 CHAPTER XIII. The ablest of Scottish politicians and debaters, Sir John Dalrymple, was appointed Lord Advocate. His father, Sir James, the greatest of Scottish jurists, was placed at the head of the Court of Session. Sir William Lockhart, a man whose letters prove him to have possessed considerable ability, became Solicitor General. Sir James Montgomery had flattered himself that he should be the Chief Minister. He had distinguished himself highly in the Convention. He had been one of the commissioners who attended the Crown and administered the oath to the new sovereigns. In parliamentary ability and eloquence he had no superior among his countrymen except the new Lord Advocate. The secretarieship was, not indeed indignity, but in real power the highest office in the new Scottish government, and this office was the reward to which Montgomery thought himself entitled. But the Episcopalians and the moderate Presbyterians dreaded him as a man of extreme opinions and of bitter spirit. He had been a chief of the Covenanters, he had been prosecuted at one time for holding Conventacles, and at another time for harboring rebels. He had been fined, he had been imprisoned, he had been almost driven to take refuge from his enemies beyond the Atlantic in the infant settlement of New Jersey. It was apprehended that, if he were now armed with the whole power of the Crown, he would exact a terrible retribution for what he had suffered. William therefore preferred Melville, who, though not a man of eminent talents, was regarded by the Presbyterians as the thoroughgoing friend, and not yet regarded by the Episcopalians as an implacable enemy. Melville fixed his residence at the English court, and became the regular organ of communication between Kensington and the authorities at Edinburgh. William had, however, one Scottish advisor who deserved and possessed more influence than any of the ostensible ministers. This was Carstairs, one of the most remarkable men of that age. He united great scholastic attainments with great aptitude for civil business and the firm faith and ardent zeal of a martyr, with the shrewdness and suppleness of a consummate politician. Encourage and fidelity he resembled Burnett. But he had, what Burnett wanted, judgment, self-command, and a singular power of keeping secrets. There was no post to which he might not have aspired if he had been a layman or a priest of the Church of England. But a Presbyterian clergyman could not hope to attain any high dignity, either in the north or in the south of the island. Carstairs was forced to content himself with the substance of power and to leave the semblance to others. He was named chaplain to their majesties for Scotland, but wherever the king was, in England, in Ireland, in the Netherlands, there was this most trusty and most prudent of courtiers. He obtained from the royal bounty a modest competence, and he desired no more. But it was well known that he could be as useful a friend and as formidable an enemy as any member of the Cabinet, and he was designated at the public offices and in the anti-chambers of the palace by the significant nickname of the Cardinal. To Montgomery was offered the place of Lord Justice Clerk. But that place, though high and honourable, he thought below his merits and his capacity, and he returned from London to Scotland with a heart ulcerated by hatred of his ungrateful master and of his successful rivals. At Edinburgh a knot of wigs, as severely disappointed as himself by the new arrangements, readily submitted to the guidance of so bold an able eliter. Under his direction these men, among whom the Earl of Anondale and Lord Ross were the most conspicuous, formed themselves into a society called the Club, appointed a clerk, and met daily at a tavern to concert plans of opposition. Round this nucleus soon gathered a great body of greedy and angry politicians. With these dishonest malcontents, whose object was merely to annoy the government and to get places, were leagued other malcontents, who, in the course of a long resistance to tyranny, had become so perverse and irritable that they were unable to live contentedly, even under the mildest and most constitutional government. Such a man was Sir Patrick Hume. He had returned from exile as litigious, as impracticable, as morbidly jealous of all superior authority, and as fond of haranguing as he had been four years before, and was as much bent on making a merely nominal sovereign of William as he had been formally bent on making a merely nominal general of Argyle. A man far superior morally and intellectually to Hume, Fletcher of Salton, belonging to the same party. Though not a member of the convention, he was a most active member of the Club. He hated monarchy, he hated democracy. His favorite project was to make Scotland an oligarchical republic. The king, if there must be a king, was to be a mere pageant. The lowest class of the people were to be bondsmen. The whole power, legislative and executive, was to be in the hands of Parliament. In other words, the country was to be absolutely governed by hereditary aristocracy, the most needy, the most haughty, and the most quarrelsome in Europe. Under such a polity there could have been neither freedom nor tranquility. Trade, industry, science would have languished, and Scotland would have been a smaller Poland, with a puppet sovereign, a turbulent deat, and an enslaved people. With unsuccessful candidates for office, and with honest but wrong-headed Republicans were mingled politicians, whose course was determined merely by fear. Many sycophants, who were conscious that they had, in the evil time, done what deserved punishment, were desirous to make their peace with the powerful and vindictive Club, and were glad to be permitted to atone for their servility to James by their opposition to William. The great body of Jacobites, meanwhile, stood aloof, saw with delight the enemies of the House of Stuart divided against one another, and indulged the hope that the confusion would end in the restoration of the banished King. While Montgomery was laboring to form, out of various materials, a party which might, when the Convention should reassemble, be powerful enough to dictate to the throne, an enemy still more formidable than Montgomery had set up the standard of civil war in a region about which the politicians of Westminster, and indeed most of the politicians of Edinburgh, knew no more than about Abyssinia or Japan. It is not easy for a modern Englishman, who can pass in a day from his club in St. James's Street to his shooting-box among the Grampians, and who finds in his shooting-box all the comforts and luxuries of his club, to believe that, in the time of his great-grandfathers, St. James's Street had as little connection with the Grampians as with the Andes. Yet so it was. In the south of our island, scarcely anything was known about the Celtic part of Scotland, and what was known excited no feeling but contempt and loathing. The crags and the glands, the woods and the waters, were indeed the same that now swarm every autumn with admiring gazers and stretchers. The trossex wound as now between gigantic walls of rock tapestryed with broom and wild roses. Foyers came headlong down through the birch wood with the same leap and the same roar with which he still rushes to Loch Ness. And in defiance of the sun of June the snowy scalp of Ben Crocken rose as it still rises over the willowy islets of Loch Howe. Yet none of these sites had powered till a recent period to attract a single poet or painter from more opulent and more tranquil regions. Indeed law and police, trade and industry have done far more than people of romantic dispositions will readily admit, to develop in our minds a sense of the wilder beauties of nature. A traveller must be freed from all apprehension of being murdered or starved before he can be charmed by the bold outlines and rich tints of the hills. He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the abruptness of a precipice from which he is an eminent danger of falling two thousand feet perpendicular, by the boiling waves of a torrent which suddenly whorls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life, by the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just stripped and mangled, or by the screams of those eagles whose next meal may probably be on his own eyes. About the year 1730 Captain Burt, one of the first Englishmen who caught a glimpse of the spots which now allure tourists from every part of the civilized world, wrote an account of his wanderings. He was evidently a man of a quick and observant and a cultivated mind, and would doubtless had he lived in our age have looked with mingled awe and delight on the mountains of Invernus Shire. He pronounced those mountains monstrous excrencises. Their deformity, he said, was such that the most sterile plains seemed lovely by comparison. Fine weather he complained only made bad worse, for the clearer the day the more disagreeable did those misshapen masses of gloomy brown and dirty purple affect the eye. What a contrast, he exclaimed, between those horrible prospects and the beauties of Richmond Hill. Some persons may think that Burt was a man of vulgar and prosaical mind, but they will scarcely venture to pass a similar judgment on Oliver Goldsmith. Goldsmith was one of the very few Saxons who, more than a century ago, ventured to explore the Highlands. He was disgusted by the hideous wilderness, and declared that he greatly preferred the charming country around Leiden, the vast expanse of verdant meadow and the villows, with their statues and grottoes, trim flower beds, and rectilinear avenues. Yet it is difficult to believe that the author of the traveler and of the deserted village was naturally inferior in taste and sensibility to the thousands of clerks and milleners who are now thrown into raptures by the sight of Locke Catrine and Locke Lomond. His feelings may be easily explained. It was not till roads had been cut out of the rocks, till bridges had been flung over the courses of the rivulets, till ends had succeeded to dens of robbers, till there was as little danger of being slain or plundered in the wildest defile of Fadenoch or Locke Burr, as in Corn Hill, that strangers could be enchanted by the blue dimples of the lakes and by the rainbows which overhung the waterfalls, and could derive a solemn pleasure even from the clouds and tempests which lowered on the mountaintops. The change in the feeling with which the lowlanders regarded the Highland scenery was closely connected with a change not less remarkable in the feeling with which they regarded the Highland race. It was not strange that the wild scotch, as they were sometimes called, should in the seventeenth century have been considered by the Saxons as mere savages. But it is surely strange that, considered as savages, they should not have been objects of interest and curiosity. The English were then abundantly inquisitive about the manners of rude nations, separated from our island by great continents and oceans. Numerous books were printed describing the laws, the superstitions, the cabins, the rapasts, the dresses, the marriages, the funerals of laplanders and hotentots, mohawks, and malaise. The plays and poems of that age are full of allusions to the usages of the black men of Africa and of the red men of America. The only barbarian about whom there was no wish to have any information was the Highlander. Five or six years after the revolution, an indefatagable angler published an account of Scotland. He boasted that, in the course of his rambles, from lake to lake, and from brook to brook, he had left scarcely a nook of the kingdom unexplored. We find that he had never ventured beyond the extreme skirts of the Celtic region. He tells us that even from the people who lived close to the passes he could learn little or nothing about the Gaelic population. Few Englishmen, he says, had ever seen Inverary. All beyond Inverary was chaos. In the reign of George I a work was published which professed to give a most exact account of Scotland, and in this work, consisting of more than three hundred pages, two contemptuous paragraphs were thought sufficient for the Highlands and the Highlanders. We may well doubt whether, in 1689, one in twenty of the well-read gentlemen who assembled at Will's's coffee-house knew that, within the Four Seas, and at the distance of less than five hundred miles from London, were many miniature courts, in each of which a petty prince, attended by guards, by armor-bearers, by musicians, by a hereditary orator, by a hereditary poet laureate, kept a rude state, dispensed a rude justice, waged wars, and concluded treaties. While the old Gaelic institutions were in full vigor, no account of them was given by any observer, qualified to judge of them fairly. Had such an observer studied the character of the Highlanders, he would doubtless have found in it closely intermingled the good and the bad qualities of an uncivilized nation. He would have found that the people had no love for their country or for their king, that they had no attachment to any commonwealth larger than the clan, or to any magistrate superior to the chief. He would have found that life was governed by a code of morality