No More Learning

He, on the other hand, had been
informed that the Western Covenanters who filled the cellars of the city
had vowed vengeance on him: and, in truth, when we consider that their
temper was singularly savage and implacable; that they had been taught
to regard the slaying of a persecutor as a duty; that no examples
furnished by Holy Writ had been more frequently held up to their
admiration than Ehud stabbing Eglon, and Samuel hewing Agag limb from
limb; that they had never heard any achievement in the history of their
own country more warmly praised by their favourite teachers than the
butchery of Cardinal Beatoun and of Archbishop Sharpe; we may well
wonder that a man who had shed the blood of the saints like water should
have been able to walk the High Street in safety during a single
day. The enemy whom Dundee had most reason to fear was a youth of
distinguished courage and abilities named William Cleland. Cleland had,
when little more than sixteen years old, borne arms in that insurrection
which had been put down at Bothwell Bridge. He had since disgusted some
virulent fanatics by his humanity and moderation. But with the great
body of Presbyterians his name stood high. For with the strict morality
and ardent zeal of a Puritan he united some accomplishments of which few
Puritans could boast. His manners were polished, and his literary and
scientific attainments respectable. He was a linguist, mathematician,
and a poet. It is true that his hymns, odes, ballads, and Hudibrastic
satires are of very little intrinsic value; but, when it is considered
that he was a mere boy when most of them were written, it must be
admitted that they show considerable vigour of mind. He was now at
Edinburgh: his influence among the West Country Whigs assembled there
was great: he hated Dundee with deadly hatred, and was believed to be
meditating some act of violence, [294]

On the fifteenth of March Dundee received information that some of the
Covenanters had bound themselves together to slay him and Sir George
Mackenzie, whose eloquence and learning, long prostituted to the service
of tyranny, had made him more odious to the Presbyterians than any
other man of the gown. Dundee applied to Hamilton for protection, and
Hamilton advised him to bring the matter under the consideration of the
Convention at the next sitting, [295]

Before that sitting, a person named Crane arrived from France, with a
letter addressed by the fugitive King to the Estates. The letter was
sealed: the bearer, strange to say, was not furnished with a copy for
the information of the heads of the Jacobite party; nor did he bring any
message, written or verbal, to either of James's agents. Balcarras and
Dundee were mortified by finding that so little confidence was reposed
in them, and were harassed by painful doubts touching the contents of
the document on which so much depended. They were willing, however, to
hope for the best. King James could not, situated as he was, be so ill
advised as to act in direct opposition to the counsel and entreaties
of his friends. His letter, when opened, must be found to contain such
gracious assurances as would animate the royalists and conciliate the
moderate Whigs. His adherents, therefore, determined that it should be
produced.

When the Convention reassembled on the morning of Saturday the sixteenth
of March, it was proposed that measures should be taken for the personal
security of the members. It was alleged that the life of Dundee had been
threatened; that two men of sinister appearance had been watching the
house where he lodged, and had been heard to say that they would use the
dog as he had used them. Mackenzie complained that he too was in danger,
and, with his usual copiousness and force of language, demanded the
protection of the Estates. But the matter was lightly treated by the
majority: and the Convention passed on to other business, [296]

It was then announced that Crane was at the door of the Parliament
House. He was admitted. The paper of which he was in charge was laid on
the table. Hamilton remarked that there was, in the hands of the Earl
of Leven, a communication from the Prince by whose authority the
Estates had been convoked. That communication seemed to be entitled to
precedence. The Convention was of the same opinion; and the well weighed
and prudent letter of William was read.

It was then moved that the letter of James should be opened. The
Whigs objected that it might possibly contain a mandate dissolving the
Convention. They therefore proposed that, before the seal was broken,
the Estates should resolve to continue sitting, notwithstanding any such
mandate. The Jacobites, who knew no more than the Whigs what was in the
letter, and were impatient to have it read, eagerly assented. A vote was
passed by which the members bound themselves to consider any order which
should command them to separate as a nullity, and to remain assembled
till they should have accomplished the work of securing the liberty and
religion of Scotland. This vote was signed by almost all the lords and
gentlemen who were present. Seven out of nine bishops subscribed it. The
names of Dundee and Balcarras, written by their own hands, may still
be seen on the original roll. Balcarras afterwards excused what, on
his principles, was, beyond all dispute, a flagrant act of treason,
by saying that he and his friends had, from zeal for their master's
interest, concurred in a declaration of rebellion against their master's
authority; that they had anticipated the most salutary effects from the
letter; and that, if they had not made some concession to the majority,
the letter would not have been opened.

