The Highlanders of the old dispensation had virtues of their own, but the poet was much left to himself when he conceived Glengarry as cradle for his idealised Scot, brought up among such a good Presbyterian family as would be more at home in the _Cottar’s Saturday Night_ upon the Carrick border--a picture quoted in full by Gilpin as an illustration of Highland manners!
Pure livers were they all, austere and grave, And fearing God, the very children taught Stern self-respect, a reverence for God’s word, And an habitual piety, maintained With strictness scarcely known on English ground.
The plain truth is that Wordsworth here was for confusing oil and vinegar. He had heard at school of a Drummond Jacobite exile who took asylum among the Lakes; and there he must often have met Scottish pedlars; then he indiscriminately “combined his information,” perhaps led astray by Walter Scott’s glorification of the Highlands. Behind the Highland line, where a tourist with a knapsack has in our time been hailed as a pedlar, there went about of old such itinerant dealers, who seem to have borne a quasi-sacred character when some such safe-conduct was much needed; but they, like Bryce Snailsfoot, were more apt to be canny Lowlanders, and so little of teetotallers that, as Scott tells us, “the chapman’s drouth” was a sly proverb in Scotland, where a colporteur of tracts could praise the “continual mercy” of a dram at every farm. In England the pedlar’s trade was so much in the hands of Scots--at one time counted by thousands across the Border--that these two titles to somewhat qualified respect appear to have become almost synonymous at the time when Wordsworth’s pedlar was laying up his little fortune. Instances of this may be found in that curious novel, _The Spiritual Quixote_, showing how a young gentleman who took to Methodist preaching passed among Derbyshire countryfolk as a “Scotch pedlar,” or simply as “a travelling Scotchman”; while in chapbooks of the period a “rider” is the term for that more exalted emissary of commerce who came to be a “traveller” _par excellence_, or a “drummer” in the figurative language of America. “Traveller” would hardly suit such an one in Scotland, where to “travel” implies specially the use of Shanks’ Naigie. Both in England and Scotland those packmen were sometimes looked on with suspicion by the authorities, accused of being political agitators as well as newsmongers, and, later on, of diffusing irreligious publications. On the Continent, also, Scots sought their fortune as pedlars, when no longer in such demand as soldiers.