An Unintentional Scottish Masterpiece

It is an occupational hazard of poets laureate that, however far they flee the public, rustic local books will be shyly pressed into their hands. But when the British laureate Robert Southey was passing through the Scottish Highlands in 1819, literary discovery came from the simplest act of any tourist: he idly picked up a local guidebook from a table. “Striking and Picturesque Delineations of the Grand, Beautiful, Wonderful, and Interesting Scenery Around Loch-Earn,” the title page announced, by one Angus M’Diarmid. The rugged Highland landscape that the book described was, Southey marvelled, rivalled only by the prose itself from “the first sentence—if sentence that may be called which hath no limitations of sense or syntax.”