Above all, the difference lies in the rise of burghs in
the Lowlands. Speech follows trade. Every small town on the east coast
was a school of English language. Should commerce ever reach the
Highlands, should the abomination of desolation overtake the waterfalls
and the valleys, and other temples of nature share the degradation of
the Falls of Foyers, we may then look for the disappearance of the
Gaelic tongue.
Be all this as it may, it is undeniable that there has been in the
Highlands, since 1745, a change of civilization without a displacement
of race. We venture to think that there is some ground for the view that
a similar change of civilization occurred in the Lowlands between 1066
and 1286, and, similarly, without a racial dispossession. We do not deny
that there was some infusion of Anglo-Saxon blood between the Forth and
the Moray Firth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; but there is no
evidence that it was a repopulation.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 94: In this discussion the province of Lothian is not
included.]
[Footnote 95: Ri Mortuath is an Irish term. We find, more usually, in
Scotland, the Mormaer.]
[Footnote 96: _Op. cit._, vol. i, p. 254.]
[Footnote 97: _History of Scotland_, vol. i, pp. 135-6.]
[Footnote 98: _Celtic Scotland_, vol. iii, pp. 303, 309.]
[Footnote 99: _Celtic Scotland_, vol. iii, p. 368.]
[Footnote 100: It should of course be recollected that the Gaelic tongue
must have persisted in the vernacular speech of the Lowlands long after
we lose all traces of it as a literary language.
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