She personally exemplified the Scottish Highlands attributes which she admired: "virtuous and dignified poverty, elegance of sentiment that lives in the heart and conduct, and subsists independent of local and transitory modes.

For doing this, she had singular advantages in her personal intercourse with the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviewers, and in her constant habit of retailing her own opinions and their judgments in frequent conversations with other associates, and in numerous letters to her friends, so that the same subject, being set before her mind in several different lights of investigation in receiving, and of explanation in imparting it, became perfectly familiar, and took its durable place in her retentive memory.

[3][failed verification] Mrs. Macvicar some time afterwards received his directions to follow him; and accompanied by their daughter, she landed at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1758, and took up her temporary residence at Albany, New York.

Returning by the river from Oswego to Albany, the Macvicars became intimate with Madame Margarita Schuyler (1701–1782), who had then left her mansion on The Flats, and purchased a house in that town.

Mr. Macvicar hired men to survey and map his lands, and also at the time reasonably expected that his [sic] Township of Clarendon would in a few years become a very valuable property.

[4][failed verification] At this period of her life, Grant had two homes, usually spending the summer with her parents, presumably at Invernahyle in Scotland, and the winter with Madame Schuyler at Albany.

The family Bible, and a Scotch sergeant's copy of Blind Harry's The Wallace were the earliest books to which she had access, and she derived from studying the latter on the banks of Lake Ontario an enthusiastic feeling for Scotland, which lasted through life.

[6] On the voyage back to Albany, from the garrison at Oswego, staying a while at Fort Brewerton, Captain Mungo Campbell, the commander, presented her with an illustrated copy of the Paradise Lost.

Her principal advantage, however, consisted in oral instructions received from Madame Schuyler, and from listening to the conversations held by her monitress [clarification needed] with the military officers[6][failed verification] Disgusted with the new settlers, and suffering from rheumatism, Mr. Macvicar suddenly resolved on returning with his wife and daughter to Scotland.

His neighbour, Captain John Munro, consented to take charge of the "Township of Clarendon", and with a reasonable expectation of deriving an income from it in a few years, and of securing an ample inheritance for his child, he reappeared in Glasgow in 1768.

[7] In Glasgow, Grant found several girls of her own age, including two sisters named Pagan, afterwards better known as Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Brown, with whom, during the three following years, she cultivated a friendship.

Her father had again employed himself in commerce, but he resigned that occupation and accepted the appointment of barrack-master at Fort Augustus, in the county of Inverness, in 1773, and immediately removed there with his family.

[8][9] In Fort Augustus, for six years, Grant lived among the families of the military officers, and the inhabitants of the Strathmore, while practising literary composition in writing letters to her Lowland and other friends, and in occasional sallies of poetry.

They collected the original verses and translations which she had previously written and given away, sent them to her for revision, and published them under the patronage of the Duchess of Gordon, three thousand names appearing in the list of subscribers.

To make a comfortable provision for all her children had now become her chief desire, and to further this object she resolved, at the suggestion of her friends, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, and others, with whom she had kept up a correspondence from her girlhood, to publish the letters which they had preserved.

[19] Having kept alive her American remembrances by comparing them with those of her mother, and having enlarged and corrected these conjoint impressions by reading Cadwallader Colden's The History of the Five Indian Nations, and that part of the Travels through the United States of North America by François Alexandre Frédéric, duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt which relates his tour from Upper Canada to New York, she fortunately met in London with several near relations of Madame Schuyler, who afforded her the aid of their more accurate knowledge, while she was engaged in finishing the manuscript and correcting the proof-sheets of her Memoirs of an American Lady, which appeared in 1808.

[21] It is not to be doubted, although the observation does not seem to have been uttered or to have got into print, that the Letters from the Mountains were partly indebted for their immediate success to their connection with the birthplace of James Macpherson and the race of Ossian.

It had the same effect in society, where the sagacity of her intellect, the warmth of her heart, her natural ease and fluency of speech, and the refined simplicity of her manners, rendered her an object of interest, and often of admiration.

Particular spots charmed me, but the general aspect of the country made me always think myself in a defile guarded by savage and gloomy giants with their heads in the clouds and their feet washed by cataracts; in short, it appeared to me as awful as it would be to live night and day in that mighty Minster that so filled my eyes and my imagination when lately at York.

Time, however, went on, and I began to grow a little savage myself: 'not a mountain reared its head unsung; ’ and, when I grew acquainted with the language and the poetry of the country, I found a thousand interesting localities combined with those scenes where the lovely and the brave of other days had still a local habitation and a name: cherished traditions, and the poetry of nature and the heart shed light over scenes the most gloomy, and peopled solitude with images the most attractive and awakening.

When, after a long residence in this land of enthusiasm, I left the abode of ghosts, and warrior-hunters, and heroines, to come down to common life in a flat country, you cannot imagine how bleak and unsheltered, how tame and uninteresting, it appeared".

Again, writing to the same friend, on 17 September 1810, Grant said, in reference to a tour which she had lately made with some English visitors :—[32]"I have seen the Trosachs before, and thought them all that Walter Scott describes; yet till now they produced less of the local interest which pervades all Highland scenery than any other district I know.

Because they were uncelebrated and unsung; and almost every mountain glen and every lnoor that I ever saw or heard of besides is connected with some strain of native poetry, some note of wild music, or some antique legend, that give a local habitation and a name to those forms which float on the memory, or fleet through the imagination.

When I first went to the Highlands, and, from not knowing the language or the people, could not taste the charms of their poetry, the sentiments of their music, or the delights of manners more courteous, and conversation more intelligent, than are anywhere else to be met with among rusticsf" when first, I say, I wandered untaught and forlorn amid the desolation of brown heaths and dusky mountains, I was at times charmed with particular scenes, but the general effect was as much lost on me as on these tourists: I was like the ignorant maid who tried her master’s violin all over, and could never find where the tune lay".Here is confession, unwittingly made, that the true spirit of sublime poetry never inhabited the mind of Grant.

Heroes and heroines appear to advantage with a background of solemn or beautiful scenery, and the secondary charm of human interest is added by fictitious narrative to many an alpine spot.

That charm, however, can invest any landscape, whether mountainous or marine, of the woodland or the plain: Cowper has difl'used it over the flat arable and pasture lands of Buckinghamshire; the Brontés have cast its lustre with fascinating brilliancy across the bleak and unpicturesque moors of Haworth.

Genuine appreciation of natural scenery has its proper gradations of admiration and love for every landscape, but it is in all its varied characters essentially different and distinct from mere adventitious associations.

She learned to like the severe and stately glory of desert ranges; but it was after the same manner that some persons take pleasure in sea-views, on account of the graceful ships and pretty boats which diversify the monotonous vastness of the ocean.

[33] Having lived among the most eminent literary people of the time, and read all the fashionable books, Grant has thrown into her letters anecdotes, sketches of character, and critical remarks, which add to the interest they possess as records of family biography.

These inconsistencies, so far as they relate to the Schuylers, may possibly have been rectified in after editions, but strange want of vigilance is manifested by the omission of at least a note to show the reader that the second statement was to be considered as a correction of the first.