30.01.07
The English and their Intellect
What a romantic Hugh Miller was! Listen to what he says about the relative intellects of English and Scots:
“Nothing in the English character so strikingly impressed me as its immense extent of range across the intellectual scale … there is an order of English mind to which Scotland has not attained: our first men stand in the second rank, not a foot-breadth behind the foremost of England’s second rank men; but there is a front rank of British intellect in which there stands no Scotchman … Scotland has produced no Shakespeare; Burns and Sir Walter Scott would fall short of the stature of the giant of Avon. Of Milton we have not even a representative. Bacon is as exclusively unique as Milton, and as exclusively English; and though the grandfather of Newton was a Scotchman, we have certainly no Scotch Sir Isaac.” (obviously Miller lived before Dudley Watkins, the inventor of Oor Wullie and the Broons - an intellect no Englishman has ever been able to copy).
But, on the other hand, Miller writes, “Be that as it may, however, it is unquestionable that England has produced an order of intellect to which Scotland has not attained; and it does strike as at least curious, in connexion with the fact that the English, notwithstanding, should as a people stand on a lower intellectual level than the Scotch … I have no hesitation in affirming that their (the English) minds lie much more profoundly asleep than those of the common people of Scotland. We have no class north of the Tweed that corresponds with the class of ruddy, round faced, vacant English, so abundant in the rural districts, and whose very physiognomy, derived during the course of centuries from untaught ancestors indicates intellect yet unawakened.” (Clearly, Miller never spent any time with the chavs of Drumchapel or Possil)
Anyway, good mixed with bad. Good old Miller. Always a good read and a good laugh.