Passing from Tarbet, we entered the grand and beautiful pass of Glencoe,—­sublime with purple shadows with bright lights between, and in one place showing an exquisitely silent and lonely little lake.  The wildness of the scene was heightened by the black Highland cattle feeding here and there.  They looked much at home, too, in the park at Inverary, where I saw them next day.  In Inverary I was disappointed.  I found, indeed, the position of every object the same as indicated in the “Legend of Montrose,” but the expression of the whole seemed unlike what I had fancied.  The present abode of the Argyle family is a modern structure, and boasts very few vestiges of the old romantic history attached to the name.  The park and look-out upon the lake are beautiful, but except from the brief pleasure derived from these, the old cross from Iona that stands in the market-place, and the drone of the bagpipe which lulled me to sleep at night playing some melancholy air, there was nothing to make me feel that it was “a far cry to Lochawe,” but, on the contrary, I seemed in the very midst of the prosaic, the civilized world.

Leaving Inverary, we left that day the Highlands too, passing through.  Hell Glen, a very wild and grand defile.  Taking boat then on Loch Levy, we passed down the Clyde, stopping an hour or two on our way at Dumbarton.  Nature herself foresaw the era of picture when she made and placed this rock:  there is every preparation for the artist’s stealing a little piece from her treasures to hang on the walls of a room.  Here I saw the sword of “Wallace wight,” shown by a son of the nineteenth century, who said that this hero lived about fifty years ago, and who did not know the height of this rock, in a cranny of which he lived, or at least ate and slept and “donned his clothes.”  From the top of the rock I saw sunset on the beautiful Clyde, animated that day by an endless procession of steamers, little skiffs, and boats.  In one of the former, the Cardiff Castle, we embarked as the last light of day was fading, and that evening found ourselves in Glasgow.

I understand there is an intellectual society of high merit in Glasgow, but we were there only a few hours, and did not see any one.  Certainly the place, as it may be judged of merely from the general aspect of the population and such objects as may be seen in the streets, more resembles an Inferno than any other we have yet visited.  The people are more crowded together, and the stamp of squalid, stolid misery and degradation more obvious and appalling.  The English and Scotch do not take kindly to poverty, like those of sunnier climes; it makes them fierce or stupid, and, life presenting no other cheap pleasure, they take refuge in drinking.

I saw here in Glasgow persons, especially women, dressed in dirty, wretched tatters, worse than none, and with an expression of listless, unexpecting woe upon their faces, far more tragic than the inscription over the gate of Dante’s Inferno.  To one species of misery suffered here to the last extent, I shall advert in speaking of London.