THE SCOT SETTLES NORTH DOWN
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of Edinburgh, which had so often resounded with his eloquence; or, like Scott, rest, where he desired to rest, among the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey; or, like that other sweet singer of our Border-land, lie far away from the sound of his dearly-loved Teviot, where
"A distant and a deadly shore has Leyden's cold remains."
It is enough if he have done the work which his hand found to do, whether it be, like Knox's, the building up of a nation's character, or, like these peasants, but the tilling of thirty acres of not too fertile land in County Down.
The stuff of which the great body of the emigrants was made formed one element in the success of the colony, the other was the character of the two men who led and controlled them.
Had the system of "cram" been invented in James I.'s time, and had the two men on whom devolved the colonisation of South Clannaboye and the Great Ards been chosen by the most exhausting of Civil Service examinations, it is somewhat doubtful whether our modern system of discovering administrators would have put forward men so well fitted for the work as Hamilton and Montgomery. Both seem to have possessed those qualities, amiable and unamiable, which go to make up the very successful man. Montgomery, too, as the chroniclers tell us, was supported by an able and active wife--a requisite for successful colonial governors, which...continue reading »
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Page 15
The Scot in Ulster:
Sketch of the History of the Scottish Population of Ulster
by John Harrison
1888