Lost Leaders Author: Andrew Lang PDF DOWNLOAD

Title: Lost Leaders
Author: Andrew Lang .
Editor: W. Pett Ridge
Release Date: August 14, 2005 Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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Lost Leaders Author: Andrew Lang PDF DOWNLOAD

👇IN THIS BOOK
SCOTCH RIVERS.
September is the season of the second and lovelier youth of the river-scenery of
Scotland. Spring comes but slowly up that way; it is June before the woods have
quite clothed themselves. In April the angler or the sketcher is chilled by the
east wind, whirling showers of hail, and even when the riverbanks are sweet
with primroses, the bluff tops of the border hills are often bleak with late snow.
This state of things is less unpropitious to angling than might be expected. A
hardy race of trout will sometimes rise freely to the artificial fly when the natural
fly is destroyed, and the angler is almost blinded with dusty snowflakes. All
through midsummer the Scotch rivers lose their chief
 attractions. The bracken
has not yet changed its green for the fairy gold, the hue of its decay; the woods
wear a uniform and sombre green; the waters are low and shrunken, and angling
is almost impossible. But with September the pleasant season returns for people
who love “to be quiet, and go a-fishing,” or a-sketching. The hills put on a
wonderful harmony of colours, the woods rival the October splendours of
English forests. The bends of the Tweed below Melrose and round Mertoun—a
scene that, as Scott says, the river seems loth to leave—may challenge
comparison with anything the Thames can show at Nuneham or Cliefden. The
angler, too, is as fortunate as the lover of the picturesque. 
The trout that have
hidden themselves all summer, or at best have cautiously nibbled at the wormbait, now rise freely to the fly. Wherever a yellow leaf drops from birch tree or
elm the great trout are splashing, and they are too eager to distinguish very
subtly between flies of nature’s making and flies of fur and feather. It is a time
when every one who can manage it should be by the water-side, and should take
with him, if possible, the posthumous work of Sir Thomas Dick Lauder on the
“Rivers of Scotland.”
This book, as the author of “Rab and his Friends” tells us in the preface, is a republication of articles written in 1848, on the death-bed of the author, a man of
many accomplishments and of a most lovable nature. He would lie and dictate
or write in pencil these happy and wistful memories of days passed by the banks
of Tweed and Tyne. He did not care to speak of the northern waters: of Tay,
which the Roman invaders compared to Tiber; of Laxford, the river of salmon;
or of the “thundering Spey.” Nor has he anything to say of the west, and of
Galloway, the country out of which young Lochinvar came, with its soft and
broken hills, like the lower spurs of the Pyrenees, and its streams, now rushing
down defiles of rock, now stealing with slow foot through the plains. He
confines himself to the limits of the Scottish Arcadia; to the hills near
Edinburgh, where Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd loved and sang in a rather affected
way; and to the main stream and the tributaries of the Tweed. He tells, with a
humour like 
that of Charles Lamb in his account of his youthful search for the
mysterious fountain-head of the New River, how he sought among the Pentland
Hills for the source of the brook that flowed past his own garden. The
wandering stream led him through many a scene renowned in Border history, up
to the heights whence Marmion surveyed the Scottish forces encamped on
Borough Moor before the fatal day of Flodden. These scenes are described with
spirit and loving interest; but it is by Tweedside that the tourist will find his most
pleasant guide in Lauder’s book. Just as Cicero said of Athens, that in every
stone you tread on a history, so on Tweedside by every nook and valley you find
the place of a ballad, a story, or a legend. From Tweed’s source, near the grave
of the Wizard Merlin, down to Berwick and the sea, the Border “keeps” and
towers are as frequent as castles on the Rhine. Each has its tradition, 
its memory
of lawless times, which have become beautiful in the magic of poetry and the
mist of the past. First comes Neidpath Castle, with its vaulted “hanging
chamber” in the roof, and the rafter, with the iron ring to which prisoners were
hanged, still remaining to testify to the lawless power of Border lords. Neidpath
has a softer legend of the death of the lady of the house, when her lover failed to
recognize the features that had wasted with sorrow for his absence. 
Lower down
the river comes Clovenfords, with its memories of Christopher North, and
