Endnotes

  1. These sentences have, I hear, given offence in my native town, and a proportionable pleasure to our rivals of Glasgow. I confess the news caused me both pain and merriment. May I remark, as a balm for wounded fellow-townsmen, that there is nothing deadly in my accusations? Small blame to them if they keep ledgers: ’tis an excellent business habit. Churchgoing is not, that ever I heard, a subject of reproach; decency of linen is a mark of prosperous affairs, and conscious moral rectitude one of the tokens of good living. It is not their fault it the city calls for something more specious by way of inhabitants. A man in a frock-coat looks out of place upon an Alp or Pyramid, although he has the virtues of a Peabody and the talents of a Bentham. And let them console themselves⁠—they do as well as anybody else; the population of (let us say) Chicago would cut quite as rueful a figure on the same romantic stage. To the Glasgow people I would say only one word, but that is of gold; I have not yet written a book about Glasgow. ↩

  2. Please pronounce Arkansaw, with the accent on the first. ↩

  3. I had nearly finished the transcription of the following pages when I saw on a friend’s table the number containing the piece from which this sentence is extracted, and, struck with a similarity of title, took it home with me and read it with indescribable satisfaction. I do not know whether I more envy M. Theuriet the pleasure of having written this delightful article, or the reader the pleasure, which I hope he has still before him, of reading it once and again, and lingering over the passages that please him most. ↩

  4. William Abercrombie. See Fasti Ecclesia Scoticanae, under “Maybole” (Part III). ↩

  5. “Deux poures varlez qui n’ont nulz gages et qui gissoient la nuit avec les chiens.” See Champollion-Figeac’s Louis et Charles d’Orléans, I, 63, and for my lord’s English horn, ibid. 96. ↩

  6. Compare Blake, in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads, without improvement, are roads of Genius.” ↩