Clyde’s first plunge, at the Bonnington, or Boniton, Linn, is the least deep and impressive of the three; and by comparison with the scenes below, the surroundings of the spot where the river takes its leap are open and bare. The water falls sheer over a precipice into a deep cauldron 30 feet below, and is broken in its descent only by a projecting rock in the middle. Thence it churns and eddies and boils between the lofty walls of sandstone overhung by wood, and draped wherever there is hold for root and fibre by trees and undergrowth, to meet a greater catastrophe at Corra Linn. At this the grandest of Scotland’s waterfalls—“Clyde’s most majestic daughter”—the stream flings itself down from a height of 84 feet, in a tumultuous white mass of foam, the falling body of water being broken and torn in its descent by many sharp ledges and points of rock. In time of spate, especially when the sun shines and wreathes rainbows in the smoke of mist and spray that rises from the fall, the scene is indescribably grand. The deafening roar of the angry waters, the loveliness of the rock and sylvan scenery in which they are set, deepen beyond measure the impression which these Falls of Clyde make on the mind and imagination. The wealth of foliage—bracken, broom, sloe, and wild flowers of many kinds, as well as tall forest trees—drapes what would otherwise be the savage nakedness of the spot with hues and forms of beauty; and there is no lack of the shady “ell-wide walks” which Wordsworth so much appreciated, winding from one to another coign of vantage on the riverside. Nor is there wanting the charm of romantic and historical association:—

“Wallace’s Tower” helped to inspire the poet of the “Excursion” at sight of Corra Linn:—

There is also a “Wallace Chair” below Corra Linn; and in Bonnington House, whose beautiful grounds, to which the public have access, occupy the right bank of the river opposite both of these upper falls, there are relics of the hero who made Lanark and the Linns of Clyde one of his chief haunts.

Quite other memories—those of David Dale, “herd-boy, hawker, manufacturer, turkey-red dyer, banker, and evangelist,” and of his partner and son-in-law, Robert Owen—linger about the wheels and chimney-stacks of New Lanark, those celebrated cotton mills which were established, in days before steam had robbed water-power of great part of its workaday functions, for the purpose of carrying out a noble experiment in industry and philanthropy. And Braxfield, still lower down the stream, recalls to us the name and rural tastes—surely, not without a redeeming touch of grace and romance—of that Hanging Judge, the Jeffreys of the Scottish bench, whom Robert Louis Stevenson has immortalised as the Lord Justice Clerk in “Weir of Hermiston.”

But the Castle Hill and streets of the “ancient burgh of Lanark”—now close by, on the table-land above the river—bring back our thoughts to “Wallace wight” and to lawless and troublous times. The site of the old Royal Castle, which had harboured kings and stood sieges, is now occupied by a bowling green. Lanark Moor, where armies have mustered in the cause of the Douglases or the Stuarts, of King or Covenant, is in peaceful possession of golf and horse-racing. In the Castlegait is the site of the house where, according to a cherished tradition over which the duller Muse of History shakes the head, lived Marion Bradfute, that heiress of Lamington whom Wallace took to wife, and whom he so terribly avenged when Hazelrig, the sheriff and governor of Lanark Castle, had slain her for giving harbourage to the hero.

The valley below Lanark gradually opens up into the fruitful “Trough of the Clyde,” and becomes beautifully diversified by fertile fields, by woods and lawns, and by cottages surrounded by orchard trees, that in spring are overspread with the tinted and perfumed snow of the apple-blossom. From the right the Mouse Water flows into Clyde through the savage chasm of the Cartland Crags—opposing walls and pinnacles of rock, crowned and seamed with wood, that have apparently been riven apart to allow scant passage for the turbid little moorland stream that brawls over the sandstone reefs and ledges in the green obscurity below. Still the ghost of Wallace flits before us, for in the jaws of the Cartland defile, close to Telford’s handsome bridge over the Mouse, is the champion’s Cave, and perched on the summit of the cliffs is the “Castle of the Quaw,” associated in legend with his deeds. Another arch spanning the Mouse—the Roman Bridge at Cleghorn—has associations much more ancient; it marks the spot where Watling Street, which traversed Clydesdale and crossed Lanark Moor on its way from Carlisle to Antonine’s Wall, passed the brawling little stream.