In a few minutes the hopes of Balcarras were grievously disappointed.
The letter from which so much had been hoped and feared was read with
all the honours which Scottish Parliaments were in the habit of paying
to royal communications: but every word carried despair to the hearts
of the Jacobites. It was plain that adversity had taught James neither
wisdom nor mercy. All was obstinacy, cruelty, insolence. A pardon was
promised to those traitors who should return to their allegiance within
a fortnight. Against all others unsparing vengeance was denounced.
Not only was no sorrow expressed for past offences: but the letter
was itself a new offence: for it was written and countersigned by the
apostate Melfort, who was, by the statutes of the realm, incapable of
holding the office of Secretary, and who was not less abhorred by the
Protestant Tories than by the Whigs. The hall was in a tumult. The
enemies of James were loud and vehement. His friends, angry with him,
and ashamed of him, saw that it was vain to think of continuing the
struggle in the Convention. Every vote which had been doubtful when his
letter was unsealed was now irrecoverably lost. The sitting closed in
great agitation, [297]

It was Saturday afternoon. There was to be no other meeting till Monday
morning. The Jacobite leaders held a consultation, and came to the
conclusion that it was necessary to take a decided step. Dundee and
Balcarras must use the powers with which they had been intrusted. The
minority must forthwith leave Edinburgh and assemble at Stirling. Athol
assented, and undertook to bring a great body of his clansmen from the
Highlands to protect the deliberations of the Royalist Convention. Every
thing was arranged for the secession; but, in a few hours, the tardiness
of one man and the haste of another ruined the whole plan.

The Monday came. The Jacobite lords and gentlemen were actually taking
horse for Stirling, when Athol asked for a delay of twenty-four hours.
He had no personal reason to be in haste. By staying he ran no risk
of being assassinated. By going he incurred the risks inseparable from
civil war. The members of his party, unwilling to separate from him,
consented to the postponement which he requested, and repaired once more
to the Parliament House. Dundee alone refused to stay a moment longer.
His life was in danger. The Convention had refused to protect him. He
would not remain to be a mark for the pistols and daggers of murderers.
Balcarras expostulated to no purpose. "By departing alone," he said,
"you will give the alarm and break up the whole scheme. " But Dundee was
obstinate. Brave as he undoubtedly was, he seems, like many other brave
men, to have been less proof against the danger of assassination
than against any other form of danger. He knew what the hatred of the
Covenanters was: he knew how well he had earned their hatred; and he was
haunted by that consciousness of inexpiable guilt, and by that dread of
a terrible retribution, which the ancient polytheists personified
under the awful name of the Furies. His old troopers, the Satans and
Beelzebubs who had shared his crimes, and who now shared his perils,
were ready to be the companions of his flight.

Meanwhile the Convention had assembled. Mackenzie was on his legs, and
was pathetically lamenting the hard condition of the Estates, at once
commanded by the guns of a fortress and menaced by a fanatical rabble,
when he was interrupted by some sentinels who came running from the
posts near the Castle. They had seen Dundee at the head of fifty horse
on the Stirling road. That road ran close under the huge rock on which
the citadel is built. Gordon had appeared on the ramparts, and had made
a sign that he had something to say. Dundee had climbed high enough to
hear and to be heard, and was then actually conferring with the Duke.
Up to that moment the hatred with which the Presbyterian members of
the assembly regarded the merciless persecutor of their brethren in
the faith had been restrained by the decorous forms of parliamentary
deliberation. But now the explosion was terrible. Hamilton himself,
who, by the acknowledgment of his opponents, had hitherto performed the
duties of President with gravity and impartiality, was the loudest and
fiercest man in the hall. "It is high time," he cried, "that we [should
find] the enemies of our religion and of our civil freedom are mustering
all around us; and we may well suspect that they have accomplices even
here. Lock the doors. Lay the keys on the table. Let nobody go out but
those lords and gentlemen whom we shall appoint to call the citizens to
arms. There are some good men from the West in Edinburgh, men for whom I
can answer. " The assembly raised a general cry of assent. Several
members of the majority boasted that they too had brought with them
trusty retainers who would turn out at a moment's notice against
Claverhouse and his dragoons. All that Hamilton proposed was instantly
done. The Jacobites, silent and unresisting, became prisoners. Leven
went forth and ordered the drums to beat. The Covenanters of Lanarkshire
and Ayrshire promptly obeyed the signal. The force thus assembled had
indeed no very military appearance, but was amply sufficient to overawe
the adherents of the House of Stuart. From Dundee nothing was to be
hoped or feared. He had already scrambled down the Castle hill, rejoined
his troopers, and galloped westward. Hamilton now ordered the doors to
be opened. The suspected members were at liberty to depart. Humbled and
brokenspirited, yet glad that they had come off so well, they stole
forth through the crowd of stern fanatics which filled the High Street.
All thought of secession was at an end, [298]

