Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise,
and constant resolution are the fibres of the legend of his
country's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland have been
tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish history -
Flodden, Darien, or the Forty-five were still either failures or
defeats; and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the
Bruce combine with the very smallness of the country to teach
rather a moral than a material criterion for life. Britain is
altogether small, the mere taproot of her extended empire:
Scotland, again, which alone the Scottish boy adopts in his
imagination, is but a little part of that, and avowedly cold,
sterile and unpopulous. It is not so for nothing. I once seemed
to have perceived in an American boy a greater readiness of
sympathy for lands that are great, and rich, and growing, like his
own. It proved to be quite otherwise: a mere dumb piece of boyish
romance, that I had lacked penetration to divine. But the error
serves the purpose of my argument; for I am sure, at least, that
the heart of young Scotland will be always touched more nearly by
paucity of number and Spartan poverty of life.
So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained. That
Shorter Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was
yet composed in the city of Westminster.
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