Stonebyres Linn, the last of the three great leaps of Clyde, is somewhat more than a mile below Lanark Bridge, and close to the road that holds down the left bank of the stream to Crossford, Dalserf, and Hamilton. It has not the romantic surroundings of Corra Linn. But the fall of water descending headlong over rocky ledges in a dizzy plunge into the “Salmon Pool”—the “thus far and no farther” of the lordly fish that once swarmed in the Clyde—has by many been adjudged more graceful, if less majestic, than the upper linn. Two miles further on comes in the Nethan, winding through its wooded strath under the base of Craignethan Castle. It is the Tillietudlem of “Old Mortality,” the name being probably borrowed by Scott from “Gullietudlem,” a ravine adjacent to Corra Linn. It was a stronghold of the Hamiltons; and, with its strong position on a steep peninsulated bluff between the Nethan and a tributary burn, its moat, and its massive walls and towers of hewn stone, of which a goodly portion yet keep its place, it must when first built have been well-nigh impregnable. The traditional tale is that the Scottish monarch of the time, taking alarm at the portentous and threatening strength, rewarded the builder and owner—the “Bastard of Arran”—by hanging him betimes as a suspected rebel. The chief incident in its annals is the stay made at Craignethan by Mary Stuart before fortune went finally against her at Langside. More vividly do the frowning keep, the crumbling vaults, the ivy-clad garden walls, and the steep copse-clad dells and braes, recall to our minds Lady Margaret Bellenden sitting down to “disjeune” in the chamber of daïs, Jenny Dennison scalding the too-adventurous Cuddie Headrigg with the porridge, Henry Morton before the Council, and Burley lurking like a wounded wolf in his cave.

From this point downward the stream of Clyde, as it winds towards Glasgow through the centre of the great coal and iron field that has fed the wealth of the city and the commerce of the river, becomes more and more closely beset by the great armies of industry. For a time they still keep at a respectful distance; their camp fires—pillars of flame by night and of cloud by day—rising from furnace chimney and pit head on the high ground enclosing the “Trough of the Clyde.” Up there, in an intricate network of railway lines, are busy and growing towns and villages sending forth their smoke to overshadow the valley, and pouring down into it, by a score of tributary streams, the lees and pollutions of labour and of crowded urban life. But for a while the sheltered haughs and sloping banks of the Clyde still deserve the name of the “Orchard of Scotland.” The drumlie gills and burns, that higher up have drained moss hags and skirted mounds of slag and mean rows of miners’ cottages, break into the central valley through bosky and craggy dells, and through acres of fruit trees and the woods and lawns of stately mansion houses, or past venerable parish churches or fragments of old castles, to join the Clyde. There are such fine sweeps of river as those, for instance, that skirt the grounds of Mauldslie Castle, and wind round Dalserf, before the now broad and full stream takes a straighter course under Dalserf Bridge, past Cambusnethan, towards Dalziel and Hamilton.

All these names invite the down-stream wayfarer to pause and survey the beauties of Clydesdale. But the spot of really commanding interest is Hamilton, the centre for four or five centuries of the power of the great family of Hamilton, that succeeded to so much of the dominion and influence owned by the Douglases in the valley of the Clyde. The haughlands here spread out to a truly noble width; and the lawns and parks that surround the chief seat of the Dukes of Hamilton, and stretch down to the right bank of the river and extend along its windings from Hamilton Bridge down to Bothwell Bridge, have space enough to give an air of grandeur and seclusion to the scene, spite of the crowding around it of a modern workaday world. For the town of Hamilton is at the very gate of the palace; and over against the low parks and the racecourse by the riverside rise sheaves of chimney-stacks, crowned with smoke, that proclaim the neighbourhood of Motherwell and other grimy haunts of the Lanarkshire coal and iron industries.

From the plain white baronial house of “The Orchard,” built in 1591 and set among its pleasant fruit trees, Hamilton Palace has spread and risen into one of the princeliest piles in the land. Its long and lofty façade, adorned with Corinthian columns, overlooks its parterres and flower gardens; the grand mausoleum of the Hamiltons, built—at a cost, it is said, of £150,000—in the style of the castle of San Angelo at Rome; and the spacious parks, dotted with trees, that slope gently towards the margin of Clyde.