On the following day it was resolved that the kingdom should be put into
a posture of defence. The preamble of this resolution contained a severe
reflection on the perfidy of the traitor who, within a few hours after
he had, by an engagement subscribed with his own hand, bound himself not
to quit his post in the Convention, had set the example of desertion,
and given the signal of civil war. All Protestants, from sixteen to
sixty, were ordered to hold themselves in readiness to assemble in arms
at the first summons; and, that none might pretend ignorance, it was
directed that the edict should be proclaimed at all the market crosses
throughout the realm, [299]

The Estates then proceeded to send a letter of thanks to William. To
this letter were attached the signatures of many noblemen and gentlemen
who were in the interest of the banished King. The Bishops however
unanimously refused to subscribe their names.

It had long been the custom of the Parliaments of Scotland to entrust
the preparation of Acts to a select number of members who were
designated as the Lords of the Articles. In conformity with this usage,
the business of framing a plan for the settling of the government was
now confided to a Committee of twenty-four. Of the twenty-four eight
were peers, eight representatives of counties, and eight representatives
of towns. The majority of the Committee were Whigs; and not a single
prelate had a seat.

The spirit of the Jacobites, broken by a succession of disasters, was,
about this time, for a moment revived by the arrival of the Duke of
Queensberry from London. His rank was high and his influence was great:
his character, by comparison with the characters of those who surrounded
him, was fair. When Popery was in the ascendent, he had been true to
the cause of the Protestant Church; and, since Whiggism had been in the
ascendent, he had been true to the cause of hereditary monarchy. Some
thought that, if he had been earlier in his place, he might have been
able to render important service to the House of Stuart, [300] Even now
the stimulants which he applied to his torpid and feeble party produced
some faint symptoms of returning animation. Means were found of
communicating with Gordon; and he was earnestly solicited to fire on the
city. The Jacobites hoped that, as soon as the cannon balls had beaten
down a few chimneys, the Estates would adjourn to Glasgow. Time would
thus be gained; and the royalists might be able to execute their old
project of meeting in a separate convention. Gordon however positively
refused to take on himself so grave a responsibility on no better
warrant than the request of a small cabal, [301]

By this time the Estates had a guard on which they could rely more
firmly than on the undisciplined and turbulent Covenanters of the West.
A squadron of English men of war from the Thames had arrived in the
Frith of Forth. On board were the three Scottish regiments which had
accompanied William from Holland. He had, with great judgment, selected
them to protect the assembly which was to settle the government of
their country; and, that no cause of jealousy might be given to a people
exquisitely sensitive on points of national honour, he had purged the
ranks of all Dutch soldiers, and had thus reduced the number of men to
about eleven hundred. This little force was commanded by Andrew Mackay,
a Highlander of noble descent, who had served long on the Continent, and
who was distinguished by courage of the truest temper, and by a piety
such as is seldom found in soldiers of fortune. The Convention passed a
resolution appointing Mackay general of their forces. When the question
was put on this resolution, the Archbishop of Glasgow, unwilling
doubtless to be a party to such an usurpation of powers which belonged
to the King alone, begged that the prelates might be excused from
voting. Divines, he said, had nothing to do with military arrangements.
"The Fathers of the Church," answered a member very keenly, "have been
lately favoured with a new light. I have myself seen military
orders signed by the Most Reverend person who has suddenly become so
scrupulous. There was indeed one difference: those orders were for
dragooning Protestants, and the resolution before us is meant to protect
us from Papists. " [302]

The arrival of Mackay's troops, and the determination of Gordon to
remain inactive, quelled the spirit of the Jacobites. They had indeed
one chance left. They might possibly, by joining with those Whigs who
were bent on an union with England, have postponed during a considerable
time the settlement of the government. A negotiation was actually opened
with this view, but was speedily broken off. For it soon appeared that
the party which was for James was really hostile to the union, and that
the party which was for the union was really hostile to James. As these
two parties had no object in common, the only effect of a coalition
between them must have been that one of them would have become the tool
of the other. The question of the union therefore was not raised, [303]
Some Jacobites retired to their country seats: others, though they
remained at Edinburgh, ceased to show themselves in the Parliament
House: many passed over to the winning side; and, when at length
the resolutions prepared by the Twenty Four were submitted to the
Convention, it appeared that the party which on the first day of the
session had rallied round Athol had dwindled away to nothing.

