behind the gigantic piles of overhanging rock, and that those invisible birds of prey might at any moment pounce upon their baggage or dash them down with one fell swoop into the raging torrent of the Garry. This dreaded "pass of the withered brushwood "--the same which the Hessian troops refused to enter during the Jacobite rebellion of 1746-having been safely threaded by the timid forces, their cautious commander extended them in a thin line, only three deep, on the rough vale above the flooded river.

Mackay was unfortunately unequal to the occasion. He had been forced into this position by the sudden appearance in the afternoon, upon the heights above his army, of the plaided giants of the Grampians under the gallant Graham of Claverhouse. It was a splendid host, with heroes that might well have graced the field of Troy, which had been gathered by the fiery cross from the miserable huts and proud castles of the Scottish highlands to do battle for the unworthy cause of the last of the Stuart kings. In the array of blooming tartan and blazing brass might be seen the majestic figure of Sir Ewan Cameron of Lochiel, the Cetewayo of King James's Court, mounted on a bright bay horse, and with a blood-red plume waving from the crest of his helmet; the rude and dauntless young Glengarry, the fierce Keppoch, the handsome boy of Duart, the Macdonald chiefs of Clanranald and Sleat, both of whom were also of tender years, and as yet in the bud of martial fame; and at the head of his small contingent, for his poor and ferocious sept was feeble as regards number, the venerable chieftain of Glencoe, whose appearance is thus described in a Latin poem of the period :

"Next, with a daring look and warlike stride,
Glencoe advanced; his rattling armour shone
With dreadful glare; his large, broad, brawny back
A thick bull's-hide, impenetrably hard,
Instead of clothes, invest; and though along
Twice fifty of gigantic limbs and size
The warrior led, fierce, horrid, wild, and strong,
Yet his vast bulk did like a turret rise
By head and shoulders o'er the surly crew.
Round, in his left, his mighty shield he twirled,
And in his right his broadsword brandished high,
And flashed like lightning with affrighting gleams.
His visage boisterous, horribly was graced
With stiff mustachios like two bending horns,
And turbid fiery eyes, as meteors red,
Which fury and revenge did threaten round."

THE RUSH OF THE AVALANCHE; DEATH OF DUNDEE.

Claverhouse saw at once that his antagonist was in a trap, as safe within the grasp of his dashing Highlanders as a feeble deer in the coils of the boa constrictor, that one fierce and swift rush from the heights upon the thin line below would cut it through into disorganised groups, and leave it at the

mercy of the irresistible broadswords. While Mackay did his best to comfort his timid soldiers with the information that the savage mountaineers were accustomed to cast off their brogues and plaids and fight in a seminude state, not because of excessive bravery and eagerness for battle, but in order that they might be able to take more quickly to their heels in case of defeat, Dundee, on the other hand, had difficulty in holding back his impatient host from the onset. Although he had begun to draw out his line on the crest of the hill at five in the afternoon, he continued till close on sunset to gaze with his eagle eye on the doomed and mesmerized chickens "boddachs" his men called them

underneath; the plated armour of the hero glistened in the sunbeams as he rode along on his favourite dun-coloured charger, calling out to his tartaned host, "Steady, Claymores! we must wait till the sun is lower; they can't run away." The Lowlanders attempted to strike terror into their foes by discharging three small leather field-pieces, known as "Sandy's stoups," but without the least effect except smoke and noise, not a single ball alighting among the bonnets of Bonnie Dundee. It was within half an hour of sunset-the light had crept out of the valleys, and was only beating on the lofty peaks of Benvracky and the mighty Benygloe; there was just time left for making a complete holocaust of the boddachs, when the leader of the highland host exclaimed, "In God's name, let us go on, and let this be your word, King James and the Church of Scotland, which God long preserve!" There was a terrible pause, like that which precedes a thunderstorm; then from the dead silence the furious avalanche of shoeless and stockingless redshanks swept down the hill with their bodies bent forward; rushed across the short space of level ground towards the embattled line, shielding their faces with their targes, but halting not for a moment as the bullets whizzed among them on front and flank from the wider line of Teutons; stopped for an instant, fired one deadly volley that echoed up the mountains like a clap of thunder, and then throwing away their guns, dashed pell-mell on the foe with their claymores. "After this the noise seemed hushed," say "Lochiel's Memoirs," "and the fire ceasing on both sides, nothing was heard for some few moments but the sullen and hollow clashes of broadswords, with the dismal groans and cries of dying and wounded men." The rout was complete and instan taneous; Mackay turned his head and found himself alone; struck with surprise, knowing that the day was hopelessly lost, and fearing the pursuit of Dundee and his hawk-eyed legions, he rode off with the remnant tithe of his army across the flooded Garry, con

tinuing his flight during the night-time; and late in the next day-Sunday-arrived at Drummond Castle as the hero of one of the most pitiable tales of blunder and discomfiture recorded in the annals of his country.

