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And call they this Improvement?—to have changed,

My native Clyde, thy once romantic shore,

Where Nature’s face is banished and estranged,

And Heaven reflected in thy wave no more;

Whose banks, that sweetened May-day’s breath before,

Lie sere and leafless now in summer’s beam,

With sooty exhalations covered o’er;

And for the daisied green-sward, down thy stream

Unsightly brick-lanes smoke, and clanking engines gleam.

The banks of the Clyde have not grown more Arcadian since Campbell’s day, so the traveller does well to hurry by rail over the windings of the smoky river, embarking at Greenock or Helensburgh, where it broadens out into a firth deep enough to drown the offences of man. Here launch forth a fleet of steamboats, whose admirals, almost alone in Britain, rival the luxurious arks of the Hudson and the Mississippi; and here begins a “delectable voyage,” too often spoiled by rain, else warmly praised by a hundred pens, for instance in Colonel Lockhart’s Fair to See, one of the most amusing of Highland novels, as readers might not guess from this opening passage: