whether it is ever killed. Rather it keeps returning, ever the
more rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to which you have
been long accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish to
enjoyment or heightens the sense of isolation.

One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotchman's eye -
the domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the
quaint, venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm
colouring of all. We have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient
buildings, above all in country places; and those that we have are
all of hewn or harled masonry. Wood has been sparingly used in
their construction; the window-frames are sunken in the wall, not
flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are steeper-pitched;
even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold and permanent
appearance. English houses, in comparison, have the look of
cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter. And to this the
Scotchman never becomes used. His eye can never rest consciously
on one of these brick houses - rickles of brick, as he might call
them - or on one of these flat-chested streets, but he is instantly
reminded where he is, and instantly travels back in fancy to his
home. "This is no my ain house; I ken by the biggin' o't." And
yet perhaps it is his own, bought with his own money, the key of it
long polished in his pocket; but it has not yet, and never will be,
thoroughly adopted by his imagination; nor does he cease to
remember that, in the whole length and breadth of his native
country, there was no building even distantly resembling it.

But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count
England foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of
the empire, surprise and even pain us. The dull, neglected