and honor widely different from that which is established in peaceful and prosperous societies. He would have learned that a stab in the back, or a shot from behind a fragment of rock, were approved modes of taking satisfaction for insults. He would have heard men relate boastfully how they or their fathers had reeked on hereditary enemies in a neighboring valley such vengeance as would have made old soldiers of the Thirty Years' Wars shudder. He would have found that robbery was held to be a calling, not merely innocent, but honorable. He would have seen, wherever he turned, that dislike of steady industry and that disposition to throw on the weaker sex the heaviest part of manual labor which are characteristic of savages. He would have been struck by the spectacle of athletic men basking in the sun, angling for salmon or taking aim at grouse, while their aged mothers, their pregnant wives, their tender daughters were reaping the scanty harvest of oats. Nor did the women repine at their hard lot. In their view it was quite fit that a man, especially if he assumed the aristocratic title of June Vossel and adorned his bonnet with the eagle's feather, should take his ease except when he was fighting, hunting, or marauding. To mention the name of such a man in connection with commerce or with any mechanical art was an insult. Agriculture was indeed less despised. Yet a high-born warrior was much more becomingly employed in plundering the land of others than in tilling his own. The religion of the greater part of the Highlanders was a rude mixture of potpourri and paganism. The symbol of redemption was associated with heathen sacrifices and incantations. Baptized men poured libations of ale to one daemon and set out drink-offerings of milk for another. Seers wrapped themselves up in bull's hides and awaited in that vesture the inspiration which was to reveal the future. Even among those minstrels and genealogists whose hereditary vocation was to preserve the memory of past events an inquirer would have found very few who could read. In truth he might have easily journeyed from sea to sea without discovering a page of Gaelic printed or written. The price which he would have had to pay for his knowledge of the country would have been heavy. He would have had to endure hardships as great as if he had been so journing among the Esquimaux or the Samoyeds. Here and there, indeed, at the castle of some great lord who had a seat in the parliament and privy council, and who was accustomed to pass a large part of his life in the cities of the south, might have been found wigs and embroidered coats, plate and fine linen, lace and jewels, French dishes and French wines. But in general the traveller would have been forced to content himself with very different quarters. In many dwellings the furniture, the food, the clothing, nay, the very hair and skin of his hosts would have put his philosophy to the proof. His lodging would sometimes have been in a hut of which every nook would have swarmed with vermin. He would have inhaled an atmosphere thick with peat smoke and foul with a hundred noisome exhalations. At supper grain fit only for horses would have been set before him, accompanied by a cake of blood drawn from living cows. Some of the company with which he would have feasted would have been covered with cutinadious eruptions, and others would have been smeared with tar like sheep. His couch would have been the bare earth, dry or wet as the weather might be, and from that couch he would have risen half poisoned with stench, half blind with the reek of turf, and half mad with the itch. This is not an attractive picture, and yet an enlightened and dispassionate observer would have found in the character and manners of this rude people something which might well excite admiration and a good hope. Their courage was what great exploits achieved in all the four quarters of the globe have since proved it to be. Their intense attachment to their own tribe and to their own patriarch, though politically a great evil, partook of the nature of virtue. The sentiment was misdirected and ill-regulated, but still it was heroic. There must be some elevation of soul in a man who loves the society of which he is a member, and the leader whom he follows with a love stronger than the love of life. It was true that the Highlander had few scruples about shedding the blood of an enemy, but it was not less true that he had high notions of the duty of observing faith to allies and hospitality to guests. It was true that his predatory habits were most pernicious to the Commonwealth. Yet those aired greatly who imagined that he bore any resemblance to villains who, in rich and well-governed communities, lived by stealing. When he drove before him the herds of lowland farmers up the pass which led to his native Glen, he no more considered himself as a thief than the Ralees and Drakes consider themselves as thieves when they divided the cargoes of Spanish galleons. He was a warrior, seizing lawful prize of war, of war never once intermitted during the thirty-five generations which had passed away since the Teutonic invaders had driven the children of the soil to the mountains. That if he was caught robbing on such principles he should, for the protection of peaceful industry, be punished with the utmost rigor of the law was perfectly just. But it was not just to class him morally with the pickpockets who infested Drury Lane Theatre or the High Women who stopped coaches on Blackheath. His inordinate pride of birth and his contempt for labor and trade were indeed great weaknesses, and had done far more than the inclinacy of the air and the sterility of the soil to keep his country poor and rude. Yet even here there was some compensation. It must in fairness be acknowledged that the patrician virtues were not less widely diffused among the population of the Highlands than the patrician vices. As there was no other part of the island where men, sordidly clothed, lodged, and fed, indulged themselves to such a degree in the idle, sauntering habits of an aristocracy, so there was no other part of the island where such men had, in such a degree, the better qualities of an aristocracy, grace and dignity of manner, of self-respect, and that noble sensibility which makes dishonor more terrible than death. A gentleman of this sort, whose clothes were begrimmed with the accumulated filth of years, and whose hovel smelt worse than an English hog-stie, would often do the honors of that hovel with a lofty courtesy worthy of the splendid circle of Versailles. Though he had as little book-learning as the most stupid plough-boys of England, it would have been a great error to put him in the same intellectual rank with such plough-boys. It is indeed only by reading that men can become profoundly acquainted with any science. But the arts of poetry and rhetoric may be carried near to absolute perfection, and may exercise a mighty influence on the public mind, in an age in which books are wholly or almost wholly unknown. The first great painter of life and manners has described, with a vivacity which makes it impossible to doubt that he was copying from nature, the effect produced by eloquence and song on audiences ignorant of the alphabet. It is probable that, in the Highland councils, men who would not have been qualified for the duty of parish clerks, sometimes argued questions of peace and war, of tribute and homage, with ability worthy of Halifax and Carmarthen, and that at the Highland banquets, minstrels who did not know their letters sometimes poured forth rhapsodies, in which a discerning critic might have found passages which would have reminded him of the tenderness of Autway or of the vigor of Dryden. There was therefore even then evidence sufficient to justify the belief that no natural inferiority had kept the kilt far behind the Saxon. It might safely have been predicted that, if ever an efficient police should make it impossible for the Highlander to avenge his wrongs by violence and to supply his wants by rapine, if ever his faculties should be developed by the civilizing influence of the Protestant religion and of the English language, if ever he should transfer to his country and to her lawful magistrates the affection and respect with which he had been taught to regard his own petty community and his own petty prince, the kingdom would obtain an immense accession of strength for all the purposes both of peace and of war. Such would doubtless have been the decision of a well-informed and impartial judge, but no such judge was then to be found. The Saxons who dwelt far from the Gaelic provinces could not be well-informed. The Saxons who dwelt near those provinces could not be impartial. National enmities have always been fear system among borderers, and the enmity between the Highland border and the Lowland borderer on the whole frontier was the growth of ages, and was kept fresh by constant injuries. One day many square miles of pasture land were swept bare by armed plunderers from the hills. Another day a score of plaids dangling in a row on the gallows of grief or sterling. Fairs were indeed held on the debatable land for the necessary interchange of commodities, but to those fares both parties came prepared for battle, and the day often ended in bloodshed. Thus the Highlander was an object of hatred to his Saxon neighbors, and from his Saxon neighbors those Saxons who dwelt far from him learned the very little that they cared to know about his habits. When the English condescended to think of him at all, and it was seldom that they did so, they considered him as a filthy abject savage, a slave, a papist, a cutthroat, and a thief. This contentious loathing lasted till the year 1745, and was then for a moment succeeded by intense fear and rage. England, thoroughly alarmed, put forth her whole strength. The Highlands were subjugated rapidly, completely, and forever. During a short time the English nation, still heated by the recent conflict, breathed nothing but vengeance. The slaughter on the field of battle and on the scaffold was not sufficient to slake the public thirst for blood. The sight of the tartan inflamed the populace of London with hatred, which showed itself by unmanly outrages to defenseless captives. A political and social revolution took place through the whole Celtic region. The power of the chiefs was destroyed, the people were disarmed, the use of the old national garb was interdicted, the old predatory habits were effectively broken, and scarcely had this change been accomplished when a strange reflux of public feeling began. The cruelty succeeded to aversion. The nation X-graded the cruelties which had been committed on the Highlanders, and forgot that for those cruelties it was itself answerable. Those very Londoners who, while the memory of the March to Darby was still fresh, had thronged to hoot and pelt the rebel prisoners, now fastened on the Prince who had put down the rebellion the nickname of Butcher. Those barbarous institutions and usages, which, while they were in full force, no Saxon had thought worthy of serious examination, or had mentioned, except with contempt, had no sooner ceased to exist than they become the objects of curiosity, of interest, even of admiration. Scarcely had the chiefs been turned into mere landlords when it became the fashion to draw invidious comparisons between the rapacity of the landlord and the indulgence of the chief. Men seemed to have forgotten that the ancient Gaelic polity had been found to be incompatible with the authority of law, had obstructed the progress of civilization, had more than once brought on the empire the curse of civil war. As they had formerly seen only the odious side of that polity, they could now see only the pleasing side. The old thai, they said, had been parental. The new thai was purely commercial. What could be more lamentable than that the head of a tribe should eject, for a paltry arrear of rent, tenants who were his own flesh and blood, tenants whose forefathers had often with their bodies covered his forefathers on the field of battle. As long as there were Gaelic marauders, they had been regarded by the Saxon population as hateful vermin who ought to be exterminated without mercy. As soon as the extermination had been accomplished, as soon as cattle were as safe in the Perthshire passes as in the Smithfield market, the freebooter was exalted into a hero of romance. As long as the Gaelic dress was worn, the Saxons had pronounced it hideous, ridiculous, nay, grossly indecent. Soon after it had been prohibited, they discovered that it was the most graceful drapery in Europe. The Gaelic monuments, the Gaelic usages, the Gaelic superstitions, the Gaelic verses, disdainfully neglected during many ages, began to attract the attention of the learned from the moment at which the peculiarities of the Gaelic race began to disappear. So strong was the impulse that, where the Highlands were concerned, men of sense gave ready credence to stories without evidence, and men of taste gave rapturous applause to compositions without merit. Epic poems, which any skillful and dispassionate critic would at a glance have perceived to be almost entirely modern, and which, if they had been published as modern, would have