“Her march is on the mountain wave, Her home is on the deep.”
Had Caledonia been as tardy as she is alleged to have been in the practice of scrupulous cleanliness, we should easily have found good reasons for defending and palliating her procrastination. But the charge against her is absolutely a vulgar error--a popular delusion--a senseless clamour. Take the country. Is it likely that the national poet, who knew the customs and dispositions of our peasantry, being one of them himself, intimately and practically, would have enumerated among the dearest reminiscences of childhood, that
“We twa hae paidl’t i’ the burn Frae mornin’ sun till dine,”
if such an occupation were not the delight of the whole rural population? Take the town. Does there ever come down a torrent of rain, making the streets the channels of mighty rivers, that there is not seen instantly a colony of young Argonauts emerging, like flies from the Tweed, out of the very water, and exploring the unknown profundities of the gutter, as from lamp-post to lamp-post they go, “sounding on their dim and perilous way?” Take every well-regulated family on Saturday night. Where is the fortunate urchin who shall escape the rude purgation of the Girzy, nor be sent to bed red as a lobster, and clean as a whistle? Take the far-reaching seabeach from Newhaven to Joppa. Are those tremendous scenes which have lately riveted the gaze of a whole country on the sands of Portobello characteristic of a people animated by a feline antipathy to moisture? The verdict is so unquestionably for us, that we decline to adduce any further evidence.
In short, Europe continued to maintain most amicable relations, while Asia cultivated the closest intimacy with water, hot and cold, fresh and salt. America is too young yet to be included in the argument; and as for Africa, crocodiles, hippopotami, and sharks, usurp a monopoly of the favourite pools so exclusively, that the returns of its bathing statistics are most uncertain. In this course, matters ran on smoothly for cycles and cycles of years, races of men following races, as waves follow waves. Any perceptible alteration in the relative positions of man and water, at the same time, was in the direction of stricter and more frequent communication between them. Cleanliness became fashionable--an event which, without snapping the connexion somewhat loosely subsisting between the purifying element and the inferior grades of society, rapidly and widely diffused a knowledge of its capabilities and its amiabilities among the higher circles. Well, on the dawn of a glorious morning, when the sun, and all the seas, lakes, and rivers of the globe were playing at battledore and shuttle-cock with the beams of the orb of day, water suddenly found itself, at a bound, lifted to a pinnacle only a little beneath the summit on which Thales of yore enthroned it. Matter, on this occasion, it was not announced to be--but the cure of all the afflictions with which matter could be visited. Ten thousand aromatic herbs gracefully adjusted their petals, ere they fell, and withered into rank and noisome weeds; ten thousand apothecaries were petrified in the act of braying poison in their mortars, and in that attitude remain, stony remembrances of their own villanies; physicians melted away by faculties and colleges;