"It was a famous victory." At least fifteen hundred of Mackay's men were butchered. The men of Athole, who had been marched out to join them, and instead had drunk the health of King James in their tartan bonnets, brought in five hundred prisoners who had been caught like conies in the Pass of Killiecrankie. Highlanders used to roll the narrative of the ghastly revel as a sweet morsel under their tongue: "There were scarce ever such strokes given in Europe as were given that day." Officers and soldiers were cut down through the head and neck to the very breast; skulls were shaven off above the ears by a backstroke as if they were nightcaps; the single blow of a claymore cleft through shoulder and cross-belt to the entrails; skull-caps were beaten into the brains of their wearers; pikes and small swords were cut through as if they were contemptible willow wands. Glengarry mowed down two men at every stroke of his ponderous claymore.

But to what purpose all this carnage and the magnificent piles of baggage on the haughs above the Garry that came into the hands of the looting redshanks? With that nightfall there fell the last hope and the most heroic spirit of the old cause. There perished in the rebel ranks not only Donald of the Blue Eyes-the valiant boy of Glengarrythe huge Haliburton, who stalked about like a moving castle, throwing fire and sword on every side, but greatest of all, James Graham, "Bonnie Dundee," the man with a woman's face and a hero's heart; his body was found upon the field, and buried in the church of Blair Athole. "He could not fall," said the elegy," "but by his country's fate." His faithful friend, the Earl of Balcarres, on the Sunday morning after the battle, while in prison in Edinburgh, saw the ghost of the handsome Graham move across the room in stately and melancholy silence; and when King William was urged to despatch a strong force to retrieve the disaster of the "infernal defile," that shrewd Dutchman remarked that "it was needless; the war ended with Dundee's life."

DUNKELD AND CROMDALE; KING JAMES'S

TENDERNESS AND BRANDY.

The Highlanders were indeed still ready to flock blindly around the standards of their chiefs, but there was now no supreme spirit to launch them at full tide on the soldiers of the plains; there was no name to charm more, only an Irish Cannon or an unknown Buchan in place of the gallant Graham. The

fiendish rush of the horde broke and was shivered at Dunkeld on the steady pikes of the grim and pious Cameronians, and their host was finally surprised by night on the haughs of Cromdale, when the leaders were fain to escape in the scantiest attire into the mists of the mountains.

"The English horse they were so rude,

They bathed their hoofs in Highland blood."

The battle of the Boyne, in July 1690, to use the words of the Memoirs written by the hand of James II., marked "the melancholy extinction of the King's hopes and authority." The martial fury of the Celts among the picturesque hills of Scotland and the green meadows of Erin could not win back the throne for the feeble Popish despot; the avalanche of 1689 had lost its soul, its cohesion, and its force; it was broken up into heartless masses on the scattered braes and glens: Buchan was content to skulk in the remoter wilds of the western Highlands, until the dethroned monarch could assure his faithful Scots whether there was any hope of soon seeing the friendly lilies of France floating on the Grampians. "The King" and his "subjects" were equally in a bad plight. A cordon of ten thousand soldiers hemmed them in from trading with and plundering the lowland valleys; the neglect of their cattle and of the little tillage that had supplied meal for their brose brought them to the verge of famine and to the necessity of assistance or surrender. The purse of the royal exile was also in a state of ebb. In the exhaustion of his resources during the last determined stand in Ireland he had "made a shift" to despatch a ship from Nantes to the relief of the destitute and desponding patriots, laden with flour, salt, flints, tobacco, drugs, and, above all things, brandy-for the bibulous proclivities of the Scottish Gael were as ravenous as the tastes of Red Indians and unconverted negroes, and had been bitterly assailed by Acts of Parliament. he was unable to promise after the wreck of the Jacobins (Jacobites we call them now) in Ireland. His Majesty was "too tender of their lives" to expose them to a desperate course; a trifle of £200 was sent across to the suffering Episcopal clergy by the Popish exile "as a mark of his impartial love and charity;" they might fight if they wished, but it would be wiser to make peace with Nero and wait for better times, when they might shake off the fetters of the unnatural son-inlaw who had torn the crown from his sacred brow.