instantly found their proper place in company with Blackmore's Alfred and Wilkie's Epignard, were pronounced to be fifteen hundred years old and were gravely classed with the Iliad. Writers of a very different order from the impostor who fabricated these forgeries saw how striking in effect might be produced by skillful pictures of the old Highland life. Whatever was repulsive was softened down, whatever was graceful and noble was brought prominently forward. Some of these works were executed with such admirable art that, like the historical plays of Shakespeare, they superseded history. The versions of the poet were realities to his readers. The places which he described became holy ground and were visited by thousands of pilgrims. Soon the vulgar imagination was so completely occupied by plaids, targets, and claymores that, by most Englishmen, Scotchmen and Highlander were regarded as synonymous words. Few people seemed to be aware that, at no remote period, a MacDonald or a McGregor in his tartan was to a citizen of Edinburgh or Glasgow what an Indian hunter in his war-paint is to an inhabitant of Philadelphia or Boston. Artists and actors represented Bruce and Douglas in striped petticoats. They might as well have represented Washington brandishing a tomahawk and girt with a string of scalps. At length this fashion reached a point beyond which it was not easy to proceed. The last British king, who held a court at Holy Road, thought that he could not give a more striking proof of his respect for the usages, which had prevailed in Scotland before the Union, then by disguising himself in what, before the Union, was considered by nine Scotchmen out of ten as the dress of a thief. Thus it has chance that the old Gaelic institutions and manners have never been exhibited in a simple light of truth. Up to the middle of the last century they were seen through one false medium. They have since been seen through another. Once they loomed dimly through an obscuring and distorting haze of prejudice, and no sooner had that fog dispersed than they appeared bright with all the richest tints of poetry. The time when a perfectly fair picture could have been painted has now passed away. The original has long disappeared. No authentic effigy exists, and all that is possible to presuce an imperfect likeness by the help of two portraits, one of which is a coarse caricature and the other a masterpiece of flattery. Among the most erroneous notions which have been commonly received concerning the history and character of the Highlanders is one which it is especially necessary to correct. During the century which commenced with the campaign of Montrose and terminated with the campaign of the young pretender, every great military exploit which was achieved on British ground in the cause of the House of Stuart was achieved by the valor of Gaelic tribes. The English have therefore very naturally ascribed to those tribes the feelings of English Cavaliers, profound reverence for the royal office, and enthusiastic attachment to the royal family. A close inquiry, however, will show that the strength of these feelings among the Celtic clans has been greatly exaggerated. CHAPTER XIII. In studying the history of our civil contensions we must never forget that the same names, badges, and war cries had very different meanings in different parts of the British Isles. We have already seen how little there was in common between the Jacobitism of Ireland and the Jacobitism of England. The Jacobitism of the Scotch Highlander was, at least in the 17th century, a third variety, quite distinct from the other two. The Gaelic population was far indeed from holding the doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance. In fact, disobedience and resistance made up the ordinary life of that population. Some of those very clans, which it had been the fashion to describe as so in enthusiastically loyal, that they were prepared to stand by James to the death even when he was in the wrong, had never, while he was on the throne, paid the slightest respect to his authority even when he was clearly in the right. Their practice, their calling, had been to disobey and to defy him. Some of them had actually been proscribed by sound of horn for the crime of withstanding his lawful commands and would have torn to pieces without scruple any of his officers who had dared to venture beyond the passes for the purpose of executing his warrant. The English Whigs were accused by their opponents of holding doctrines dangerously lax, touching the obedience due to the Chief Magistrate. Yet no respectable English Whig ever defended rebellion except as a rare and extreme remedy for rare and extreme evils. But among those Celtic Chiefs whose loyalty has been the theme of so much warm eulogy were some whose whole existence from boyhood upwards had been one long rebellion. Such men, it is evident, were not likely to see the revolution in the same light in which it appears to an Saxonian non-jurer. On the other hand they were not, like the aboriginal Irish, urged to take arms by impatience of Saxon domination. To such domination the Scottish Celt had never been subjected. He occupied his own wild and sterile region and followed his own national usages. In his dealings with the Saxons he was rather the oppressor than the oppressed. He exacted blackmail from them. He drove away their flocks and herds, and they seldom dared to pursue him to his native wilderness. They had never portioned out among themselves his dreary region of Moor and Shingle. He had never seen the tower of his hereditary chieftains occupied by a new surfer who could not speak Gaelic, and who looked on all who spoke it as brutes and slaves, nor had his national and religious feelings ever been outraged by the power and splendor of a church which he regarded as at once foreign and heretical. The real explanation of the readiness with which a large part of the population of the Highlands, twice in the 17th century, drew the sword for the stewards, is to be found in the internal quarrels which divided the Commonwealth of Clans. For there was a Commonwealth of Clans, the image on a reduced scale of the great Commonwealths of European nations. In the smaller of these two Commonwealths, as in the larger, there were wars, treaties, alliances, disputes about territory and precedence, a system of public law, a balance of power. There was one inexhaustible source of discontents and disputes. The feudal system had, some centuries before, been introduced into the hill country, but had neither destroyed the patriarchal system nor amalgamated completely with it. In general, he who was Lord in the Norman polity was also chief in the Celtic polity, and when this was the case, there was no conflict. But when the two characters were separated, all the willing and loyal obedience was reserved for the chief. The Lord had only what he could get and hold by force. If he was able, by the help of his own tribe, to keep in subjection tenants who were not of his own tribe, there was a tyranny of clan over clan, the most galling perhaps of all forms of tyranny. At different times different races had risen to an authority which had produced general fear and envy. The McDonald's had once possessed in the Hebrides and throughout the mountain country of Argyllishire and Invernishire an ascendancy similar to that which the House of Austria had once possessed in Christendom. But the ascendancy of the McDonald's had, like the ascendancy of the House of Austria passed away, and the campels, the children of Darmid, had become in the Highlands what the Bourbons had become in Europe. The parallel might be carried far, imputation similar to those which it was the fashion to throw on the French government were thrown on the campels. A peculiar dexterity, a peculiar plausibility of address, a peculiar contempt for all the obligations of good faith were ascribed with or without reason to the dreaded race. Fair and false, like a campel, became a proverb. It was said that McCollum Moore, after McCollum Moore had, with unraired, unscrupulous, and unrelenting ambition, annexed mountain after mountain and island after island to the original domains of his house. Some tribes had been expelled from their territory, some compelled to pay tribute, some incorporated with the conquerors. At length the number of fighting men who bore the name of Campel was sufficient to meet in the field of battle the combined forces of all the other Western clans. It was during those civil troubles which commenced in 1638 that the power of this aspiring family reached the zenith. The Marques of Argyle was at the head of a party as well as at the head of a tribe. Possessed of two different kinds of authority he used each of them in such a way as to extend and fortify the other. The knowledge that he could bring into the field the claymores of five thousand half heathen mountaineers added to his influence among the austere Presbyterians who filled the privy council and the general assembly at Edinburgh. His influence at Edinburgh added to the terror which he inspired among the mountains. Of all the Highland princes whose history is well known to us he was the greatest and most dreaded. It was while his neighbors were watching the increase of his power with hatred which fear could scarcely keep down that Montrose called them to arms. The call was promptly obeyed. A powerful coalition of clans waged war, nominally for King Charles, but really against McCollum Moore. It is not so easy for any person who has studied the history of that contest to doubt that if Argyle had supported the cause of monarchy his neighbors would have declared against it. Grave writers tell of the victory gained at Inverloch by the royalists over the rebels, but the peasants who dwell near the spot speak more accurately. They talk of the great battle won there by the McDonalds over the campels. The feelings which had produced the coalition against the Marquesse of Argyle retained their force long after his death. His son, Earl Argybald, though a man of many eminent virtues, inherited with the ascendancy of his accession the unpopularity which such ascendancy could scarcely fail to produce. In 1675 several warlike tribes formed a confederacy against him, but were compelled to submit to the superior force which was at his command. There was therefore great joy from sea to sea when in 1681 he was arraigned on a futile charge, condemned to death, driven into exile and deprived of his dignities. There was great alarm when in 1685 he returned from banishment and sent forth the fiery cross to summon his kinsmen to his standard, and there was again great joy when his enterprise had failed, when his army had melted away, when his head had been fixed on the toll booth of Edinburgh, and when those chiefs who had regarded him as an oppressor had obtained from the crowd on easy terms remissions of old debts and grants of new titles. While England and Scotland generally were execrating the tyranny of James, he was honoured as a deliverer in Appen and Locaber in Glenroy and Glenmore. The hatred excited by the power and ambition of the House of Argyle was not satisfied even when the head of that house had perished, when his children were fugitives, when strangers garrisoned the castle of Inverari, and when the whole shore of Locfin was laid waste by fire and sword. It was said that the terrible precedent which had been set in the case of the McGregors ought to be followed, that it ought to be made a crime to bear the odious name of Campbell. On a sudden all was changed. The revolution came, the heir of Argyle returned in triumph. He was, as his predecessors had been, at the head not only of a tribe, but of a party. The sentence which had deprived him of his estate and of his honours was treated by the majority of the convention as a nullity. The doors of the Parliament House were thrown open to him. He was selected from the whole body of Scottish nobles to administer the oath of office to the new sovereigns. And he was authorized to raise an army on his domains for the service of the Crown. He would now doubtless be as powerful as the most powerful of his ancestors. Backed by the strength of the government, he would demand all the long and heavier rears of rent and tribute which were due to him from his neighbours and would exact revenge for all the injuries and insults which his family had suffered. There was terror and agitation in the castles of twenty petty kings. The uneasiness was great among the stewards of Appin, whose territory was close pressed by the sea on one side and by the race of Diarmid on the other. The McNatins were still more alarmed, once they had been the masters of those beautiful valleys through which the aura and the she-ra flow into Lough Finn, but the campels had prevailed. The McNatins had been reduced to subjection and had generation after generation looked up with awe and detestation to the neighbouring castle of Inverari. They had recently been promised a complete emancipation, a grant by virtue of which their chief would have held as a state immediately from the Crown, had been prepared, and was about to pass the seals, when the revolution suddenly extinguished a hope which amounted almost to certainty. The MacLanes remembered