Michael Fry

WE HAVE seen the eyes of the world on Scotland this autumn, which made a pleasant change, whatever you thought about the result of the referendum.

But there was a time the world’s eyes were often on Scotland – in the 18th century, when, as the French philosopher Voltaire said, “at this day there come to us from Scotland rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening”. Indeed, “we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation”.

Voltaire was a wit as well as a philosopher, and he meant his remark to be funny. Most Frenchmen in his time – come to that, most Englishmen – thought of Scotland as a savage country, mountainous and stormy, with hairy and kilted natives. To connect them with rules of taste and ideas of civilisation seemed bizarre.

Yet usually Voltaire’s barbs were also based in some truth.

He would have had a good picture of the actual level of civilisation in Scotland from all the Scots who went to see and talk to him at his home of Ferney, situated just across the Swiss frontier from his homeland so that King Louis XVI’s police could not arrest him.

The list stretched from David Hume to James Boswell, from the sublime to the ridiculous, a good cross-section at any rate of the nation’s brightest and best.

Epic poetry, then? Certainly James MacPherson’s Ossian, whether or not an authentic relic of the remote Celtic past, was the most famous epic poem of the age, a wellspring of the Romanticism that would define a future era of European history.

And gardening? Again, Scottish gardeners were everywhere in demand (the first US president, George Washington, employed one at Mount Vernon in Virginia) for their skill at making plants grow in places where they ought not to be growing.

I have reached this point

The Scottish Enlightenment, nicest of all, was an affair of good cheer, good drink and good talk

instinct for generosity and inclusion.

We love Burns not for his incoherently contradictory opinions, ranging from the Jacobite to the Jacobin, but as a poor farmer’s son from Ayrshire who had an uncanny connection with all our cares and wishes for a better life: “It’s coming yet for a’ that, that man to man the world o’er shall brothers be for a’ that.”

It may seem weird to suggest there is much of a link here with Adam Smith, generally regarded as the apostle of capitalism.

Yet his great book TheWealth ofNations abounds not just with sympathy for the common