Peebles, where King James sings that there was “dancing and derray” in his
time; and still lower Ashiesteel, where Scott was young and happy, and
Abbotsford, where his fame and his misfortunes found him out. It was on a
bright afternoon in late September that he died there, and the mourners by his
bed heard through the silence the murmuring of Tweed How many other
associations there are by the tributary rivers! what a breath of “pastoral
melancholy”! There is Ettrick, where the cautious lover in the old song of
Ettrick banks found “a canny place of meeting.” Oakwood Tower, where
Michael Scott, the wizard, wove his spells, is a farm building—the haunted
magician’s room is a granary, Earlstone, where Thomas the Rhymer dwelt, and 
whence the two white deer recalled him to Elfland and to the arms of the fairy
queen, is noted “for its shawl manufactory.” Only Yarrow still keeps its ancient
quiet, and the burn that was tinged by the blood of Douglas is unstained by more
commonplace dyes.
All these changes make the “Rivers of Scotland” rather melancholy reading.
Thirty years have not passed since Lauder died, and how much he would miss if
he could revisit his beloved water! Spearing salmon by torchlight is a forbidden
thing. The rocks are no longer lit up with the red glow; they resound no longer
with the shouts and splashing of the yeomen. You might almost as readily find a
hart on Harthope, or a wild cat at Catslack, or a wolf at Wolf-Cleugh, as catch
three stone-weight of trout in Meggat-water. {6} The days of guileless fish and
fabulous draughts of trout are over. 
No sportsman need take three large baskets
to the Gala now, as Lauder did, and actually filled them with thirty-six dozen of
trout. The modern angler must not allow his expectations to be raised too highly
by these stories. Sport has become much more difficult in these times of rapidly
growing population. It is a pleasant sight to see the weavers spending their
afternoons beside the Tweed; it is such a sight as could not be witnessed by the
closely preserved rivers of England. But the weavers have taught the trout
caution, and the dyes and various pollutions of trade have thinned their
numbers. Mr. Ruskin sees no hope in this state of things; he preaches, in the
spirit of old Hesiod, that there is no piety in a race which defiles the “holy
waters.” But surely civilization, even if it spoil sport and degrade scenery, is
better than a state of things in which the laird would hang up his foes to an iron
ring in the roof. 
The hill of Cowden Knowes may be a less eligible place for
lovers’ meetings than it was of old. But in those times the lord of Cowden
Knowes is said by tradition to have had a way of putting his prisoners in barrels
studded with iron nails, and rolling them down a brae. This is the side of the
good old times which should not be overlooked. It may not be pleasant to find
blue dye and wool yarn in Teviot, but it is more endurable than to have to
encounter the bandit Barnskill, 
who hewed his bed of flint, Scott says, in Minto
Crags. Still, the reading of the “Rivers of Scotland” leaves rather a sad
impression on the reader, and makes him ask once more if there is no way of
reconciling the beauty of rude ages with the comforts and culture of civilization.
This is a question that really demands an answer, though it is often put in a
mistaken way. The teachings of Mr. Ruskin and of his followers would bring us
back to a time when printing was not, and an engineer would have been burned
for a wizard. {8} But there is a point at which civilization and production must
begin to respect the limits of the beautiful, on which they so constantly
👎ent a day among the most shy and hidden beauties of nature, surprising her here and there in places where, unless he had gone a-fishing, he might never have penetrated. He has set his skill against the strength and skill of the monarch of rivers, and has mastered him among the haunts of fairies and beneath the ruined towers of feudalism. These are some of the delights that to-day end for a season. {16}

WINTER SPORTS.

People to whom cold means misery, who hate to be braced, and shudder at the word “seasonable,” can have little difficulty in accounting for the origin of the sports of winter. They need only adapt to the circumstances that old Lydian tradition which says that games of chance were invented during a great famine. Men permitted themselves to eat only every second day, and tried to forget their hunger in playing at draughts and dice. That is clearly the invention of a southern people, which never had occasion to wish it could become oblivious of the weather, as too many of us would l

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