544 PRÆTERITA-III

of railroads and factories, he will find that all the highest intellectual and moral powers of Scotland were developed, from the days of the Douglases at Lochmaben, to those of Scott in Edinburgh,-Burns in Ayr,-and Carlyle at Ecclefechan, by the pastoral country, everywhere habitable, but only by hardihood under suffering, and patience in poverty; defending themselves always against the northern Pictish war of the Highlands, and the southern, of the English Edwards and Percys, in the days when whatever was loveliest and best of the Catholic religion haunted still the-then not ruins,-of Melrose, Jedburgh, Dryburgh, Kelso, Dunblane, Dundrennan, New Abbey of Dumfries, and, above all, the most ancient Cave of Whithorn,-the Candida Casa of St. Ninian;¹ while perfectly sincere and passionate forms of Evangelicalism purified and brightened the later characters of shepherd Cameronian life,² being won, like all the great victories of Christianity, by martyrdoms, of which the memory remains most vivid by those very shores where Christianity was first planted in Scotland,-Whithorn is, I think, only ten miles south of Wigtown Bay; and in the churchyard of Wigtown, close to the old Agnew burying-ground, (where most of Joanie’s family are laid,) are the graves of Margaret MacLachlan, and Margaret Wilson,³ over which in rhythm is recorded on little square tombstones the story of their martyrdom.

70. It was only, I repeat, since what became practically my farewell journey in Italy in 1882,⁴ that I recovered the train of old associations by re-visiting Tweedside, from Coldstream up to Ashestiel;⁵ and the Solway shores from Dumfries to Whithorn; and while what knowledge I had

¹ [See Vol. XXIX. p. 450, and Vol. XXXIII. p. 226.]

² [See Scott’s account at close of chapter xxxiii. of Waverley with reference to gifted Gilfillan, for whom see Vol. XXXIV. p. 324.]

³ [“The Martyrs of the Solway” (1667-1685) suffered death by drowning at Bladenoch for refusing to conform to episcopacy. The incident is commemorated in a picture by Millais (1871), now in the Liverpool Gallery.]

⁴ [For on the actually last foreign journey, in 1888 (the year before that in which the present chapter was written), Ruskin was only in Italy for a short time.]

⁵ [In September 1883: see Fors Clavigera, Letter 92 (“Ashestiel”), Vol. XXIX. pp. 449 seq.]

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