The soul of Hamilton Palace has departed since the sale in 1881 of the unrivalled collection of pictures, books, and rare works of art, brought together by the taste and wealth of Beckford, the author of “Vathek,” and of successive dukes. With this removal the centre of interest seems once more to have shifted to the further side of the busy burgh, where, in the High Parks adjoining the original seat of the Hamilton family, the “crumbled halls” of Cadzow Castle, are to be found the yet more venerable remains of the Caledonian Forest—huge gnarled and decayed boles of ancient oaks, sadly thinned by latter-day gales—and the survivors of what are supposed to be the native breed of wild white cattle.

When Queen Mary escaped from Lochleven, she fled for shelter and aid to her kinsfolk at Cadzow. A few years later, as Scott’s ballad rehearses, another refugee spurred thither—Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, after assassinating the Regent Moray in the street of Linlithgow. The Magician waves his wand and restores the scene, by Avon side, as it was more than three centuries ago:—

A hundred years later, when Cadzow was already abandoned and in decay, the victorious Covenanting force which had defeated the dragoons of Claverhouse at Drumelog, on the dreary moorland slopes near the sources of the Avon, marched down this waterside—the Evandale of “Old Mortality”—on their way to make their bold but luckless attempt on Glasgow. Soon after they were back again in this neighbourhood in force, preparing to resist, with what disastrous results is well known, the passage of Monmouth’s Royalist troops across Bothwell Brig:—

So writes the author of “The Clyde”; and in spite of the beauty of the scene, the old associations of Bothwell Brig and its vicinity are with broil and wrong and bloodshed. Below the scene of Monmouth’s victory are sylvan banks consecrated to the memory of forsaken love—“O Bothwell bank, thou bloomest fair!” And lower down, facing each other from vantage ground on opposite sides of the stream, are the grand ruins of old Bothwell Castle and the remains of Blantyre Priory.

Between these two sentinels of the past—the crumbling but still massive feudal towers of the Douglases on their bold green bank, and the meagre fragment of the monastic house perched on its red sandstone cliff—runs the smooth deep current of the Clyde, inspiring, as Wordsworth has said, “thoughts more in harmony with the sober and stately images of former times, than if it had roared over a rocky channel, and forced its sound upon the ear.” The castle, both from the mass and height of its huge walls and round towers and turrets, and from its situation, is still magnificent in its decay. It has had many masters, among them that Aymer de Valence who held Clydesdale for the English and planned the capture of Wallace. Edward I. and Edward III. have sojourned in it. But its best remembered owners are the Black Douglases. They swore indifferently by “St. Bride of Bothwell” and by “St. Bride of Douglas.” In the beautiful choir of the old collegiate church, now forming part of the church of the parish, reposes the dust of chiefs of the name; and descendants of the old race still hold the lands and woods around Bothwell Castle. In St. Bride’s too, in 1400, a couple of years after its erection, took place in an “unhappy hour” the fateful marriage between David, Duke of Rothesay, and Marjory, the daughter of “Archibald the Grim,” Earl of Douglas. A more pleasant association with Bothwell Church is the birth, in the manse here, of Joanna Baillie, the poetess, who has preserved in her verse fond remembrances of the “bonnie braes” and “sunny shallows” of the Clyde, where she spent her childhood.

The left, or Blantyre, bank of Clyde also has its “stately images of the past.” The barony, which had belonged to Randolph and to “Black Agnes of Dunbar,” fell, with the Priory lands, to Walter Stewart, the first Baron Blantyre, James VI.’s old classfellow and favourite, whose descendant still bears the title. Blantyre Priory had in its day sheltered Wallace. They will show you the rock, one of many, from which, in legend, the patriot leaped to escape his enemies. It was a daughter-house of the Abbey of Jedburgh, which, like other great Tweedside monasteries, had a retreat in the Clyde, when invading armies crossed the Border. Now the rifled and wasted monk’s nest is itself besieged by the clamorous army of labour. In a nook by the waterside, between it and Bothwell Bridge, David Dale and John Monteith planted their calico-printing and turkey-red works—those Blantyre mills which have since thriven so mightily, and under whose shadow David Livingstone was born. Blantyre village grows to a town on the bank above, and behind are the pit shafts of High Blantyre, reminding us of one of the saddest of colliery catastrophes.

