"Kinsman," she said, "you are welcome--and you, too, stranger," she
added, releasing my alarmed companion, who instinctively drew back and
settled his wig, and addressing herself to me--"you also are welcome. You
came," she added, "to our unhappy country, when our bloods were chafed,
and our hands were red. Excuse the rudeness that gave you a rough
welcome, and lay it upon the evil times, and not upon us." All this was
said with the manners of a princess, and in the tone and style of a
court. Nor was there the least tincture of that vulgarity, which we
naturally attach to the Lowland Scottish. There was a strong provincial
accentuation, but, otherwise, the language rendered by Helen MacGregor,
out of the native and poetical Gaelic, into English, which she had
acquired as we do learned tongues, but had probably never heard applied
to the mean purposes of ordinary life, was graceful, flowing, and
declamatory. Her husband, who had in his time played many parts, used a
much less elevated and emphatic dialect;--but even _his_ language rose in
purity of expression, as you may have remarked, if I have been accurate
in recording it, when the affairs which he discussed were of an agitating
and important nature; and it appears to me in his case, and in that of
some other Highlanders whom I have known, that, when familiar and
facetious, they used the Lowland Scottish dialect,--when serious and
impassioned, their thoughts arranged themselves in the idiom of their
native language; and in the latter case, as they uttered the
corresponding ideas in English, the expressions sounded wild, elevated,
and poetical. In fact, the language of passion is almost always pure as
well as vehement, and it is no uncommon thing to hear a Scotchman, when
overwhelmed by a countryman with a tone of bitter and fluent upbraiding,
reply by way of taunt to his adversary, "You have gotten to your
English."
Rob Roy
Volume 2 Chapter 18
Sir Walter Scott
