Much is changed, in the countryside as well as in the country; but
much remains. The little towns of your time are populous and
excessively black with the smoke of factories--not, I fear, at
present very flourishing. In Galashiels you still see the little
change-house and the cluster of cottages round the Laird's lodge,
like the clachan of Tully Veolan. But these plain remnants of the
old Scotch towns are almost buried in a multitude of "smoky dwarf
houses"--a living poet, Mr. Matthew Arnold, has found the fitting
phrase for these dwellings, once for all. All over the Forest the
waters are dirty and poisoned: I think they are filthiest below
Hawick; but this may be mere local prejudice in a Selkirk man. To
keep them clean costs money; and, though improvements are often
promised, I cannot see much change--for the better. Abbotsford,
luckily, is above Galashiels, and only receives the dirt and dyes of
Selkirk, Peebles, Walkerburn, and Innerleithen. On the other hand,
your ill-omened later dwelling, "the unhappy palace of your race,"
is overlooked by villas that prick a cockney ear among their
larches, hotels of the future. Ah, Sir, Scotland is a strange
place. Whisky is exiled from some of our caravanserais, and they
have banished Sir John Barleycorn. It seems as if the views of the
excellent critic (who wrote your life lately, and said you had left
no descendants, le pauvre homme!) were beginning to prevail. This
pious biographer was greatly shocked by that capital story about the
keg of whisky that arrived at the Liddesdale farmer's during family
prayers. Your Toryism also was an offence to him.

Among these vicissitudes of things and the overthrow of customs, let
us be thankful that, beyond the reach of the manufacturers, the