Escaping from the shadow of Bothwell’s braes, our river flows smoothly on between widening haughs and opening prospects within sight of Uddington, where Glasgow has planted a colony of villas, by a long serpentine sweep past the parks and trees of Dalbowie, and so under the steep wooded bluff of Kenmuir, long renowned for its wild flowers and its “Wedding Well,” to Carmyle, a hamlet that still, in spite of the close neighbourhood of the great city, retains something of rural quaintness and simplicity in its rushing mill-dams and its climbing garden plots. Cambuslang is only a mile below, but on the other or southern bank, along a reach of river beautifully fringed by trees—Cambuslang, with its high-placed church tower, its Kirkton burn bickering down its ravine past the golf-course and the amphitheatre where Whitfield uplifted his voice in the great “Revival Wark” of 1742; and with Rosebank, the home of David Dale, on the river front, shouldered by dye works and neighboured by the fine new railway bridge over the Clyde.

The high ground behind “Cam’s’lang,” as those name it who know it, is a convenient coign from whence to survey the myriad spires and chimneys of Glasgow; for the river makes only a few more great sweeps through a plain where pleasure-grounds alternate with public works, before reaching Rutherglen—the senior and once the rival of Glasgow—and the Green itself, and disappearing into St. Mungo’s wilderness of houses and canopy of smoke.

Passing strange it is to one who gazes down from Dechmont Hill or from the Cathkin Braes upon the Clyde losing itself in the murky depths of the great city, whose fog and reek and densely packed masses of dwellings seem to fill the valley, to reflect that the spot was originally chosen as a place suitable for seclusion and calm meditation; that so late as the period of the Reformation Glasgow was a country town of three or four thousand people. How much of the legendary story of St. Kentigern is founded on fact, none can positively say. But we can certainly believe that he came here and preached to the heathen Britons of Strathclyde, whose capital, Dumbarton, was not far off, and whose “high places” were on the neighbouring hills; that he gathered disciples about him, and founded a monastery, after the old Columban rule, on the slopes beside the clear Molendinar Burn, something more than a mile above its confluence with the waters of Clyde. His shrine is still the centre of the “Laigh Kirk,” or crypt of the Cathedral, and is, indeed, the nucleus around which have grown not only the ancient and beautiful church, but also the vast modern city that bears the name of Mungo “the Beloved.” It is the seed out of which Glasgow has grown.

A map of Glasgow in the early part of the seventeenth century shows it to have then consisted of little more than two streets crossing each other—one running at right angles to and the other parallel with the course of the Clyde—together with a few tributary vennels and closes, and with “kailyards” rendering upon the open fields. The former thoroughfare, as the Saltmarket and High Street, climbed the slope to the Metropolitan Church and the Bishop’s Castle; the other diverged to right and left as the Gallowgait and the Trongait, which latter extended as far as the precincts of the church, croft, and well of St. Tenu—transmogrified by time and wear into St. Enoch’s—in the line of the present Argyll Street. At the intersection were the Mercat Cross and the Tolbooth, prison and council chamber in one. The Cross was, accordingly, the centre of the commerce and of the municipal authority of Old Glasgow. The venerable Tolbooth and Cross Steeples still look down upon a busy scene. Still are they redolent of the memories of the citizens and the burgh life of former times: spite of change, they continue to be haunted by the spirit of Bailie Nicol Jarvie picking his way along the street, accompanied by his lass and lantern, to visit Francis Osbaldistone behind prison walls, and of Captain Paton’s Nelly bringing an ingredient of that hero’s punch from the West Port Well.

Halfway between the Cross and the Cathedral, on the west side of a thoroughfare which three hundred years ago was accounted spacious and even stately, were the old College Buildings, where the University, founded in 1450, was housed until, a quarter of a century ago, the intrusion of the railway and other considerations made it flit to more splendid and salubrious quarters at Gilmorehill.

