Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/217

Rh that's a topperer," with a verb also, to toper, to surpass, to clinch. The Cumberland man applies "topperer" to any thing or person that is superior,—

The Dopper Kirk is the highest expression of this exclusive unco-guidness, which also so markedly characterised the true-blue Hillman of the seventeenth century. And with reason, for both can trace their dourly militant Calvinism to the same source—the Hollanders that baffled the legions of the Spanish Inquisition. The Scottish Church in Rotterdam has for three centuries marked the close affinity between Scot and Dutchman. Here Wallace, leader of the hapless Pentland rising, was a ruling elder, and so also was Hamilton, of "Old Mortality" fame, that wilful but unfortunate leader who so bungled the defence of Bothwell Brig. Here, too, John Brown of Wamphray ordained Richard Cameron in 1679, to fall desperately afterwards at Airdsmoss in 1681. From the Hillmen were recruited those doughty fighters, the Cameronians. The term Dopper, applied to Dutch Calvinism in the Transvaal, is in no sense ecclesiastical, though one sees it sometimes interpreted as the Quaker, and again as the Baptist Church. There is really nothing to support either interpretation.

If we are to get along with the Dutch of the Cape we had better try as soon as possible to understand this Taal to which they cling so fondly. For nothing so wins the affections and sympathies of a race with whom our lot may be cast as showing a kindly interest in their homely speech. Unfortunately the average Englishman is too apt to dispose of a strange tongue as simply a "rum lingo" and not worth mastering. Similarly to the Greek, everyone who did not understand his language was classed as a barbarian, a babbler. In the case of an Asiatic, a Polynesian, or a Negro dialect there is some excuse for indifference, but the Afrikander's speech is only indirectly a foreign tongue. Apart altogether from those borrowed words that reach us through education and trading intercourse, English and Dutch are structurally akin, belonging as they do to cognate