The Mosstrooper: A Legend of the Scottish Border

Robert Fittis

Robert Scott Fittis

The Mosstrooper: A Legend of the Scottish Border

PREFATORY NOTE

After the death of my husband, Robert Scott Fittis, several of his friends suggested to me that some of his earlier writings should be re-published in book form as a Memorial of the Author, especially as it is now quite impossible to procure them otherwise. For these reasons I have chosen “The Mosstrooper,” which, although now re-published here as he revised it in a subsequent edition, was originally written by my late husband when he was only between sixteen and seventeen years of age.

I take this public opportunity of thanking Mr. A. H. Millar for his great kindness in writing the very full and accurate biographical notice which is prefixed to this Memorial Volume.

В В В В Katharine Fittis.

89В High Street,

Perth, December, 1906.

ROBERT SCOTT FITTIS

(BIOGRAPHICAL)

Born 15th November, 1824

Died 11th October, 1903

ROBERT SCOTT FITTIS represents a type of the Scottish man of letters which is rapidly disappearing. While it could not justly be said that he was unique as a personality, or that he introduced a novel combination of intellectual qualities and thereby formed an epoch, the honour must be ascribed to him of having continued the best traditions of the Augustan Age of Scottish Literature, and of maintaining the dignity in literary affairs to which his native land had attained. He was a Scotsman “through and through,” loving the land of his birth with intense devotion, reverencing the heroes whom she had brought forth to adorn the records alike of war and literature, and devoting the energies of a long life to setting before his countrymen the best models of patriotism for their imitation. His natural gifts were so strenuously cultivated that in his later days he was regarded as an inexhaustible encyclopædia of recondite information of the most varied kind. He was from his youth an omnivorous reader, and he possessed that best of all gifts “a reference memory,” as Dean Stanley called it, and could bring forth from his treasures, new and old, a surprising variety of apt quotations and original inferences. In some respects his mind was akin to that of the late John Hill Burton, the historian. He had the same finical love of accuracy, the same fervid Scottish spirit, and a similarly broad outlook upon general literature which prevented him from becoming merely a local historian and nothing more. While his labours in connection with Perthshire history were unceasing, and have produced a rich storehouse of facts, he dealt with national history and literature in a manner which showed the breadth of his mind and the variegated nature of his studies. He was a historian, earnest to separate veritable truth from tradition; yet he was one eager to collect these very traditions as fragments of national character. A student of charters and a genealogist, over whom any time-stained charter or antique paper scrawled with crabbed penmanship exercised a fascination, he was still an ardent lover of poetry, especially such as described the flowery banks of Tay or Tummel, the gowany lea of Gowrie, or the Bens and Straths of Garth and Glen Lyon. Upon one of his title-pages he placed two quotations which aptly express his characteristics: —

Let me the page of History turn o’er,

The instructive page, and heedfully explore

What faithful pens of former times have wrote.

– Wondrous skilled in genealogies,

And could in apt and voluble terms discourse

Of births, of titles, and alliances;

Of marriages, and inter-marriages;

Relationship remote, or near of kin.

To describe adequately the life of such a man within limited space is impossible. All that can here be done is to outline his industrious career, as a tribute to one whose devotion to national literature, even in times of severe distress and difficulty, must ever command sincere respect.

The Fair City of Perth was the birth-place of Robert Scott Fittis, and there he spent all his days, fro