While Time and reforming zeal—aided by the voices and pikes of the citizens of the day—have spared to us St. Mungo’s Church, the fortress-like Bishop’s Palace and the “Manses” of the thirty prebends and other ecclesiastics have been swept away, along with memorials of earlier and later date; St. Roche’s Chapel, in the fields to the north, now flaunts a smoky pennon as St. Rollox; the high ground of the “Craigs,” or the “Fir Park,” across the once limpid trouting burn—where St. Columba is fabled to have met St. Kentigern—is covered with the thicket of headstones and obelisks of the Necropolis, grouped about Knox’s monument, and holds the dust of some of the host and most distinguished of Glasgow’s sons; the Molendinar itself has been buried from sight and smell—none too soon.

Returning to the lower end of what was once the main thoroughfare of the Glasgow of old, the Briggait—once a busy centre of the city’s commerce—led to the riverside and what was long the sole bridge connecting the north and south banks of the Clyde. Stockwell Street also gave access to it from the Trongait. Only in the early ’fifties was the ancient stone structure, which had stood for five centuries and which figures prominently in old views of Glasgow from the Clyde, replaced by the present Victoria Bridge. Nine other bridges, including two suspension bridges for foot-passengers and three great railway viaducts, now span the stream within the city bounds. All of them have sprung up within the last fifty years; and the traffic between bank and bank has required, besides, the burrowing under the river-bed of subways and underground lines, and the connection of bank and bank by steam and other ferries. Chief among these bridges, as channels of commerce and intercourse—what London Bridge is to the Metropolis—is the “roaring lane” of the Jamaica Street Bridge. The fine structure immediately below it, which carries the Caledonian line across from the Bridge Street to the Central Station, marks the limits of navigation for all but the smaller kind of river-craft; for here Clyde may be said to merge into Glasgow Harbour, and a new and almost last chapter in its career opens at the Broomielaw.

There was a time when Rutherglen reckoned itself a seaport, and when fishermen drew shoals of salmon from the clear-flowing Clyde, and spread their nets on Glasgow Green. Such sights have long ceased to be witnessed; and the Camlachie Burn no longer wimples in the face of day between alder-covered banks through the flat riverside meadow to join the Molendinar and the Clyde. But “the Green” remains the most famous and most prized of the city’s open spaces: it is the central “lung” of Glasgow. If not in fashionable surroundings, in its function as a safety valve for popular enthusiasm and excitement it is the Hyde Park of the Second City of the Empire. In it great political and religious gatherings have been and still are held; here do the East-enders throng and bask in holiday time, and here have been seen also riot and rejoicing, and events of note in the history of the municipality, the kingdom, and even of the world. To mention the greatest of all, did not the epoch-making idea of the steam-engine flash through the brain of James Watt as he took a Sunday ramble, thoughtful and solitary, on the Green, near the Humane Society’s quarters, where afterwards Lambert, “hero and martyr,” achieved his wonderful rescues from drowning? Did not the Regent Moray’s army here cross the Clyde to intercept and disperse Mary Stuart’s adherents at Langside? And did not Prince Charlie—an unwelcome guest in Whiggish Glasgow—review his Highlanders in the Flesher’s Haugh?

At the time of the Pretender’s visit, the era of Glasgow’s commercial prosperity—the reign of the “tobacco dons” and the “sugar dons,” who preceded the “cotton lords” and the present reigning dynasty of the “iron kings”—was only opening. The current of the city’s business life had already begun to turn aside from the channel of the High Street, in order to run parallel with the river, along the line of the Trongait and Argyll Street, to absorb little suburban villages, to overflow the neighbouring fields, and by-and-by to swallow up, one by one, the mansions of its merchant princes. But when the present century opened, the town could boast of only some 80,000 inhabitants. The Saracen’s Head in the Gallowgate was still the chief place of entertainment; there Dr. Johnson housed on his return from his Hebridean tour, and Burns was also among its guests. Queen Street a hundred years ago had not so long ceased to be the Cow Loan through which the citizens drove out their cows to pasture; and George Square, when the century was young, was a retired park, with trees and turf and shrubberies, surrounded by the private dwellings of a few city magnates.