that, only fourteen years before, their lands had been invaded, and the seat of their chief taken and garrisoned by the campels. Even before William and Mary had been proclaimed at Edinburgh, a Maclean, deputed doubtless by the head of his tribe, had crossed the sea to Dublin, and had assured James that, if two or three battalions from Ireland were landed in Argyllishire, they would be immediately joined by four thousand four hundred claymores. A similar spirit animated the Cameroons. Their ruler, Sir Ewen Cameroon of Lowkeel, surnamed The Black, was in personal qualities unrivaled among the Celtic princes. He was a gracious master, a trusty ally, a terrible enemy. His countenance and bearing were singularly noble. Some persons who had been at Versailles, and among them the shrewd and observant Simon Lord Lovat, said that there was, in person and manner, a most striking resemblance between Louis XIV and Lowkeel, and whoever compares the portraits of the two will perceive that there really was some likeness. In stature the difference was great. Louis, in spite of his high heeled shoes and a towering wig, hardly reached the middle size. Lowkeel was tall and strongly built. In agility and skill at his weapons he had few equals among the inhabitants of the hills. He had repeatedly been victorious in single combat. He was a hunter of great fame. He made vigorous war on the wolves, which, down to his time, preyed on the red deer of the Grampians, and by his hand perished the last of the ferocious breed which is known to have wandered at large in our island. Nor was Lowkeel less distinguished by intellectual than by bodily vigor. He might indeed have seemed ignorant to educated and traveled Englishmen who had studied the classics under Busby at Westminster. Under Aldrick at Oxford, who had learned something about the sciences among the fellows of the Royal Society, and something about the fine arts in the galleries of Florence and Rome. But though Lowkeel had very little knowledge of books, he was eminently wise in counsel, eloquent in debate, ready in devising expedience, and skillful in managing the minds of men. His understanding preserved him from those follies into which pride and anger frequently hurried his brother Chieftains. Many therefore who regarded his brother Chieftains as mere barbarians mentioned him with respect. Even at the Dutch Embassy in St. James's Square, he was spoken of as a man of such capacity and courage that it would not be easy to find his equal. As a patron of literature, he ranks with a magnificent dorset. If dorset, out of his own purse, allowed Dryden a pension equal to the profits of the larchership, Lowkeel is said to have bestowed on a celebrated bard who had been plundered by marauders and who implored alms in pathetic Gaelic Ode three cows and the almost incredible sum of fifteen pound sterling. In truth, the character of this great chief was depicted two thousand five hundred years before his birth and depicted, such as the power of genius, in colors which will be fresh as many years after his death, he was the Ulysses of the Highlands. He held a large territory, people to buy a race which reverenced no Lord, no King, but himself. For that territory, however, he owed homage to the house of Argyle. He was bound to assist his feudal superiors and war and was deeply in debt to them for rent. This vassalage he had doubtless been early taught to consider as degrading and unjust. In his minority he had been the ward and chivalry of the politic Marquesse and had been educated at the castle of Inverari. But at eighteen the boy broke loose from the authority of his guardian and fought bravely, both for Charles I and for Charles II. He was therefore considered by the English as a cavalier, was well received at Whitehall after the restoration, and was knighted by the hand of James. The compliment, however, which was paid to him on one of his appearances at the English court, would not have seemed very flattering to a Saxon. Take care of your pockets, my lords, cried his Majesty. Here comes the King of the Thieves. The loyalty of L'Oquille is almost proverbial, but it was very unlike what would be called loyalty in England. In the records of the Scottish Parliament he was, in the days of Charles II, described as a lawless and rebellious man, who held lands masterfully and in high contempt of the royal authority. On one occasion the sheriff of Invernessshire was directed by King James to hold a court at L'Oquille. L'Oquille, jealous of this interference with his own patriarchal despotism, came to the tribunal at the head of four hundred armed Cameroons. He affected great reverence for the royal commission, but he dropped three or four words, which were perfectly understood by the pages and armor-bearers who watched every turn of his eye. Is none of my lads so clever as to send this judge packing? I have seen them get up a quarrel when there was less need of one. In a moment a brawl began in the crowd. None could say how or where. Hundreds of dirks were out. Cries of help and murder were raised on all sides. Many wounds were inflicted. Two men were killed. The sitting broke up in tumult, and the terrified sheriff was forced to put himself under the protection of the chief, who, with a plausible bow of respect and concern, escorted him safe home. It is amusing to think that the man who performed this feat is constantly extolled as the most faithful and dutiful subjects by riders who blame Somers and Burnett as contumners of the legitimate authority of sovereigns. Lockeel would undoubtedly have laughed the doctrine of non-resistance to scorn, but scarcely any chief in Invernessshire had gained more than he by the downfall of the house of Argyle, or had more reason than he to dread the restoration of that house. Scarcely any chief in Invernesshire, therefore, was more alarmed and disgusted by the proceedings of the convention. But of all those Highlanders who looked on the recent turn of fortune with painful apprehension, the fiercest and the most powerful were the McDonalds. More than one of the magnates who bore that widespread name laid claim to the honor of being the rightful successor of those lords of the Isles who, as late as the 15th century, disputed the preeminence of the kings of Scotland. This genealogical controversy, which has lasted down to our own time, caused much bickering among the competitors. But they all agreed in regretting the past splendor of their dynasty and in detesting the upstart race of Campbell. The old feud had never slumbered. It was still constantly repeated and versed prose that the finest part of the domain belonged to the ancient heads of the Gaelic nation, Hislay, where they had lived with the pomp of royalty, Iona, where they had been interned with the pomp of religion, the Papps of Jura, the rich peninsula of Kintyre, had been transferred from the legitimate possessors to the insatiable McCullum Moor. Since the downfall of the House of Argyle, the McDonald's, if they had not regained their ancient superiority, might at least boast that they had now no superior. Relieved from the fear of their mighty enemy in the West, they had turned their arms against weaker enemies in the East, against the clan of Macintosh and against the town of Invernus. End of Chapter 13, Part 7, History of England, Chapter 13, Part 8. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The History of England, from the Assession of James II, by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Chapter 13, Part 8. The clan of Macintosh, a branch of an ancient and renowned tribe, which took its name and badge from the wild cat of the forests, had a dispute with the McDonald's, which originated, if tradition may be believed, in those dark times when the Danish pirates wasted the coasts of Scotland. Invernus was a Saxon colony among the Celts. A hive of traders and artisans in the midst of a population of loungers and plunderers. A solitary outpost of civilization in a region of barbarians. Though the buildings covered but a small part of the space over which they now extend, though the arrival of a brig in the port was a rare event, though the exchange was the middle of a mirey street in which stood a market cross, much resembling a broken milestone, though the sittings of the municipal council were held in a filthy den with a roughcast wall, though the best houses were such as now would be called hovels, though the best roofs were of thatch, though the best ceilings were of bear rafters, though the best windows were in bad weather, closed with shutters for want of glass, though the humbler dwellings were mere heaps of turf, in which barrels with the bottoms knocked out served the purpose of chimneys, yet to the mountaineer of the Grampians, this city was as Babylon or as Tyre. Nowhere else had he seen four or five hundred houses, two churches, twelve maltkins crowded close together. Nowhere else had he been dazzled by the splendor of rows of booths, where knives, hornspoons, tin kettles, and gouty ribbons were exposed to sail. Nowhere else had he been on board of one of those huge ships which brought sugar and wine over the sea from countries far beyond the limits of his geography. It is not strange that the haughty and warlike McDonalds, despising peaceful industry, yet envying the fruits of that industry, should have fastened a secession of quarrels on the people of Inverness. In the reign of Charles II it had been apprehended that the town would be stormed and plundered by those rude neighbors. The terms of peace which they offered showed how little they regarded the authority of the prince and of the law. Their demands, that a heavy tribute should be paid to them, that the municipal magistrates should bind themselves by an oath to deliver tip to the vengeance of the clan, every burger who should shed the blood of a McDonald, and that every burger who should anywhere meet a person wearing the McDonald tartan should ground arms in token of submission. Never did Louis XIV, not even when he was encamped between Utrecht and Amsterdam, treat the state's general with such despotic insolence. By the intervention of the privy council of Scotland a compromise was effected, but the old animosity was undiminished. Common enmities and common apprehensions produced a good understanding between the town and the clan of the Macintosh. The foe most hated and dreaded by both was Colin MacDonald of Keppach, an excellent specimen of the genuine Highland Jacobite. Keppach's whole life had been passing and insulting and resisting the authority of the crown. He had been repeatedly charged on his allegiance to desist from his lawless practices, but had treated every admonition with contempt. The government, however, was not willing to resort to extremes against him, and he long continued to rule the stormy peaks of Coriarek and the gigantic terraces which still marked the limits of what was once the Lake of Glenroy. He was famed for his knowledge of all the ravines and caverns of that dreary region, and such was the skill with which he could track a herd of cattle to the most secret hiding place that he was known by the nickname of Call of the Cows. At length his outrageous violations of all law compelled the privy council to take decided steps. He was proclaimed a rebel, letters of fire and sword were issued against him under the seal of James, and, a few weeks before the revolution, a body of royal troops supported by the whole strength of the Macintoshes marched into Keppach's territories. He gave battle to the invaders and was victorious. The king's forces were put to flight, the king's captain was slain, and this by a hero whose loyalty to the king many writers have very complacently contrasted with the factious turbulence of the Whigs. If Keppach had ever stood in any awe of the government, he was completely relieved from that feeling by the general anarchy which followed the revolution. He wasted the lands of the Macintoshes, advanced to Invernus, and threatened the town with destruction. The danger was extreme. The houses were surrounded only by a wall which time and weather had so loosened that it shook in every storm. Yet the inhabitants showed a bold front, and their courage was stimulated by their preachers. Sunday the 28th of April was a day of alarm and confusion. The savages went round and round the small colony of Saxons like a troop of famished wolves round a sheepfold. Keppach threatened and blustered. He would come in with all his men. He would sack the place. The burgers meanwhile mustered in arms round the market cross to listen to the oratory of their ministers. The day closed without an assault. The Monday and the Tuesday passed away in intense anxiety, and then an unexpected mediator made his appearance. Dundee, after his flight from Edinburgh, had retired to his country's seat in that valley through which the glommies descends to the ancient castle of Macbeth. Here he remained quiet during some time. He protested that he had no intention of opposing the new government. He declared himself ready to return to Edinburgh if only he could be assured that he should be protected against lawless violence, and he offered to give his word of honour, or if that were not sufficient to give bail, that he would keep the peace. Some