embarrassment w hich leaves both the landlord and 
his guest in equal misery, but with the most pleasing of all politeness, 
the simplicity and cordiality of affection ; proud to give that hospi- 
tality which they had not received, and to humble the persons w'ho 
had thought of them with contempt, by shewdng how little tiiey de- 
served it. Having been driven from the low countries of Scotland 
by invasion, they, from time immemorial, thought themselves entitled 
to make reprisals on the property of their invaders ; but they touched 
not that of each other: so that in the same men there appeared, to 
those w'ho did not look into the causes of things, a strange mixture 
of vice and of virtue ; for what we term theft and rapine, they termed 
right and justice. But from the practice of these reprisals, tliey ac- 
quired the habits of being enterprising, artful, and bold. Hence the 
Highlanders were in the habitual practice of war, and hence their 
attachment to their chieftain, and to each other, was founded upon 
the two most active principles of human nature, love of their friends, and 
resentment against their enemies. But the frequency of war tempered its 
ferocity. They bound up the wounds of their prisoners, while they neg- 
lected their own ; and in the person of an enemy, respected and pitied 
the stranger. They wentahvays completely armed, a fashion which, by 
accustoming them to the instruments of death, removed the fear of death 
itself, and which, from the danger of provocation, made the common 
people as polite, and as guarded in their behaviour, as the gentry of 
other countries. From these combined circumstances, the higher ranks 
and the lower ranks of the Highlanders, joined that refinement of 
sentiment, which in all other nations is peculiar to the former, to 
that strength and -hardiness of body which in other countries is pos- 
sessed only by the latter. To be modest as well as brave, to be con- 