To this once rural spot the centre of interest and authority of Modern Glasgow has now flitted; and here the city has set up its Valhalla. In the heart of the Square a statue of Sir Walter Scott towers on its high pedestal; and surrounding it are ranks of other monuments—equestrian statues, and figures erect and seated: among them those of Sir John Moore and Lord Clyde, both of them “Glasgow callants” who won for their native city war-laurels to place beside its trophies of peaceful industry; and of Thomas Campbell, the poet, who was born in the High Street, within a stonecast of the old College Buildings. Chief of the public edifices that face the Square are the new Municipal Buildings, in which, after several shiftings from the venerable Tolbooth, the City Fathers have set up their gods. The foundation stone of this magnificent pile was laid in October, 1883, and it has cost the town nearly £600,000. Here would be a convenient standpoint whence to survey the more recent spread and growth of the city, were this a description of Glasgow instead of a glance down the course of the Clyde. From George Square as a centre, a radius of fully two and a half miles would now be required in order to draw a circle embracing the whole area of the city. In that space, and included within the municipal boundaries, is a population which in 1891 numbered 656,000. But the circle would enclose also the police burghs of Govan, Partick, and Kinning Park, which, although partially surrounded by Glasgow, and essentially a part of the same urban community, have separate municipal organisations. Adding these and the suburban villages and populous areas attached to, but outside the circumference of, the city, and making allowance for the growth of five years, we have a greater “geographical Glasgow” which Sir James Bell and Mr. Paton, in their recent work, estimate to contain no fewer than 900,000 souls. So that since the beginning of the century the increase has been something like tenfold in population; while in wealth, in trade, and in the multiplication of the resources of civilisation, its progress has been, perhaps, still more marked.

The classic but now much-befouled Kelvin is at its mouth the boundary between the city and the adjoining burgh of Partick; and when it passes this point the Clyde leaves Glasgow territory behind it, without, however, escaping from the sphere of its administrative authority. Very different is this straight, broad highway of commerce—lined by quay walls and wet and graving docks, by shipbuilding yards and boiler-sheds, by factories, timber depôts, and railway sidings, burdened with craft innumerable, and overhung by the shapes of great iron vessels (the pride of Glasgow and the Clyde) in every stage of construction—from the stream that winds and gleams like a serpent between its green banks only a few miles above. The opposing shores send up a perpetual din of iron smiting upon iron: the deafening and yet, to the understanding ear, inspiriting sound of the Clyde’s most famous industry—that of shipbuilding. The broad tide of waters is churned by paddles and propellers innumerable. It is muddy and evil-smelling, for Glasgow has not repaid its debt to the Clyde with gratitude, and still makes its river the receptacle of its sewage and garbage. All this, however, is to be changed; already the experiment of sewage purification has been for some years in operation at Dalmarnock, and shortly a scheme intended to embrace the whole north side of Glasgow will be at work on ground purchased by the Corporation at Dalmuir, some miles down the river. So that in time trout may venture back to Kelvin, and the “stately salmon” itself be seen basking in the sandbanks opposite the Broomielaw, or stemming the “amber-coloured Clyde,” once more pure and sweet as well as “beneficent and strong.”

Often the channel itself is choked with mist and overhung with smoke; and vessels and houses loom vaguely through the haze, or stand out in startling relief against their dim background when the sun manages to send his shafts through the mist and to light up river and shipping. Nowhere are there such sunsets to be seen as in this murky and rainy and dinsome clime of Glasgow Harbour.

To embark on board one of the river-steamers at the Broomielaw is a convenient mode of surveying what remains to be seen of the river and its surroundings. Steering down-stream by the broad and deep channel between the lines and thickets of masts and funnels of the craft moored to either bank, or assembled in the great dock basins, there is plenty of time to reflect on the changes that have come over the scene, even since Campbell deplored that Nature’s face was banished and estranged from the “once romantic shore of his native Clyde,” and the face of Heaven was no more reflected in its soot-begrimed waters—

The days when the river could be forded at high-water opposite Govan Point, and when a voyage up or down stream was a series of bumpings from shoal to shoal, seem almost as far removed from our own as the date of the canoes of our remote ancestors that have been found embedded in the ooze of the channel in the course of dredging operations. Yet they belong to the present century; and even after Henry Bell’s Comet inaugurated steam navigation by making her runs between Greenock and Glasgow, the better part of a day has been known to be spent on the trip. In the course of a century and half some sixteen millions have been spent on widening, deepening, and straightening the channel and improving the harbour accommodation of Glasgow; and the revenue of the Clyde Navigation Trust now reaches about £400,000 annually. As the fruit of all this expenditure, the Trust can point to the long lines of quay walls and the magnificent Queen’s and Govan Docks, and to a broad and straight waterway which, from Glasgow Bridge to Port Glasgow, has a uniform depth of 28 feet at high tide.

