School don't appear to have laid their reforming hand on your city architecture. Ruskin thirty years ago, in a lecture on architecture, called Glasgow the "Devil's Drawing Room." He would hardly feel obliged to amend his judgment of it to-day, if this is the best that Glasgow can show.'
I told him, however, that a little farther westward, where many new insurance, shipping, and other commercial premises were now being built, there were signs of better things. In several instances bold innovations based on the old Celtic style had been introduced by the younger architects.
'I'm glad to hear it,' he said, 'though I doubt me much—if you don't mind my saying so—about the applicability of your old Celtic style to the amenities of joint-stock money-grabbing.'
The statutes dotted round the Square amused him. 'It seems to me,' he said, 'that the idea has been to give the place the aspect of a cemetery—you Scottish folk being, as one of your own writers has said, much addicted to graveyard reflections. Is it not your own Laird of Logan who avers that Scotchmen are never really happy save when they are at funerals?'[1]
Looking up at the Scott monument, a tall column surmounted with an effigy of the great novelist, in the middle of the Square, he observed, 'But at any rate your Walter Scott is a worthier wight to thrust up in the Almighty's face than our London Trafalgar Bay hero.' Of Robert Burns' statue he remarked, 'They've tried, don't you think, to make your ploughman poet look something of a fine gentleman, with his pigtail, his ribboned breeches, and silver-buckled shoes? But I suppose a certain degree of class-respectability, in dress at least, is obligatory for admission into your post-mortem court of celebrities.' After going
- ↑ I had sent him a copy of the Laird of Logan, an old book of Scottish anecdotes. But the saying is not there. It is a familiar tag among Scotsmen when affecting self-depreciation among Englishmen.