of his old soldiers had accompanied him, and formed a garrison sufficient to protect his house against the Presbyterians of the neighbourhood. Here he might possibly have remained unharmed and harmless, had not an event for which he was not answerable, made his enemies implacable, and made him desperate. An emissary of James had crossed from Ireland to Scotland, with letters addressed to Dundee and Balkoros. Suspicion was excited. The messenger was arrested, interrogated and searched, and the letters were found. Some of them proved to be from Melfort, and were worthy of him. Every line indicated those qualities which had made him the aberrance of his country and the favourite of his master. He announced with delight the near approach of the day of vengeance and repine, of the day when the estates of the seditious would be divided among the loyal, and when many who had been great and prosperous would be exiles and beggars. The king, Melfort said, was determined to be severe. Experience had at length convinced his majesty that mercy would be a weakness. Even the Jacobites were disgusted by learning that a restoration would be immediately followed by a confiscation and a proscription. Some of them did not hesitate to say that Melfort was a villain, that he hated Dundee and Balkoros, that he wished to ruin them, and that for that end he had written these odious dispatches, and had employed a messenger who had very dexterously managed to be caught. It is however quite certain that Melfort, after the publication of these papers, continued to stand as high as ever in the favour of James. It can therefore hardly be doubted that in those passages which shocked even the zealous supporters of hereditary right, the secretary merely expressed with fidelity the feelings and intentions of his master. Hamilton, by virtue of the powers which the estates had before their adjournment confined to him, ordered Balkoros and Dundee to be arrested. Balkoros was taken and confined, first in his own house, and then in the toll booth of Edinburgh. But to seize Dundee was not so easy an enterprise. As soon as he heard that warrants were out against him, he crossed the D with his followers, and remained a short time in the wild domains of the House of Gordon. There he held some communications with the McDonalds and Cameroons about arising, but he seems at this time to have known little and cared little about the Highlanders. Further national character he probably felt the dislike of a Saxon, for their military character, the contempt of a professional soldier. He soon returned to the Lowlands and stayed there till he learned that a considerable body of troops had been sent to apprehend him. He then betook himself to the hill country as his last refuge, pushed northward through Strathdon and Strathbogie, crossed the Spay, and on the morning of the 1st of May arrived with a small band of forcemen at the camp of Kepok before Invernus. The new situation in which Dundee was now placed, the new view of society which was presented to him, naturally suggested new projects to his inventive and enterprising spirit. The hundreds of athletic Celts whom he saw in their national order of battle were evidently not allies to be despised. If he could form a great coalition of clans, if he could muster under one banner, ten or twelve thousand of those hardy warriors, if he could induce them to submit to their restraints of discipline, what a career might be before him. A commission from King James, even when King James was securely seated on the throne, had never been regarded with much respect by call of the cows. That chief, however, hated the campbells with all the hatred of a McDonald, and probably gave an his adhesion to the cause of the House of Stuart. Dundee undertook to settle the dispute between Kepok and Invernus. The town agreed to pay two thousand dollars, a sum which, small as it might be in the estimation of the gold smiths of Lombard Street, probably exceeded any treasure that had ever been carried into the wilds of Coryaric. Half the sum was raised, not without difficulty, by the inhabitants, and Dundee is said to have passed his word for the remainder. He next tried to reconcile the McDonalds with the Macintoshes and flattered himself that the two warlike tribes, lately arrayed against each other, might be willing to fight side by side under his command. But he soon found that it was no like matter to take up a Highland feud. About the rights of the contending kings, neither clan knew anything or cared anything. The conduct of both is to be ascribed to local passions and interests. What Argyle was to Kepok, Kepok was to the Macintoshes. The Macintoshes therefore remained neutral, and their example was followed by the McPherson's, another branch of the race of the wild cat. This was not Dundee's only disappointment. The Macintoshes, the Frazieres, the Grants, the Monroees, the Mackays, the Macleodes, dwelt at a great distance from the territory of McCullomore. They had no dispute with him, they owed no debt to him, and they had no reason to dread the increase of his power. They therefore did not sympathize with his alarmed and exasperated neighbors, and could not be induced to join the Confederacy against him. Those chiefs, on the other hand, who lived nearer to Inverari, and to whom the name of Campbell had long been terrible and hateful, greeted Dundee eagerly, and promised to meet him at the head of their followers on the eighteenth of May. During the fortnight, which proceeded that day, he traversed Badinok and Athol, and exhorted the inhabitants of those districts to rise in arms. He dashed into the lowlands with his horsemen, surprised Perth, and carried off some with gentleman prisoners to the mountains. Meanwhile the fiery crosses had been wandering from Hamlet to Hamlet over all the heaths and mountains thirty miles round Bennevis, and when he reached the tristing place in Lockaber, he found that the gathering had begun. The headquarters were fixed close to Lokeel's house, a large pile built entirely of fur wood, and considered in the highlands as a superb place. Lokeel, surrounded by more than six hundred broadsorts, was there to receive his guests. Magnatin of Magnatin and Stuart of Appin were at the muster with their little clans. McDonald of Kapok led the warriors, who had, a few months before, under his command, put to flight the musketeers of King James. McDonald of Glenrenald was of tender years, but he was brought to the camp by his uncle, who acted at regent during the minority. The youth was attended by a picked bodyguard composed of his cousins, all comely in appearance, and good men of their hands. McDonald of Glengar, conspicuous by his dark brow and his lofty stature, came from the great valley where a chain of lakes, then unknown to fame, and scarcely set down in maps, is now the daily highway of steam vessels, pushing and reprising between the Atlantic and the German Ocean. None of the rulers of the mountains had a higher sense of his personal dignity, or was more frequently engaged in disputes with other chiefs. He generally affected, in his manners and in his housekeeping, a rudeness beyond that of his rude neighbors, and professed to regard the very few luxuries which had then found their way from the civilized parts of the world into the highlands as a sign of the effeminacity and degeneracy of the Gaelic race. But on this occasion he chose to imitate the splendor of Saxon warriors, and rode on horseback before his 400 plated clansmen in a steel carass and a coat embroidered with gold lace. Another McDonald, destined to a lamentable and horrible end, led a band of hardy free-booters from the dreary pass of Glencoe. Somewhat later came the great Hebrideen potentates. McDonald of Sleet, the most opulent and powerful of all the grandees who laid claim to the lofty title of Lord of the Isles, arrived at the head of 700 fighting men from Skye. A fleet of long boats brought 500 McClanes from Mole under the command of their chief, Sir John of Duarte. A far more formidable array had in old times followed his forefathers to battle. But the power, though not the spirit of the clan, had been broken by the arts and arms of the campbells. Another band of McClanes arrived under a valiant leader who took his title from Lockby, which is being interpreted, the Yellow Lake. It does not appear that a single chief who had not some special cause to dread and to test the house of Argyle obeyed Dundee's summons. There is indeed strong reason to believe that the chiefs who came would have remained quietly at home if the government had understood the politics of the Highlands. Those politics were thoroughly understood by one able and experienced statesman sprung from the Great Highland family of Mackenzie, the Viscount Tarbet. He, at this conjuncture, pointed out to Melville by letter and to Mackay in conversation both the cause and the remedy of the distemperous, which seemed likely to bring on Scotland the calamities of civil war. There was, Tarbet said, no general disposition to insurrection among the Gaol. Little was to be apprehended, even from those Popish clans, which were under no apprehension of being subjected to the yoke of the campbells. It was notorious that the ableist and most active of the discontented chiefs troubled themselves not at all about the question which were in dispute between the Whigs and the Tories. Lowkeel in particular, whose eminent personal qualities made him the most important man among the Mountaineers, cared no more for James than for William. If the Cameroons, the McDonalds, and the McClanes could be convinced that under the new government their estates and their dignities would be safe, if McCollum Moore would make some concessions, if their majesties would take on themselves the payment of some arrears of rent, Dundee might call the clans to arms, but he would call to little purpose. Five thousand pounds, Tarbet thought, would be sufficient to quiet all the Celtic magnates. And in truth, though that some might seem ludicrously small to the politicians of Westminster, though it was not larger than the annual gains of the Groom of the Stoll, or of the payment of the forces, it might well be thought immense by a barbarous potentate, who, while he ruled hundreds of square miles, and could bring hundreds of warriors into the field, had perhaps never had fifty guineas at once in his coffers. Though Tarbet was considered by the Scottish ministers of the new sovereigns as a very doubtful friend, his advice was not altogether neglected. It was resolved that overtures, such as he recommended, should be made to the malcontents. Much depended on the choice of an agent, and unfortunately the choice showed how little prejudices of the wild tribes of the hills were understood at Edinburgh. A campbell was selected for the office of gaining over to the cause of King William, men whose only quarrel to King William was that he countenanced the campbells. Offers made through such a channel were naturally regarded as at once snares and insults. After this it was to no purpose that Tarbet wrote to Lowkeel and McKay to Glengari. Lowkeel returned no answer to Tarbet, and Glengari returned to McKay, a coldly civil answer, in which the general was advised to imitate the example of monk. McKay, meanwhile, wasted some weeks in marching, in counter-marching, and in indecisive skirmishing. He afterwards, honestly admitted that the knowledge which he had acquired during thirty years of military service on the continent was in the new situation in which he was placed useless to him. It was difficult in such a country to track the enemy. It was impossible to drive him to bay. Food for an invading army was not to be found in the wilderness of Heath and Shingle, nor could supplies for many days be transported far over quaking bogs and up precipitous ascents. The general found that he had tired his men and their horses almost to death, and yet had affected nothing. Highland auxiliaries might have been of the greatest use to him, but he had few such auxiliaries. The chief of the grants indeed, who had been persecuted by the late government, and had been accused of conspiring with the unfortunate Earl of Argyle, was zealous on the side of the revolution. 