Even fifty years ago Dr. Macdonald could write of Govan as “a still rural-looking village,” to which the denizens of St. Mungo resorted on Sundays, after the skailing of the kirks, to “snuff the caller air” by the waterside; and of Partick, on the opposite bank, as an “old-fashioned town with a pleasant half-rural aspect,” also in repute as a holiday-resort on account of the “salubrity of its air.” Now, these adjuncts of Glasgow, with the adjoining Whiteinch, are world-famous as the headquarters of Clyde shipbuilding. From the Govan, Fairfield, and Linthouse yards, on the south side, and from the Finnieston, Pointhouse, Meadowbank, and Whiteinch slips, on the north bank, have been launched some of the largest and finest vessels—mercantile craft and ships of war—that have ever put to sea. Dwelling-houses and public works have spread over the ground behind, so that little is left of the “rural” or “half-rural” villages of the ’fifties. Yet Govan has its spacious breathing-space in the Elder Park, and elms still shade the ancient Celtic crosses and monuments in its parish kirkyard; Partick still borders on Kelvin Grove; and Whiteinch boasts, in its Victoria Park, of a “Fossil Grove” of more hoar antiquity than Runic crosses, or the prehistoric canoes of Govan.

Clyde, as it moves majestically away from the stir and clangour of the water fronts of Govan and Partick, begins slowly to open what Wilson, the descriptive poet of the stream, calls an “ampler mirror” to the sky and the objects on the banks. Its shores resume something of their old romance and rusticity as we come abreast of the woods and lawns of Elderslie and of Blytheswood. Behind them is the ancient burgh of Renfrew—once a fishing port and the rival of Glasgow—which, as part of the earliest heritage of the High Stewards, gives the title of Baron of Renfrew to the Heir Apparent. Further back is the romantic valley of the White Cart, that flows under Gleniffer Braes and through the busy town of Paisley—birthplace of poets, burial-place of kings, and metropolis of thread manufactures—to meet the Black Cart at Inchinnan, and enter the Clyde at the “Water Neb.”

Opposite, on the busier right bank of the river, are the factories and building-yards of Yoker and Clydebank; below these, Dalmuir and its purification works; and lower down, beyond Erskine Ferry, the houses of old Kilpatrick and of Bowling—its little harbour filled with craft, new and ancient—facing the fine lawns and woods that surround Lord Blantyre’s beautiful mansion of Erskine House. Here, where under the rough and furrowed spurs of the Kilpatrick Hills the Highlands meet the Lowlands; where the Forth and Clyde Canal joins the tide-water, and the line of “Grime’s Dyke” (the Roman wall of Antonine) found its western term; here where, according to legend, Patrick, the apostle of Ireland, was born and spent his childhood—we might lay down the limits of River and Firth. Or passing the ancient castle of Dunglass and the ford under the Hill of Dumbuck, which was the first great obstacle to Clyde navigation, it might be found in that grandest of landmarks, the Rock and Castle of Dumbarton, 91 miles from the source of the Clydes Burn, and 106 miles from the taproot of the Daer.

The lofty isolated double-headed crag sentinels alike the channel of the Clyde and the valley of the Leven, and mounts guard over the ancient and still thriving burgh at its base, once the capital of the Britons of Strathclyde, and for a thousand years the refuge and defence of kings. On the crown or at the base of the Rock many strange scenes in Scottish history have been enacted. From Dumbarton Queen Mary, a child of six, set sail for France to wed the Dauphin; and to the friendly shelter of its castle she was hastening when—

The town has still its great shipbuilding industry, its shipping trade, and its foundries and turkey-red and other manufactories. Some of the old houses remain, along with a fragment of its collegiate church. Other bold hills beside the Castle Rock overlook it, and the broad and smooth Leven—harbour and river—divides it into two parts. The view northwards from the Rock carries the eye through the wide and beautifully-wooded vista of the Leven valley into the heart of the Highlands.

