O Caledonia

"P. G. Wodehouse's comment that "It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine" is well known; less familiar may be the comment by the 19th-century Scottish critic Christopher North, "It gives me true pleasure to declare, that, as a people, the English are very little indeed inferior to the Scotch."

Dr. Johnson held that "the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England", and certainly there are quotations from Scots abroad which do not suggest nostalgia for their native land. James Boswell, for one, congratulated himself on his ability to feel at home in many countries. "I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world. In my travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home." George Gordon, better known as Lord Byron, wrote of Scotland that, "Each breeze from foggy mount and marshy plain Dilutes with drivel every drizzly brain." (Queen Victoria, on the other hand, as a visitor to Scotland fell in love with it, recording in her diary the high praise, "Albert says very German-looking.")

Quotations about what the poet Hugh MacDiarmid called "our multiform, our infinite Scotland", however, often suggest a longing to return. "My heart's in the Highlands", wrote Robert Burns, and lines in the "Canadian Boat Song" attributed to the Scottish writer John Galt emphasize the exile's sense of loss: "Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland, And we in dreams behold the Hebrides."

Scotland A History is published by OUP on 15 December 2005 (Hardback) $35.00.

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