200 McKays, animated probably by family feeling, came from the northern extremity of our island, where at midsummer there is no night to fight under a commander of their own name. But in general, the clans, which took no part in the insurrection, awaited the event with cold indifference, and pleased themselves with the hope that they should easily make their peace with the conquerors, and be permitted to assist in plundering the concurred. An experience of little more than a month satisfied McKay that there was only one way in which the Highlands could be subdued. It was idle to run after the mountaineers up and down their mountains. A chain of fortresses must be built in the most important situations, and must be well garrisoned. The place with which the general proposed to begin was in Verlaki, where the huge remains of an ancient castle stood and still stand. This post was close to an arm of the sea, and was in the heart of the country occupied by the discontented clans. A strong forestation there, and supported if necessary by ships of war, would effectually override once the McDonalds, the Cameroons, and the McClanes. While McKay was representing in his letters to the council at Edinburgh the necessity of adopting this plan, Dundee was contending with difficulties, which all his energy and dexterity could not completely overcome. The Highlanders, while they continued to be a nation living under a peculiar polity, were in one sense better, and in another sense worse fitted for military purposes than any other nation in Europe. The individual self was morally and physically well qualified for war, and especially for war in so wild and rugged a country as his own. He was intrepid, strong, fleet, patient of cold, of hunger, and of fatigue. Up steep crags, and over treacherous morasses, he moved as easily as the French household troops paced along the Great Road from Versailles to Marlis. He was accustomed to the use of weapons and to the sight of blood. He was a fencer, he was a marksman, and before he had ever stood in the ranks he was already more than half a soldier. END OF CHAPTER XIII. PART IX As the individual kelt was easily turned into a soldier, so a tribe of keltz was easily turned into a battalion of soldiers. All that was necessary was that the military organization should be conformed to the patriarchal organization. The chief must be Colonel, his uncle or brother must be Major. The taxman, who formed what may be called the peerage of the little community, must be the captains. The company of each captain must consist of those peasants who lived on his land, and whose names, faces, connections, and characters were perfectly known to him. The subaltern officers must be selected among the dune vassals, proud of the eagle's feather. The henchmen was an excellent orderly. The hereditary piper and his sons formed the band, and the clan became at once a regiment. In such a regiment was found from the first moment that exact order and prompt obedience in which the strength of regular armies consists. Every man, from highest to lowest, was in his proper place, and knew that place perfectly. It was not necessary to impress by threats or punishment on the newly enlisted troops the duty of regarding as their head, him whom they had regarded as their head ever since they could remember anything. Every private had, from infancy, respected his corporal much and his captain more, and had almost adored his colonel. There was therefore no danger of mutiny. There was as little danger of desertion. Indeed, the very feelings which most powerfully impel other soldiers to desert kept the Highlander to his standard. If he left it, wither was he to go. All his kinsmen, all his friends, were arrayed round it. To separate himself from it was to separate himself forever from his family, and to incur all the misery of that very home sickness which, in regular armies, drives so many recruits to abscond at the risk of stripes and of death. When these things are fairly considered it will not be thought strange that the Highland clans should have occasionally achieved great martial exploits. But those very institutions which made a tribe of Highlanders, all bearing the same name, and all subject to the same ruler, so formidable in battle, disqualified the nation for war on a large scale. Nothing was easier than to turn clans into efficient regiments, but nothing was more difficult than to combine these regiments in such a manner as to form an efficient army. From the shepherds and herdsmen who fought in the ranks up to the chiefs, all was harmony and order. Every man looked up to his immediate superior, and all looked up to the common head. But with the chief this chain of subordination ended. He knew only how to govern and had never learned to obey. Even to royal proclamation, even to acts of parliament, he was accustomed to yield obedience only when they were in perfect accordance with his own inclinations. It was not to be expected that he would pay to any delegated authority or respect which he was in the habit of refusing to the supreme authority. He thought himself entitled to judge of the propriety of every order which he received. Of his brother chiefs some were his enemies and some his rivals. It was hardly possible to keep him from affronting them or to convince him that they were not affronting him. All his followers sympathized with all his animosities, considered his honor as their own, and were ready at his whistle to array themselves round him in arms against the commander-in-chief. There was therefore very little chance that by any contrivance any five clans could be induced to cooperate heartily with one another during a long campaign. The best chance, however, was when they were led by a Saxon. It is remarkable that none of the great actions performed by the Highlanders during our civil wars was performed under the command of a Highlander. Some writers have mentioned it as a proof of the extraordinary genius of mantros and dundee that those captains, though not themselves of Gaelic race or speech, should have been able to form and direct confederacies of Gaelic tribes. But in truth it was precisely because mantros and dundee were not Highlanders that they were able to lead armies composed of Highland clans. Had mantros been chief of the Camerons the McDonald's would never have submitted to his authority. Had dundee been chief of Clan Ronald he would never have been obeyed by Glangari. Haudy and punctilious men, who scarcely acknowledged the king to be their superior, would not have endured the superiority of a neighbor and equal a competitor. They could far more easily bear the preeminence of a distinguished stranger, yet even to such a stranger they would allow only a very limited and very precarious authority. To bring a chief before a court-martial, to shoot him, to cashier him, to degrade him, to reprimand him publicly was impossible. McDonald of Kepwick or McLean of Duart would have struck dead any officer who had demanded his sword and told him to consider himself as under arrest, and hundreds of Claymores would instantly have been drawn to protect the murderer. All that was left to the commander under whom these potentates condescended to serve was to argue with them, to supplicate them, to flatter them, to bribe them, and it was only during a short time that any human skill could preserve harmony by these means. For every chief thought himself entitled to peculiar observance, and it was therefore impossible to pay marked court to any one without disobliging the rest. The general found himself merely the president of a Congress of Petty Kings. He was perpetually called upon to hear and to compose disputes about pedigrees, about precedents, about the division of spoil. His decision, be it what it might, must offend somebody. At any moment he might hear that his right wing had fired on his center in pursuance of some quarrel two hundred years old, or that a whole battalion had marched back to its native Glen, because another battalion had been put in the post of honor. A Highland Bard might easily have found in the history of the year 1689 subjects very similar to those with which the War of Troy furnished the great poets of antiquity. One day Achilles is sullen, keeps to his tent, and announces his intention to depart with all his men. The next day Ajax is storming about the camp and threatening to cut the throat of Ulysses. Hence it was that, though the Highlanders achieved some great exploits in the civil wars of the seventeenth century, those exploits left no trace which could be discerned after the lapse of a few weeks. Victories of strange and almost pretentious splendor produced all the consequences of defeat. Veteran soldiers and statesmen were bewildered by those sudden turns of fortune. It was incredible that undisciplined men should have performed such feats of arms. It was incredible that such feats of arms, having been performed, should be immediately followed by the triumph of the conquered and the submission of the conquerors. Montrose, having passed rapidly from victory to victory, was in the full career of success suddenly abandoned by his followers. Local jealousies and local interests had brought his army together. Local jealousies and local interests dissolved it. The Gordons left him because they fancied that he neglected them for the McDonalds. The McDonalds left him because they wanted to plunder the Campbells. The force which had once seemed sufficient to decide the fate of a kingdom melted away in a few days, and the victories of Tippermure and Kilsith were followed by the disaster of Philippe Hall. Dundee did not live long enough to experience a similar reversal of fortune, but there is every reason to believe that, had his life been prolonged one fortnight, his history would have been the history of Montrose retold. Dundee made one attempt, soon after the gathering of the clans in Lockaber, to induce them to submit to the discipline of a regular army. He called a council of war to consider this question. His opinion was supported by all the officers who had joined him from the Low Country. Distinguished among them were James Seton, Earl of Dunferline, and James Galloway, Lord Dunkeld. The Celtic chiefs took the other side. Lockeel, the ablest among them, was their spokesman, and argued the point with much ingenuity and natural eloquence. Our system, such was the substance of his reasoning, may not be the best, but we were bred to it from childhood, we understand it perfectly, it is suited to our peculiar institutions, feelings, and manners. Making war after our own fashion, we have the expertness and coolness of veterans. Making war in any other way, we shall be raw and awkward recruits. To turn us into soldiers like those of Cromwell and Turin would be the business of years, and we have not even weeks to spare. We have time enough to unlearn our own discipline, but not time enough to learn yours. Dundee, with high compliments to Lockeel, declared himself convinced, and perhaps was convinced, for the reasonings of the wise old chief were by no means without weight. Yet some Celtic usages of war were such as Dundee could not tolerate. Cruel as he was, his cruelty always had a method and a purpose. He still hoped that he might be able to win some chiefs who remained neutral, and he carefully avoided every act which could goad them into open hostility. This was, undoubtedly, a policy likely to promote the interest of James, but the interest of James was nothing to the wild marauders who used his name and rallied round his banner merely for the purpose of making profitable forays and reeking old grudges. Kepak especially, who hated the Macintoshes much more than he loved the stewards, not only plundered the territory of his enemies, but burned whatever he could not carry away. Dundee was moved to great wrath by the sight of the blazing dwellings. I would rather, he said, carry a musket in a respectable regiment than be captain of such a gang of thieves. Punishment was, of course, out of the question. Indeed it may be considered, as a remarkable proof of the general's influence, that the call of the cows deigned to apologize for conduct for which in a well-governed army he would have been shot. As the grants were in arms for King William, their property was considered a fair prize. Their territory was invaded by a party of Camerons, a skirmish took place, some blood was shed, and many cattle were carried off to Dundee's camp, where provisions were greatly needed. This raid produced a quarrel, the history of which illustrates, in the most striking manner the character of a Highland army. Among those who were slain in resisting the Camerons was a McDonald of the Glengarry branch, who had long resided among the grants, had become in feelings and opinions a grant, and had absented himself from the muster of his tribe. Though he had been guilty of a high offense against the Gaelic Code of Honor and morality, his kinsmen remembered the sacred tie which he had forgotten. Good or bad, he was bone of their bone, he was flesh of their flesh, and he should have been reserved for their justice. The name which he bore, the blood of the lords of the Isles, should have been his protection. Glengarry, in a rage, went to Dundee and demanded vengeance on Lockeel and the whole race of Cameron. Dundee replied that the unfortunate gentleman who had fallen was a traitor to the clan as well as to the king. Was it ever heard of in war that the person of an enemy, a combatant in arms, was to be held inviolable on account of his name and descent? And even if wrong had been done, how was it to be redressed? Half the army must slaughter the other half before a finger could be laid on Lockeel. Glengarry went away raging like a madman. Since his complaints were disregarded by those who ought to write him, he would write himself. He would draw out his men and fall sword in hand on the murderers of his cousin. During some time he would listen to no expostulation. When he was reminded that Lockeel's followers were in number nearly double of the Glengarry men, no matter he cried, one McDonald is worth two Camerons. Since Lockeel been equally irritable and boastful, it is probable that the Highland insurrection would have given little more trouble to the government, and that the