Lord Rosebery, as an after-dinner speaker, hardly ever makes a
mistake, and he certainly understood on Wednesday
(St. Andrew's Day) how to extract " the placks and bawbees which he needed for the treasury of the Scottish Corporation;.
but he must have offended the feelings of any Englishman present, if there were any bold enough to pass himself off as a Scotchman, when he boasted that Scotland had a national dish, " haggis," but that England has none. Why, even the Egyptian donkey-boys of fifty years ago knew our national dish, when they saluted Miss Harriet Martineau with cries of "Ros-bif, God save the Queen." Lord Rosebery should not pretend to be ignorant of what Egyptian donkey-boys of the first half of this century knew. Lord Rosebery declared that on a former occasion of taking the chair, he had ventured upon the opinion that the only Scotch products known to this 'country were herrings and Liberal Members of Parliament,
and he lamented that neither of them shoal exactly where
they used to shoal, or quite so conveniently for Scotch pur- poses. Liberal Members of Parliament, he said, shoal now more in Wales than in Scotland. But after all, he said, there are other Scotch products which are now very well known in England, especially marmalade (said, however, to be mostly composed of vegetable marrow), bailies, provosts, crofters, and metaphysics. And, again, there are Scotch students who arrive- at Oxford and Cambridge in advanced middle age with an accumulation of Caledonian degrees, but leave it spruce and young with all the prizes of the University, and become Judges the moment they arrive in London. Lord Rosebery
could not have better described the general impression which the Scotch student leaves behind him, and no doubt the- Scottish Corporation gathered in " the placks and bawbees " of many of these Scotch Judges, on Wednesday, under the per. suasive invitations which Lord Rosebery addressed to their generosity. It was a very good subscription.
Previous page
