T/HE north-east of Scotland, -- embracing Aberdeen, Banff, Murray, Mearns, and a large portion of Angus, --though now very much amalgamated with the rest of Scotland, had a character of its own in the seventeenth century.The people had a large Scandinavian element in their composition, had a shrill intonation, and a marked idiom, and a harder aspect (though probably with quite as much feeling within) than the people of the south and west.When Samuel Johnson lumbered through the region in 1773, and visited Lord Monboddo, he found it miserably bare of trees;but, had he travelled a century or two earlier, he would have had to pass through wide-spread forests.These were cut down in the seventeenth century; and in the stead of the deer and wild animals a more industrious people substituted sheep and cattle, ranging over high mountains and large undulating plains, on which you would have seen patches of oats or bear here and there around the clay or turf dwellings of the tenants, but few fences or enclosures of any kind, except in the immediate neighborhood of the proprietors, whose castles and gardens, on the French model, relieved the wildness of the scene.On to the eighteenth century the rural population consisted of landlords, with rather small farmers absolutely dependent on them, and who paid their rent in the service, on certain occasions, of men and horses, and in such articles as oats, bear, mutton, salmon, geese, poultry, and peats.In these regions the peasantry had not been taught to think and act for themselves, as they had been in the south-west by the ploughing {92} up of the soil effected by the great covenanting movement.But in some of the towns, particularly in Aberdeen, which was looked up to as a capital by a considerably wide district, there was not a little refinement, which spread its influence over the landlords, the ministers of religion, and the other professional men:
in particular, there had been in the city named a gifted painter, Jameson, a disciple of Rubens; and a very superior printer, Raban, who put in type the works of the Aberdeen doctors.The two universities, King's and Marischial's, trained and sent forth a large body of educated men, some of whom found their proper field on the Continent; while the great body of them remaining at home, were the special instruments-as teachers, clergymen, doctors, lawyers, or country gentlemen-of spreading a civilizing influence in these regions.For ten years after the Restoration, seventy students entered annually at King's, and a considerable number, though not so large, at Marischal some of these rose to eminence, and all of them helped to create a taste for learning and an appreciation for it, on the southern slope of the Grampians, and in the wide region lying north of that range of mountains, which was never crossed by the Roman legions, but was now conquered by the Roman literature.
