Ossian Collection > Journal of a tour in Scotland in

INTRODUCTION xxv
gentleman, and while ready to put up with
poor accommodation and poor fare, when
there was no choice, had a nice discrimination
in inns and in viands. It was only dirt and
squalor that provoked his undisguised disgust/
But deeper than these traits lay his genuine
interest in the social and economic conditions
which the Tour enabled him to observe, and
the enduring value and interest of the Journal
— since the professional reader will study
Telford's technique elsewhere — lies in the
picture it gives, in the scores of anecdotes
and acute observations, of the reaction of this
network of good waterways and landways
upon the economic and social progress of
the country. Southey watches the gradual
percolation, through these channels, of civilised
amenities with unqualified approval. Twenty
years before, he had passed for a " Romantic,"
and been classed, with Wordsworth and
Coleridge, as one of the " Lake School " who
gloried in Nature undesecrated by the finger
of Man. There was indeed by this time a
sham Romanticism, nowhere more rampant
than in the Highlands, and Southey pillories
with intelligible sarcasm one of the absurd
"puffs "of "Wonderful and Interesting Scenery"
^ Cf, liis] anathemas upon begging (p. 41), "philabegs."