WHEN we look upon the two pictures contained in this work, which show what a beautiful and picturesque place Govan was in 1848, and contrast the quiet village of the past with the crowded town into which it has grown, we can hardly help sympathizing with the sentiment expressed by Thomas Campbell in his Lines on Revisiting a Scottish River -

"And call they this improvement? - to have changed,

My native Clyde, thy once romantic shore,

Where Nature's face is banished and estranged,

And Heaven reflected in thy wave no more."

If the Bard of Hope was moved to express himself in these mournful numbers so many years ago, what would be his reflections were he to sail down his native river now? Would he still retain his sorrowful impressions, or would he recognize the fact that the changes he deplores contain within themselves all the elements of poetry? That this is true was experienced by at least one Glasgow poet, Alexander Smith, who gloried in being a true son of the city, and who found the "ebb and flow of streets" to be as full of poetry as the beating of ocean upon the shore. To him the river, changed as it is, was as fit a subject for the Muse as if its waters, unpolluted by the accompaniment of a great commercial town, still ran between banks of daisies. This is how the river showed itself to him:-

"We floated down between dark ranks of masts,

We heard the swarming streets, the noisy mills;

Saw sooty foundries full of glare and gloom,

Great bellied chimneys tipped by tongues of flame

Quiver in smoky heat. We slowly passed

Loud building yards, where every slip contained

A mighty vessel, with a hundred men

Battering its iron sides. A cheer! A ship

In a gay flutter of innumerous flags

Slid gaily to her home."

One portion of old Govan still remains much the same as it was when the accompanying drawing was taken. That is the row of old thatched houses, called the Water Row, which show their crow stepped gables to the river All else has been changed. The banks on each side are now covered with great shipbuilding yards, and the stream which a hundred years ago, at Govan Pointhouse, was only one foot three inches in depth, carries safely on its bosom the greatest leviathans afloat. Even the old church, whose spire was an exact reproduction of that which stands over Shakespeare's grave in Stratford-on-Avon, has been removed to make room for a more spacious edifice. It is to the shipbuilding industry that Govan chiefly owes its expansion. The shipyards within the parish are the most numerous and most extensive on the Clyde, and it has been estimated that when trade is good they give employment to over 12,000 men, who draw about £1,000,000 per annum in the shape of wages. How rapid the growth of this industry must have been may be gathered from the fact that in the Statistical Account of the parish, published in 1839, no mention is made of its existence.