rebels would have perished obscurely in the wilderness by one another's claymores. But nature had bestowed on him enlarge-method the qualities of a statesman, though fortune had hidden those qualities in an obscure corner of the world. He saw that this was not a time for brawling. His own character for courage had long been established, and his temper was under strict government. The fury of Glengarry not being inflamed by any fresh provocation rapidly abated. Indeed there were some who suspected that he had never been quite so pugnacious as he had effected to be, and that his bluster was meant only to keep up his own dignity in the eyes of his retainers. However this might be the quarrel was composed and the two chiefs met with the outward show of civility at the general's table. Dundee saw if his Celtic allies must have made him desirous to have in his army some troops on whose obedience he could depend, and who would not, at a signal from their colonel, turn their arms against their general and their king. He, accordingly, during the months of May and June, sent to Dublin a succession of letters earnestly imploring assistance. If six thousand, four thousand, three thousand, regular soldiers were now sent to Lackabur, he trusted that his majesty would soon hold a court in Holyrood. That such a force might be spared hardly admitted of a doubt. The authority of James was at that time acknowledged in every part of Ireland except on the shores of Lackarna and behind the ramparts of Londonderry. He had in that kingdom an army of forty thousand men. An eighth part of such an army would scarcely be missed, and might, united with the clans which were in insurrection, effect great things in Scotland. Dundee received such answers to his applications as encouraged him to hope that a large and well-appointed force would soon be sent from Ulster to join him. He did not wish to try the chance of battle before these suckers arrived. McKay, on the other hand, was weary of marching to and fro in a desert. His men were exhausted and out of heart. He thought it desirable that they should withdraw from the hill-country and William was of the same opinion. In June, therefore, the civil war was, as if by concert between the generals, completely suspended. Dundee remained in Lackabur, impatiently awaiting the arrival of troops and supplies from Ireland. It was impossible for him to keep his Highlanders together in a state of inactivity. A vast extent of moor and mountain was required to furnish food for so many months. The clans, therefore, went back to their own glens, having promised to reassemble on the first summons. Meanwhile, McKay's soldiers, exhausted by severe exertions and privations, were taking their ease and quarters scattered over the low country from Aberdeen to Stirling. McKay himself was at Edinburgh and was urging the ministers there to furnish him with the means of constructing a chain of fortifications among the Grampians. The ministers had, it should seem, miscalculated their military resources. It had been expected that the Campbells would take the field in such a force as would balance the whole strength of the clans which marched under Dundee. It had also been expected that the covenanters of the West would hasten to swell the ranks of the army of King William. Both expectations were disappointed. Argyle had found his principality devastated and his tribe disarmed and disorganized. A considerable time must elapse before his standard would be surrounded by an array such as his forefathers had led to battle. The covenanters of the West were in general unwilling to enlist. They were assuredly not wanting in courage and they hated Dundee with deadly hatred. In their part of the country the memory of his cruelty was still fresh. Every village had its own tale of blood. The gray-headed father was missed in one dwelling, the hopeful stripling in another. It was remembered but too well how the dragoons had stalked into the peasant's cottage, cursing and damning him, themselves and each other at every second word, pushing from the inglenook his grandmother of eighty and thrusting their hands into the bosom of his daughter of sixteen. How the abjuration had been tender to him, how he had folded his arms and said, God's will be done, how the colonel had called for a file with loaded muskets, and how in three minutes the good man of the house had been wallowing in a pool of blood at his own door. The seat of the martyr was still vacant at the fireside, and every child could point out his grave still green amidst the heath. When the people of this region called their oppressor a servant of the devil they were not speaking figuratively. They believed that between the bad man and the bad angel there was a close alliance on definite terms that Dundee had bound himself to do the work of hell on earth and that for high purposes hell was permitted to protect its slate till the measure of his guilt should be full. But intensely as these men implored Dundee most of them had a scruple about drawing the sword for William. A great meeting was held in the parish church of Douglas, and the question was propounded whether at a time when war was in the land and when an Irish invasion was expected it were not a duty to take arms. The debate was sharp and tumultuous. The orators on one side adjured their brethren not to incur the curse denounced against the inhabitants of Meroz, who came not to the help of the Lord against the mighty. The orators on the other side thundered against sinful associations. There were malignants in William's army, Mackay's own orthodoxy was problematical, to take military service with such comrades and under such a general would be a sinful association. At length after much wrangling and amidst great confusion a vote was taken, and the majority pronounced that to take military service would be a sinful association. There was, however, a large minority, and from among the members of this minority the Earl of Angus was able to raise a body of infantry, which is still after the lapse of more than a hundred and sixty years known by the name of the Cameroonian Regiment. The first Lieutenant Colonel was Cleland, that implacable Avenger of Blood who had driven Dundee from the Convention. There was no small difficulty in filling the ranks, for many West Country wigs, who did not think it absolutely sinful to enlist, stood out for terms subversive of all military discipline. Some would not serve under any Colonel, Major, Captain, Sergeant, or Corporal who was not ready to sign the Covenant. Others insisted that, if it should be found absolutely necessary to appoint any officer who had taken the tests imposed in the late rain, he should at least qualify himself for command by publicly confessing his sin at the head of the Regiment. Most of the enthusiasts who had proposed these conditions were induced by dexterous management to abate much of their demands. Yet the new Regiment had a very peculiar character. The soldiers were all rigid Puritans. One of their first acts was to petition the Parliament that all drunkenness, licentiousness, and profaneness might be severely punished. Their own conduct must have been exemplary, for the worst crime which the most extravagant bigotry could impute to them was that of hazzang on the King's birthday. It was originally intended that with the military organization of the Corps should be interwoven the organization of a Presbyterian congregation. Each company was to furnish an elder, and the elders were with the chaplain to form an ecclesiastical court for the suppression of immorality and heresy. Elders, however, were not appointed, but a noted hill preacher, Alexander Shields, was called to the office of chaplain. It is not easy to conceive that fanaticism can be heeded to a higher temperature than that which is indicated by the writings of Shields. According to him it should seem to be the first duty of a Christian ruler to persecute to the death every heterodox subject, and the first duty of every Christian subject to poignard a heterodox ruler. Yet there was then in Scotland an enthusiasm compared with which the enthusiasm even of this man was lukewarm. The extreme covenanters protested against his defection as vehemently as he had protested against the black indulgence and the oath of supremacy, and pronounced every man who entered Angus's regiment guilty of wicked confederacy with malignance. Meanwhile Edinburgh Castle had fallen, after holding out more than two months. Both the defense and the attack had been languidly conducted. The Duke of Gordon, unwilling to incur the mortal hatred of those at whose mercy his lands and life might soon be, did not choose to batter the city. The assailants, on the other hand, carried on their operations with so little energy and so little vigilance that a constant communication was kept up between the Jacobites within the Citadel and the Jacobites without. Strange stories were told of the polite and facetious messages which passed between the besieged and the besiegers. On one occasion Gordon sent to inform the magistrates that he was going to fire a salute on account of some news which he had received from Ireland, but that the good town need not be alarmed for that his guns would not be loaded with ball. On another occasion, his drums beat a parley, the white flag was hung out, a conference took place, and he gravely informed the enemy that all his cards had been thumbed to pieces, and begged them to let him have a few more packs. His friends established a telegraph by means of which they conversed with him across the lines of sentinels. From a window in the top story of one of the loftiest of those gigantic houses, a few of which still darkened the high street, a white cloth was hung out when all was well, and a black cloth when things went ill. If it was necessary to give more detailed information, a board was held up, inscribed with capital letters so large that they could, by the help of a telescope, be read on the ramparts of the castle. Agents laden with letters and fresh provisions managed, in various disguises and by various shifts, to cross the sheet of water which then lay on the north of the fortress and to clamor up the precipitous ascent. The peel of a musket from a particular half-moon was the signal which announced to the friends of the House of Stuart that another of their emissaries had got safe up the rock. But at length the supplies were exhausted and it was necessary to capitulate. Favorable terms were readily granted, the garrison marched out and the keys were delivered up amidst the acclamations of a great multitude of burgers. But the government had far more acrimonious and more pertenacious enemies in the Parliament House than in the castle. When the estates reassembled after their adjournment, the crown and scepter of Scotland were displayed with the wanton pomp in the hall as types of the absent sovereign. Hamilton rode in state from Holy Road up the high street as Lord High Commissioner, and Crawford took his seat as president. Two acts, one turning the convention into a Parliament, the other recognizing William and Mary as king and queen, were rapidly passed and touched with the scepter, and then the conflict of factions began. It speedily appeared that the opposition, which Montgomery had organized, was irresistibly strong. Though made up of many conflicting elements, Republicans, Whigs, Tories, zealous Presbyterians, bigoted preletists, it acted for a time as one man, and drew to itself a multitude of those mean and timid politicians who naturally gravitate towards the stronger party. The friends of the government were few and disunited. Hamilton brought but half a heart to the discharge of his duties. He had always been unstable, and now he was discontented. He held, indeed, the highest place to which a subject could aspire. But he imagined that he had only the show of power while others enjoyed the substance, and was not sorry to see those of whom he was jealous thwarted and annoyed. He did not absolutely betray the prince whom he represented, but he sometimes tampered with the chiefs of the club, and sometimes did sly in turn to those who were joined with him in the service of the crown. His instructions directed him to give the royal assent to laws for the mitigating or removal of numerous grievances, and particularly to a law restricting the power and reforming the constitution of the committee of articles, and to a law establishing the Presbyterian Church government. But it mattered not what his instructions were. The chiefs of the club were bent on finding a cause of quarrel. The propositions of the government touching the lords of the articles were contemptuously rejected. Hamilton wrote to London for fresh directions, and soon a second plan, which left little more than the name of the once despotic committee, was sent back. But the second plan, though such as would have contended judicious and temperate reformers, shared the fate of the first. Meanwhile the chiefs of the club laid on the table a law which interdicted the king from ever employing in any public office any person who had ever borne any part in any proceeding inconsistent with the claim of right, or who had ever obstructed or retarded any good design of the estates. This