More

TARBAT AND STAIR; THE KIRK AND HIGHLANDERS.

At this momentous crisis Scotland had the fortune to possess a host of clever politicians, who, if they brought around the Court of

The

Orange the dangerous and despicable elements of duplicity, greed, and ambition, were also able to contribute to the settlement of the seething elements the better endowments of perception, tact, energy, and determination. William had the wisdom, or the luck that goes for wisdom, to select the men for the hour, men it might not be of lofty and unswerving principle, but who, when a certain goal was placed before them, would make for it with implicit obedience, and were able by splendid skill, unscrupulous craft, and unbending determination, to grasp the means and place the prize in the hands of their master. Scotland had two burning questions, either with a blood-stained history: the one was the Kirk, the other was the Highlanders. Dutch prince, ignorant of these two grave and tragic State questions, would not be able without the greatest care to hold the crown of Scotland on his head, and would probably endanger his seat upon the throne of England. The two statesmen to whom, perhaps, the highest niche of honour is due for consolidating the Revolution in Scotland, and working out her union to England, were the plastic Sir George McKenzie, Viscount Tarbat, afterwards first Earl of Cromartie, and more preeminently still, Sir John Dalrymple, afterwards first Earl of Stair. He was the changeling son of a reputed "witch" and a pious judge, who, too, had been nicknamed a changeling, and was the author of a renowned legal treatise and a less renowned one on the Divine Attributes. So utterly, however, has the name of Stair been blasted by his connexion with one side incident of the Revolution, known as the Massacre of Glencoe, that he has not even been allotted the dignity of a separate mention in the most extended dictionaries of Scottish biography. So true is Shakespeare's dictum

"The evil that men do lives after them,

The good is oft interred with their bones."

He was the guide of his sovereign and the genial soul of the social circle; yet, in spite of his wit, his imagination, his ready eloquence, against which no Scotsman of his day could safely take up the cudgels, and his vast success as a statesman, his name is to most men now but the suggestion of an "infamous" massacre. But, after all, he was but one of many-the King and others were his fellows; he was only the ablest representative of old Scotland in the tyrannical oppression of a shameless tyranny that, to use a homely expression, deserved all it got. Clans, be it remembered, exist not now; in those days they were terrible living forces, lawless and dangerous associations, not mere memorial manes existing only to cherish "peaceful pageantry, social enjoyment, and family traditions."

ESTIMATE OF HIGHLAND "LOYALTY;" TREACHERY OF THE ABORIGINES. The Highlander was a grievance of the worst type to all peacefully disposed Scotsmen. The clans and septs were as little dependent on the Crown as are the Kroumirs or Beni Hassan of our day on the Bey of Tunis or the Sultan of Morocco. Their feuds form a ghastly and appalling tale of treachery and bloodshed. The records of the Scottish Privy Council during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are exceedingly sensational; the pages bristle with the barbarous achievements of the aborigines of the isles and highlands. "The inhabitants of the Lowlands," says Sir Walter Scott, “were indeed aware that there existed in the extremity of the island, amid wilder mountains and broader lakes than their own, tribes of men called clans, living each under the rule of their own chief, wearing a peculiar dress, speaking an unknown language, and going armed even in the most ordinary and peaceful vocations. The more southern counties saw specimens of these men following droves of cattle, which were the sole exportable commodity of their country, plaided, bonneted, belted, and brogued, and driving their bullocks, as Virgil is said to have spread his manure, with an air of great dignity and consequence. To their nearer Lowland neighbours they were known by more fierce and frequent causes of acquaintance; by the forays which they made upon the inhabitants of the plains, and the tribute, or protection-money, which they exacted from those whose possessions they spared."

That is really a gentle and generous picture of the Gael. No ordinary adjective can express the intense and deserved hatred and detestation of them which existed in the Lowlands till quite recent times. It is almost provoking to a true student to hear a word spoken in favour of the Highland Jacobins We admire the staunchness of their loyalty, yet it is contemptible from a statesman's point of view. It was simply a wider feeling of clanship,-a graft on the reverence for a chief; only the larger growth of a blind barbaric serfdom. They had only for two or three decades made the slightest show of submission to law when Montrose led them out-like the Red Indians in the American war a hundred years later - to interfere in the constitutional government of Britain by true and serious patriots, who and whose ancestors had thought and toiled and bled for many centuries in the best interests of the country; these Stuart kings, and their Claverhouse, had dared to flourish the savage plumes of the armed "Highland host"ignorant of all that was national, theological, or urbane-for the persecution of the pious

"hillmen of southern Scotland; besides, the clans were fascinated by plunder, and had no particular horror of assassination. To decide how to deal with these aborigines in a grave crisis like the Revolution of 1688, we must cast aside to-day's sentimental ethics and place ourselves in the arena of the time. How were statesmen to deal with the bull that rushed from the mountains upon the civilization of Britain ?