The pyramid of Ben Lomond, buttressed by Ptarmigan Hill, is the presiding shape. But a score of other peaks are huddled behind and around it. Below can be traced the folds of the hills that sheltered Rob Roy, and over against it the glens of the Colquhoun country that witnessed the prowess and revenge of the Wild Macgregors. Loch Lomond, the queen of our northern lakes, with its lovely archipelago of islands, is spread between. Loch Lomond, too, is tributary to the Clyde, and all the waters that tumble through its glens, from Ardlui to Balloch Pier, including the fine stream of the Endrick, which drains the heart of the Lennox, and flows past Buchanan House, the seat of the great family of Montrose, are poured by the Leven past Smollett’s old home of Bonhill, and past the busy manufacturing towns of Alexandria, and Renton, to the foot of Dumbarton Rock.

The prospect commanded by the southern side of the Rock is hardly less grand, and has infinitely more of movement and space and variety. Winding into view from out of its coverts of smoke, and under its shadowing heights, comes the great river which in its westward course here opens up into the dimensions of a firth; and beyond it the fertile plains and valleys, the busy towns and villages, and the bare enclosing hills of Renfrew, are spread out like a map. The deep-water channel of the Clyde is marked not alone by the line of red buoys and beacons, but by the craft of all nations and all sizes, from the dredger to the huge floating palace of the ocean-going passenger steamer, that are continually plying up or down on it.

As the eye travels westward the shores expand and grow dim. But the houses, shipping, and shipbuilding yards of Port Glasgow, and the long line of timber lying off its sea front, are well in view, and beyond them the thicker pall of smoke and the more densely packed masses of dwellings, chimney stalks, and masts that proclaim the whereabouts of Cartsdyke and Greenock.

One has to embark and pass this dingy and crowded side of the birthplace of James Watt—the harbour, the docks, and the shipbuilding yards, the custom house, the steamboat quays, the handsome classic façade and tower of its Municipal Buildings, and the bulk of the many spires and steeples that rise among the masses of houses which climb the hillside—before seeing the fairer and more open face which Greenock presents to those approaching it from the west. Beyond Prince’s Pier stretch wide esplanades, lined with trees, lashed with saltwater, and blown upon by salt breezes; and behind and above these are broad and handsome streets and boulevards, ascending to the steeper sides of the Craig and the Whin Hill, on whose airy heights the town has planted its cemetery, golf course, public park, and water works. Beyond Fort Matilda is the semicircular sweep of Gourock Bay, thronged with yachts and lined with villa residences, which stretch on under the base and round the corner of the headland, crowned by a fragment of Gourock Castle, towards the Cloch Light, the beacon of the inner waters of the Firth.

In mid-firth, opposite Prince’s Pier, is the “Tail of the Bank”—the station of the guardship, the anchorage of vessels preparing to ascend the river or put out to sea. Opposite, the dark-wooded headland of Ardmore projects into the estuary, and lower down the beautiful glades and tree-clad slopes surrounding the Grecian front of the Duke of Argyll’s mansion rise gently from the water to the bare ridge of the peninsula of Roseneath. Between these opens the Gare Loch—perhaps the most charming nook in all the winding waters of the Clyde—with Craigendoran Pier and Helensburgh on its lip, Row in its narrow throat, and Shandon and a string of other seaside retreats in its inner recesses. Behind this the peaks that mount watch over Loch Lomond, Loch Long, and waters yet more distant—Ben Lomond, Ben Vorlich, The Cobbler, the rugged mass of “Argyll’s Bowling Green,” and far Ben Cruachan among them—stand up in the evening light in purple and gold. Nearer at hand are lower heights that surround the Holy Loch and guard the entrance to the inner Firth; at their feet are rank upon rank of fine seaside residences and favourite watering-places, to which the crowds in populous city pent rush for fresh air and recreation. All these and other scenes lying beyond, in the outer vestibule of the Firth—the Shores of Cowal and Ayrshire; the Cumbraes; Rothesay, and the windings of the Kyles of Bute; and, well seen from the neighbour island, the rugged peaks and corries of Arran—are fringes of Greater Glasgow, and creatures of the Clyde.

JOHN GEDDIE.