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HERE are few countries in the world in respect to whose architecture it is so difficult to write anything like a connected narrative as it is revarding that of Scotland. The difficulty does not arise from the paucity of examples, or from their not having been sufficiently examined or edited, but from the circumstance of the art not being indigenous. No one who knows anything of the ethnography of art would suspect the people who now inhabit the lowlands of Scotland of inventing any form of architecture, or of feeling much sympathy with it when introduced from abroad. It may have been that the Celtic element was more predominant in the country during the Middle Ages, and that the Teutonic race only came to the surface with the Reformation, when they showed their national characteristic in their readiness to destroy what they could not build. If this were not so, it must have been that their priests were strangers, who brought their arts with them and practised them for their own satisfaction, in despite of the feelings of their flocks.

Briefly, the outline of Scotland’s architectural story seems to be this: Till the time of the wars of the Edwards, the boundary line between the styles on either side of the border cannot be very clearly defined. In Scotland the forms were rnder and bolder than in the South, but were still the same in all essential respects.

After the days of Wallace and of Bruce, hatred of the English threw the Scotch into the arms of France. Instead of the perpendicular style of the South, we find an increasing tendency to copy the Flamboyant and other contemporary styles of France, till at last, just as the style was expiring, both churehes and mansions are almost