A SCOTCHMAN ON THE SCOTCH.

Grey River Argus, Volume XII, Issue 1472, 23 April 1873, Page 3

A SCOTCHMAN ON THE SCOTCH.

Professor Blackie recently delivered an address on Burns at Edinburgh, the same night as the Upholsterers' Festival of St. Paul. He said Burns and Walter Scott have had the distinguished honor of making the whole world take off its hat to the name of Scotchman and Scotland wherever pronounced. And though, no doubt, Shakespeare is a very great name, and nobody can talk of him, or of Milton or Bacon, or of thousands of others, without profound respect, that he could assure them that when he went abroad he constantly let it be known that he was not an Englishman but a Scotchman. He thought there was a great deal tod little of Scottish self-esteem, especially in Edinburgh. There are a great number of Anglified puppies in Edinburgh -(Great laughter.) How they came by the taste it was not his business to explain ; he he only knew the fact, and he protested against it, He very seldom heard good Scotch songs in Edinburgh ; he. heard ten times as many wh«n he went to Glasgow. In Edinburgh they did not know and they did not cultivate their beautiful Doric language. They would go and cram themselves with the Doric of the Greeks who lived a 1000 years ago, and thought themselves awful learned, and went to Oxford to become Piiseyites— halfway to Rome, and then

went all the way to Rome — but their own language they do not know ; and Scotch, which is the pride of the Scottish nation and the bloom of their nationality and poetry, they look upon as vulgar? Perhaps they thought Burns was vulgar too? All that he could say was that he took his part with a vulgar man and not a dressed puppy. (Applause.) He did cot care for sitting with the Scribes and Pharisees in high places. If the apostlo of God or the singer of God were a fisherman, or a ploughman, or tentmaker, let him have his portion with him, and not with the mighty man and his respectabilities and the finely shaven smoothness of the upper class of our day. (Laughter and applause.) He had not to say a word about what was called patriotism. The world was constructed upon the principle of variety. Variety was the greatest possible wealth of the world ; monotony was the feebleness, the meagreness, and the barrenness of the world ; God wished there should be Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Irishmen, and the man who being born a Scotchman wished to be an Englishman was rebelling against the will of God and disturbing the harmony of the world. If he were a bear, he could become an elegant dancing, tricky monkey. (Laughter.)