there were at least eight centuries of national history. Behind that,
too, were all the long generations of toil and strife in which the
Scottish character was being molded into the forms that Scott and
Burns made immortal. It is a character full of curious contrasts, with
its strong predilection for theology and metaphysics on one side, and
for poetry and romance on the other. Hard, dry and practical in its
attitude to the ordinary affairs of life, it is apt to catch fire from
a sudden enthusiasm, as if volatility were its dominant note and
instability its only fixed attribute. And so it has come about that
side by side with tomes of Calvinistic divinity, there has been
transmitted to Scotsmen an equally characteristic product of the mind
of their race--a body of folksong, of ballad poetry, of legend and of
story in that quaint and copious Doric speech which makes so direct an
appeal to the hearts of men whether they are to the manner born or
not. It is surely a paradox that a nation which, in the making, had
the hardest kind of work to extract a scanty living from a stubborn
soil, and still harder work to defend their independence, their
liberties, their faith from foes of their own kindred, should be best
known to the world for the romantic ideals they have cherished and the
chivalrous follies for which their blood has been shed.

But, it is well to remember that long before the Reformers of the
sixteenth century founded the parish school system of Scotland, the
monasteries had their schools and so had the parish churches; there
were high schools in the burghs and song schools of remarkable
excellence. The light of learning may have waxed dim at times, but it
was not from an illiterate land that Scottish scholars carried into
Europe all through the Middle Ages the name and fame of their country,
any more than it was from a people unversed in the arts of war that
Scottish soldiers went abroad to fight foreign battles, giving now a