law, uniting within a very short compass almost all the faults which a law can have, was well known to be aimed at the new Lord President of the Court of Session and that his son, the new Lord Advocate. Their prosperity and power made them objects of envy to every disappointed candidate for office. That they were new men, the first of their race who had risen to distinction, and that nevertheless they had, by the mere force of ability, become as important in the state as the Duke of Hamilton or the Duke of Argyle, was a thought which galled the hearts of many needy and haughty patricians. To the wigs of Scotland the Dalrymples were what Halifax and Carmarthen were to the wigs of England. Neither the exile of Sir James nor the zeal with which Sir John had promoted the revolution was received as an atonement for old delinquency. They had both served the bloody and idolatrous house. They had both oppressed the people of God. Their late repentance might perhaps give them a fair claim to pardon, but surely gave them no right to honors and rewards. HISTORY OF INGLAND THE FRIENDS OF THE GOVERNMENT IN VAIN ATTEMPTED TO DIVERT THE ATTENTION OF THE PARLAMENT FROM THE BUSINESS OF PERSECUTING THE Dalrymple FAMILY TO THE IMPORTANT AND PRESSING QUESTION OF CHURCH GOVERNMENT. THEY SAID THAT THE OLD SYSTEM HAD BEEN ABOLISHED, THAT NO OTHER SYSTEM HAD BEEN SUBSTITUTED, THAT IT WASN'T POSSIBLE TO SAY WHAT WAS THE ESTABLISHED RELIGION OF THE KINGDOM, AND THAT THE FIRST DOOTY OF THE LEGISLATURE WAS TO PUT AN END TO AN ANARCHY WHICH WAS DAILY PRODUCING DISASTERS AND CRIMES. THE LEADERS OF THE CLUB WERE NOT TO BE SO DROWN AWAY FROM THEIR OBJECT. IT WAS MOVED AND RESOLVED THAT THE CONSIDERATION OF ECLEASEASTICAL AFFAIRS SHOULD BE POSTPONED TIL SECULAR AFFAIRS HAD BEEN SETTLED. THE UNJUST AND ABSURD ACT OF INCAPACITATION WAS CAREED BY 74 VOICES TO 24. ANOTHER VOTE STILL MORE OBVIOUSLY AIMED AT THE HOUSE OF STARE SPEEDLY FOLLOWED. THE PARLAMENT LAID CLAIMED TO A VITO ON THE NOMINATION OF THE JUDGEES AND ASSUMED THE POWER OF STOPPING THE SIGNET, IN OTHER WORDS OF SUSPENDING THE WHOLE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE, TIL THIS CLAIM SHOULD BE ALLOWED. IT WAS PLANE FROM WHAT PASSED IN DEBATE, THAT THOUGH THE CHIEF'S OF THE CLUB HAD BEGUNED WITH THE CORD OF SESSION, THEY DID NOT MEAN TO END THERE. THE ARGUMENTS USED BY SIR PATRICK HUME AND OTHERS LEAD DIRECTLY TO THE CONCLUSION THAT THE KING Aught NOT TO HAVE THE APPOINTMENT OF ANY GREAT PUBLIC FUNCTIONARY. Sir Patrick indeed avowed, both in speech and in writing, his opinion that the whole patronage of the realm ought to be transferred from the crown to the estates, when the place of treasurer, of chancellor, of secretary was vacant, the parliament ought to submit two or three names to his majesty, and one of those names his majesty ought to be bound to select. All this time the estates obstinately refused to grant any supply till their acts should have been touched with the scepter. The Lord High Commissioner was at length so much provoked by their perverseness that, after long temporizing, he refused to touch even acts which were in themselves unobjectionable, and to which his instructions empowered him to consent. The state of things would have ended in some great convulsion if the king of Scotland had not been also king of a much greater and more opulent kingdom. Charles I had never found any parliament at Westminster more unmanageable than William during the session found the parliament at Edinburgh, but it was not in the power of the parliament at Edinburgh to put on William such a pressure as the parliament at Westminster had put on Charles. A refusal of supplies at Westminster was a serious thing, and left the sovereign no choice except to yield or to raise money by unconstitutional means. But a refusal of supplies at Edinburgh reduced him to no such dilemma. The largest sum that he could hope to receive from Scotland in a year was less than what he received from England every fortnight. He had therefore only to entrench himself within the limits of his undoubted prerogative, and there to remain on the defensive till some favourable conjuncture should arrive. While these things were passing in the parliament house, the civil war in the Highlands, having been during a few weeks suspended, broke forth again more violently than before. Since the splendour of the house of Argyle had been eclipsed, no Gaelic chief could vie in power with the Marques of Athol. The district from which he took his title, and of which he might almost be called the sovereign, was in extent larger than an ordinary county, and was more fertile, more diligently cultivated, and more thickly peopled than the greater part of the Highlands. The men who followed his banner were supposed to be not less numerous than all the McDonald's and McClain's united, and were in strength and courage inferior to no tribe in the mountains, but the clan had been made insignificant by the insignificance of the chief. The Marques was the falsest, the most fickle, the most pusillanimous of mankind. Already in a short space of six months he had been several times a Jacobite, and several times a Williamite. Both Jacobites and Williamites regarded him with contempt and distrust, which respect for his immense power prevented them from fully expressing. After repeatedly vowing fidelity to both parties, and repeatedly betraying both, he began to think that he should best provide for his safety by abdicating the functions both of a pier and of a chieftain, by absenting himself both from the Parliament House at Edinburgh and from his castle in the mountains, and by quitting the country to which he was bound by every tie of duty and honour at the very crisis of her fate. While all Scotland was waiting with impatience and anxiety to see in which army his numerous retainers would be arrayed, he stole a way to England, settled himself at Bath, and pretended to drink the waters. His principality, left without a head, was divided against itself. The general leaning of the Othelmen was towards King James, for they had been employed by him only four years before, as the ministers of his vengeance against the House of Argyle. They had garrisoned in Varari, they had ravaged Lorne, they had demolished houses, cut down fruit trees, burned fishing boats, broken millstones, hanged campbells, and were therefore not likely to be pleased by the prospect of McCollum Moore's restoration. One word from the Marquesse would have sent two thousand claymores to the Jacobite side, but that word he would not speak, and the consequence was that the conduct of his followers was as irresolute and inconsistent as his own. While they were waiting for some indication of his wishes, they were called to arms at once by two leaders, either of whom might, with some show of reason, claim to be considered as a representative of the absent chief. Lord Murray, the Marquesse's eldest son, who was married to a daughter of the Duke of Hamilton, declared for King William. Stuart of Ballanac, the Marquesse's confidential agent, declared for King James. The people knew not which summons to obey. He, whose authority would have been held in profound reverence, had plighted faith to both sides, and had then run away for fear of being under the necessity of joining either. Nor was it very easy to say whether the place which he left vacant belonged to his steward or to his heir apparent. The most important military post in Othell was Blair Castle. The house which now bears that name is not distinguished by any striking peculiarity from other country seats of the aristocracy. The old building was a lofty tower of rude architecture which commanded a veil watered by the gari. The wall would have offered very little resistance to a battering train, but were quite strong enough to keep the herdsmen of the Grampians in awe. About five miles south of this stronghold, the valley of the gari contracts itself into the celebrated glen of Kilokranky. At present a highway as smooth as any road in Middlesex ascends gently from the low country to the summit of the defile. White villa's peep from the birch forest, and on a fine summer day there is scarcely a turn of the pass at which may not be seen some angler casting his fly on the foam of the river, some artist sketching a pinnacle of rock, or some party of pleasure banqueting on the turf in the fretwork of shade and sunshine. But in the days of William III Kilokranky was mentioned with horror by the peaceful and industrious inhabitants of the Perthshire Lowlands. It was deemed the most perilous of all those dark ravines through which the marauders of the hills were want to sally forth. The sound so musical to modern ears of the river brawling round the mossy rocks and among the smooth pebbles, the dark masses of crag and verger worthy of the pencil of Wilson, the fantastic peaks bathed at sunrise and sunset, with rich light as that which glows on the canvas of clawed, suggested to our ancestors thoughts of murderous ambiscades and of body stripped, gashed, and abandoned to the birds of prey. The only path was narrow and rugged. A horse could, with difficulty be led up, two men could hardly walk abreast, and in some places the way ran so close to the precipice that the traveler had great need of a steady eye and foot. Many years later the first Duke of Othol constructed a road up which it was just possible to drag his coach. But even that road was so steep and so straight that a handful of resolute men might have defended it against an army, nor did any Saxon consider a visit to Kilokranky as a pleasure till experience had taught the English government that the weapons by which the Highlanders would be most effectually subdued were the pickaxe and the spade. The country which lay just above this pass was now the theater of a war such as the Highlands had not often witnessed. Men wearing the same tartan and attached to the same lord were arrayed against each other. The name of the absent chief was used with some show of reason on both sides. Balanac at the head of a body of vassals who considered him as the representative of the Marques occupied Blair Castle. Murray with twelve hundred followers appeared before the walls and demanded to be admitted into the mansion of his family, the mansion which would one day be his own. The garrison refused to open the gates. Messages were sent off by the besiegers to Edinburgh and by the besieged to Lockaber. In both places the Tidings produced great agitation. Mackay and Dundee agreed in thinking that the crisis required prompt and strenuous exertion. On the fate of Blair Castle probably depended the fate of Olothol. On the fate of Olothol might depend the fate of Scotland. Mackay hastened northward and ordered his troops to assemble in the low country of Perthshire. Some of them were quartered at such a distance that they did not arrive in time. He soon however had with him three Scotch regiments which had served in Holland and which bore the names of their colonels, Mackay himself, Balfour and Ramsey. There was also a gallant regiment of infantry from England then called Hastings but now known as the thirteenth of the line. With these old troops were joined regiments newly levied in the lowlands. One of them was commanded by Lord Kenmore, the other which had been raised on the border and which is still styled the king's own borderers by Lord Leven. Two troops of Horace, Lord Anandales and Lord Belhaven, probably made up the army to the number of above three thousand men. Belhaven rode at the head of his troops but Anandale, the most factious of all Montgomery's followers, preferred the club and the Parliament House to the field. Dundee, meanwhile, had summoned all the clans which acknowledged his commission to assemble for an expedition into Athol. His exertions were strenuously seconded by Lockeel. The fiery crosses were sent again in all haste through Appin and Ardenamercan, up Glenmore and along Loch Leven. But the call was so unexpected and the time allowed was so short that the muster was not a very full one. The whole number of broadswords seems to have been under three thousand, with this four such as it was, Dundee set forth. On his march he was joined by suckers which had just arrived from Ulster. They consisted of little more than three hundred Irish foot, ill-armed, ill-clothed, and ill-disciplined. Their commander was an officer named Cannon, who had seen service in the Netherlands and who might perhaps have acquitted himself well in a subordinate post and in a regular army, but who was altogether unequal to the part now assigned to him. He had already loitered among the Hebrides so long that some ships which had been sent with him and which were laden with stores had been taken by English cruisers. He and his soldiers had with difficulty escaped the same fate. Incompetent as he was, he bore a commission which gave him military rank in Scotland next to Dundee. The disappointment was severe. In truth, James would have done better to withhold all assistance from the Highlanders than to mock them by sending them instead of the well-appointed army which they had asked and expected a rabble contemptible in numbers and appearance. It was now evident that whatever was done for his cause in Scotland must be done by Scottish hands.