No one of the clans could well cast a stone at another. Cruelty and treachery, rapacity and rebellion, embellish the annals of them all. The struggle for the subjection and improvement of the Highlands and the Isles had been carried on for centuries, and the policy had been to dash the hostile tribes against each other, or, to use the old Scotch phrase,

set one devil to ding another." King James IV. had struck the first effective blow by breaking up the lordship of the Isles, and by crushing and forfeiting the Macdonalds-such as the sept of Glencoewho attempted to revive it. It is unfair to single out any clan for specimens of treachery, but we may refer to one conspicuous example of that period. Maclean of Duart, after taking a leading part in the rebellion of 1513 to place young Donald of Lochalsh on the throne of the Isles, offered his service to the Government, and promised to act with double zeal in destroying "the wicked blood of the Isles; for as long as that blood reigns, the kings shall never have the Isles in peace, whenever they find an opportunity to break loose, as is evident from daily experience." A later instance of the savage treachery of a Maclean chief is found in a massacre of 1588. On the very night on which Maclan of Ardnamurchan (the head of a powerful Macdonald sept that was crushed by Argyll in 1624, took to piracy, and finally sank among the clan Ranald) was married under Maclean's own roof to that chieftain's mother, the infamous host caused a number of the Maclans to be slain; he marched at dead of night into the bridal chamber, and but for the eager entreaty of the newly married wife would have sacrificed her husband, who was then mercifully doomed by his step-son to the tortures of a dungeon.

LETTERS OF FIRE AND SWORD; PROJECTED MASSACRE BY JAMES VI.

Scotland. The order to burn houses and corn, and to destroy man, woman, and child, was carried out with ruthless severity, and the rebel chief was driven among the mountains. Such tragedies were lamentably

common.

Not till the reign of James VI. were any serious steps taken by Parliament to bring the lawless Highlands more directly under the control of the Government. Chiefs and landlords were commanded to find sureties for the peaceful behaviour of their vassals; the King, in 1596, summoned all the nobles, freeholders of a certain rental, and burgesses of the realm, under pain of death and forfeiture, to assemble with ships and arms at Dumbarton in order to proceed against the rebels of the West; all the inhabitants of the Isles and Highlands were in the following year ordered to " come compear" at Edinburgh and show their title-deeds; the royal mandate charged them with frustrating His Majesty of his rents and service, with "barbarous inhumanity," which caused the fertile ground and rich fishings to be worthless, and with "neither entertaining any civil or honest society amongst themselves, neither yet admitted others. ... to traffic within their bounds with safety of their lives and goods." In 1607 the Scottish Solomon determined on a measure of the most dreadful character, and empowered Lord Huntly" to extirpate the barbarous people of the Isles within a year." The moral capacity of the Gordon chief for executing this gigantic feat of extermination had been shown by his vigorous execution of former letters of fire and sword against the Mackintosh, when he threatened even the wife of the chieftain, and uttered the rudely humorous menace that he would "cut her tail above her houghs." Had not an accident befallen Huntly and destroyed the compact, the result would have far eclipsed the horrors of the Glencoe massacre. Fortunately for the memory of James, this project was superseded by the sweeping but milder Statutes of Icolmkill (1609) and other agreements, by which the northern chiefs were called upon to deliver up their strongholds and their war galleys; to submit themselves to the jurisdiction of the laws; to remedy the "ignorance and incivility" of the Highlands, all gentlemen owning sixty cattle were to send their youth to the Lowlands to learn to read, speak, and write English, as became the children of barons and gentlemen; the household of the chiefs was to be diminished, and the hosts of sorners-masterless vagabonds who lived at free quarters on the poor natives-were to be punished as thieves and oppressors; the bards were threatened with the stocks and banishment; the inhabitants were not to import for sale any wine or brandy, the inordinate love of which was one

The ordinary process of law was in most cases unavailing for the capture of criminals. The chiefs of hostile clans were accustomed to obtain "letters of fire and sword" from the Privy Council, such as the commission given to the laird of Mackintosh in 1688 against Coll of the Cows, the chief of the Macdonalds of Keppoch, one of Dundee's most vigorous supporters and among the fiercest warriors that ever trode the hills of