Читать книгу The Highlands and Islands of Scotland онлайн

21 страница из 43

Those young Cockneys are as ignorant as some grown-up ladies and gentlemen and not a few authors, who ought to know that the “garb of old Gaul” is no more the “Scottish dress” than a tall hat and a red cloak is the English national costume for women. The comic papers caricaturing bank directors and church elders in tartans betray themselves as published within sound of Bow Bells. A London illustrated weekly lately put Lanarkshire miners into kilts, as a patch of local colour. A few words, then, may not be wasted in enlightening popular ignorance on a subject that has some real obscurities to invite learned controversy among such pundits as concern themselves with “the cut of Adam’s philabeg.”

And first let me remonstrate with Friend Ezra Q. Broadbrim of Philadelphia and Miss Virginia M’Adam of Vermont, who profess to be as much shocked at bare knees as at the Apollo Belvidere or the Venus de Medici. A generation back England had a like squeamishness, when even on the northern stage Rob Roy and the Dougal Cratur felt it proper to wear tights; nay, a century ago certain prim ladies of Edinburgh thought fit to publish in the Courant how they must avert their eyes from hairy-shanked cattle-drovers out of Highland glens. The example of our athletic youth has gone to shame down such mock modesty. As well be scandalised by the Scotch lasses who display their comely limbs in washing-tubs, not so liberally, indeed, as did their mothers, thanks to the leering of Cockney cads, who may be born at Paisley as at Peckham! And let those who find the Highland dress too Arcadian know to their confounding that the Celt, whether of Scotland or Ireland, is a model for the Saxon in the morals that here seem open to question. As to healthfulness, the experience of Highland soldiers all over the world bears out Dr. Jaeger’s doctrine of a thick girdle round the middle of the body being best for both hot and cold weather: the seat of life protected, and the extremities left to take care of themselves. There is a very Cockney novel of truly Cockney days, in which “Sir Gregor Macgregor, Cacique of Poyais,” appears in the Fleet Prison wearing a snuff-shop kilt, as represented by the artist; and a visitor judges it as well he can’t go out, for fear of catching cold! As to picturesqueness, ask any artist wrestling with his “Portrait of a Gentleman”—heaven help him if Mars or Minerva cannot cast some cloud over the lay figure draped by twentieth-century tailors!