XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL 223

observed to me, to my immense indignation, that Adèle was not the only girl in the world; and my enjoyment of our tour in the Trossachs was not described in any more Byronian heroics;¹ the tragedy² also having been given up, because, when I had described a gondola, a bravo, the heroine Bianca, and moonlight on the Grand Canal, I found I had not much more to say.

Scott’s country took me at last well out of it all. It is of little use to the reader now to tell him that still at that date the shore of Loch Katrine, at the east extremity of the lake, was exactly as Scott had seen it, and described,

“Onward, amid the copse ’gan peep,

A narrow inlet, still and deep.”³

In literal and lovely truth, that was so:-by the side of the footpath (it was no more) which wound through the Trossachs, deep and calm under the blaeberry bushes, a dark winding clear-brown pool, not five feet wide at first, reflected the entangled moss of its margin, and arch of branches above, with scarcely a gleam of sky.

That inlet of Loch Katrine was in itself an extremely rare thing; I have never myself seen the like of it in lake shores. A winding recess of deep water, without any entering stream to account for it-possible only, I imagine, among rocks of the quite abnormal confusion of the Trossachs; and besides the natural sweetness and wonder of it, made sacred by the most beautiful poem that Scotland ever sang by her stream sides. And all that the nineteenth century conceived of wise and right to do with this piece of mountain inheritance, was to thrust the nose of a steamer into

¹ [The proof is different here:-

“... heroics. My papers on Architecture were written mostly on my knee as we trotted through the sweet Scottish lowlands, and I saw, with some recall of childish enthusiasm, the blue of Ben Venue and Ben Ledi from the ramparts of Stirling.

“It is of little use to the reader now ...”

A page of the papers, so written, is given above, facing p. 72.]

² [See above, p. 182.]

³ [Lady of the Lake, canto i. 13.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]