But from all these sorrowful tokens I by no means inferred the falsehood of the information, that here was to be found a circle rich in intellect and in aspiration.  The manufacturing and commercial towns, burning focuses of grief and vice, are also the centres of intellectual life, as in forcing-beds the rarest flowers and fruits are developed by use of impure and repulsive materials.  Where evil comes to an extreme, Heaven seems busy in providing means for the remedy.  Glaring throughout Scotland and England is the necessity for the devoutest application of intellect and love to the cure of ills that cry aloud, and, without such application, erelong help must be sought by other means than words.  Yet there is every reason to hope that those who ought to help are seriously, though, slowly, becoming alive to the imperative nature of this duty; so we must not cease to hope, even in the streets of Glasgow, and the gin-palaces of Manchester, and the dreariest recesses of London.

From Glasgow we passed to Stirling, like Dumbarton endeared to the mind which cherishes the memory of its childhood more by association with Miss Porter’s Scottish Chiefs, than with “Snowdon’s knight and Scotland’s king.”  We reached the town too late to see the castle before the next morning, and I took up at the inn “The Scottish Chiefs,” in which I had not read a word since ten or twelve years old.  We are in the habit now of laughing when this book is named, as if it were a representative of what is most absurdly stilted or bombastic, but now, in reading, my maturer mind was differently impressed from what I expected, and the infatuation with which childhood and early youth regard this book and its companion, “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” was justified.  The characters and dialogue are, indeed, out of nature, but the sentiment that animates them is pure, true, and no less healthy than noble.  Here is bad drawing, bad drama, but good music, to which the unspoiled heart will always echo, even when the intellect has learned to demand a better organ for its communication.

The castle of Stirling is as rich as any place in romantic associations.  We were shown its dungeons and its Court of Lions, where, says tradition, wild animals, kept in the grated cells adjacent, were brought out on festival occasions to furnish entertainment for the court.  So, while lords and ladies gay danced and sang above, prisoners pined and wild beasts starved below.  This, at first blush, looks like a very barbarous state of things, but, on reflection, one does not find that we have outgrown it in our present so-called state of refined civilization, only the present way of expressing the same facts is a little different.  Still lords and ladies dance and sing, unknowing or uncaring that the laborers who minister to their luxuries starve or are turned into wild beasts.  Man need not boast his condition, methinks, till he can weave his costly tapestry without the side that is kept under looking thus sadly.