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R.B. Cunninghame Graham Quotes

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Famous R.B. Cunninghame Graham Quotes

“Still I maintain that in the Scotland of to-day there yet remain some types which differ from the types set forth by Kailyard novelists. Of course I know that virtue which has long left London and the South still lingers about Ecclefechan, I know a Scotsman is a grave sententious man, oppressed with the difficulty of the jargon he is bound to speak, and weighed down by the sense of being a North Briton. I know he prays to Mr. Gladstone and Jehovah, time about, finds his amusement in comparing preachers, can read and write, buys newspapers, tells stories about ministers, and generally deports himself in a manner which would land a weaker man in idiocy within a fortnight.”

ScotlandScotsmanKailyardEcclefechanWilliam Gladstone
Book:Success
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“Ye ken, man laird, while I just dive richt to the bottom o a linn, and set doon there; ye'd think it was the inside o the Fairy Hill. Trooties, ye ken, and saumon, and they awfu pike, a comin round ye, and they bits o water weeds, waggin aboot like lairch trees in the blast. I mind ae time I stoppit doon nigh aboot half an hour. Maybe no just sae much, ye ken, but time gaes awfu quick when ye're at the bottom o a linn.”

TroutSalmonScots LanguagePikeRiver ForthWild Swimming
Book:The Scottish Sketches of R.B. Cunninghame Graham
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“No one doubts that eventually the Matabele will be conquered, and that our flag will wave triumphantly over the remnant of them in the same way it waves triumphantly over the workhouse pauper and the sailors' poor whore in the east end of London. Let it wave on over an empire reaching from north to south, from east to west, wave over every island, hitherto ungrabbed, on every sterile desert and fever-haunted swamp as yet unclaimed, over the sealer amid the icebergs, stripping the fur from the live seal, on purpose to oblige a lady; over the abandoned transport camel, perishing of thirst in the Sudan: and still keep waving over Leicester Square, where music halls at night belch out crowds of stout imperialists.”

ImperialismBritish EmpireImperialistsMusic HallsLeicester SquareMatabele
Book:The Imperial Kailyard: Being a Biting Satire on English Colonisation
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“So of the Flanders Moss. It, too, in mist seems to roll on for miles; its heathy surface turns to long waves that paly against the foot of the low range of hills, and beat upon Craigforth as if it were an island in the sea. Through wreathes of steam, the sullen Forth winds in and out between the peat hags, and when a slant of wind leaves it clear for an instant it looks mysterious and dark, as might a stream of quicksilver running down from a mine. When a fish leaps, the sound re-echoes like a bell, as it falls back into the water, and rings spread out till they are lost beneath the banks.”

MistRiver ForthFlanders MossMenteithPeat Hags
Book:A Hatchment
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“To afford protection to certain Scottish merchants who were going to Bremen, Lubeck and Hamburg to trade, and promising protection to the merchants of the Hanseatic League, when their mercantile affairs should bring them to Scotland. If they read the the records of any other countries of that time, notably those of the Genoese and Venetian Republics and many others shortly after they were instituted, they would find a widely different spirit to that which animated the national hero of Scotland. Nearly every one of those other Republics cut themselves off by inpenetrable walls of protection - by arms, by tariffs, and by sustoms - in order that their merchants should be protected: but Wallace understood clearly that there could be no international goodwill without international reciprocity and protection to the merchants of the various nationalities.”

ScotlandWilliam WallaceHanseatic LeagueLubeck Letter
Book:Self Government for Scotland
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“Highlanders, driving their "creagh" toward Balquhidder, passed, their moccasin-clad feet leaving as little impress on the mist as they had left in life upon the tussocks of bent-grass. They urged the shadowy cattle with the ponts of their Lochaber axes; and last of all, wrapped in his plaid, his thick hair curling close about his hard-lined features, passed one I knew at once by his great length of arm and red beard, on which the damp hung in a frosty dew, just as it hung upon the coats of the West Highland kyloes that he drove before him on the rode. Though for two hundred years he had slept well in the lone graveyard of the deserted church beside Loch Voil, he seemed to know the road as perfectly as he had known it in his old foraying days. As he passed he moved his target forward and his hand stole to his sword, as if he recognised one of his ancient foes. Then he was swallowed up by the same mist that had protected him so often in his life.”

GhostsMistHighlandersCattle RustlingCattle DrovingThe TrossachsBalquhidderLoch VoilRob Roy Macgregor
Book:Faith
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