The resolutions had been framed, as far as possible, in conformity
with the example recently set at Westminster. In one important point,
however, it was absolutely necessary that the copy should deviate from
the original. The Estates of England had brought two charges against
James, his misgovernment and his flight, and had, by using the soft
word "Abdication," evaded, with some sacrifice of verbal precision,
the question whether subjects may lawfully depose a bad prince. That
question the Estates of Scotland could not evade. They could not pretend
that James had deserted his post. For he had never, since he came to
the throne, resided in Scotland. During many years that kingdom had been
ruled by sovereigns who dwelt in another land. The whole machinery of
the administration had been constructed on the supposition that the
King would be absent, and was therefore not necessarily deranged by that
flight which had, in the south of the island, dissolved all government,
and suspended the ordinary course of justice. It was only by letter that
the King could, when he was at Whitehall, communicate with the Council
and the Parliament at Edinburgh; and by letter he could communicate with
them when he was at Saint Germains or at Dublin. The Twenty Four were
therefore forced to propose to the Estates a resolution distinctly
declaring that James the Seventh had by his misconduct forfeited the
crown. Many writers have inferred from the language of this resolution
that sound political principles had made a greater progress in Scotland
than in England. But the whole history of the two countries from the
Restoration to the Union proves this inference to be erroneous. The
Scottish Estates used plain language, simply because it was impossible
for them, situated as they were, to use evasive language.

The person who bore the chief part in framing the resolution, and in
defending it, was Sir John Dalrymple, who had recently held the high
office of Lord Advocate, and had been an accomplice in some of the
misdeeds which he now arraigned with great force of reasoning and
eloquence. He was strenuously supported by Sir James Montgomery, member
for Ayrshire, a man of considerable abilities, but of loose principles,
turbulent temper, insatiable cupidity, and implacable malevolence. The
Archbishop of Glasgow and Sir George Mackenzie spoke on the other side:
but the only effect of their oratory was to deprive their party of the
advantage of being able to allege that the Estates were under duress,
and that liberty of speech had been denied to the defenders of
hereditary monarchy.

When the question was put, Athol, Queensberry, and some of their
friends withdrew. Only five members voted against the resolution which
pronounced that James had forfeited his right to the allegiance of his
subjects. When it was moved that the Crown of Scotland should be
settled as the Crown of England had been settled, Athol and Queensberry
reappeared in the hall. They had doubted, they said, whether they could
justifiably declare the throne vacant. But, since it had been declared
vacant, they felt no doubt that William and Mary were the persons who
ought to fill it.

The Convention then went forth in procession to the High Street. Several
great nobles, attended by the Lord Provost of the capital and by the
heralds, ascended the octagon tower from which rose the city cross
surmounted by the unicorn of Scotland, [304] Hamilton read the vote of
the Convention; and a King at Arms proclaimed the new Sovereigns with
sound of trumpet. On the same day the Estates issued an order that the
parochial clergy should, on pain of deprivation, publish from their
pulpits the proclamation which had just been read at the city cross, and
should pray for King William and Queen Mary.

Still the interregnum was not at an end. Though the new Sovereigns had
been proclaimed, they had not yet been put into possession of the royal
authority by a formal tender and a formal acceptance. At Edinburgh,
as at Westminster, it was thought necessary that the instrument which
settled the government should clearly define and solemnly assert those
privileges of the people which the Stuarts had illegally infringed. A
Claim of Right was therefore drawn up by the Twenty Four, and adopted by
the Convention. To this Claim, which purported to be merely declaratory
of the law as it stood, was added a supplementary paper containing a
list of grievances which could be remedied only by new laws. One most
important article which we should naturally expect to find at the head
of such a list, the Convention, with great practical prudence, but in
defiance of notorious facts and of unanswerable arguments, placed in the
Claim of Right. Nobody could deny that prelacy was established by Act
of Parliament. The power exercised by the Bishops might be pernicious,
unscriptural, antichristian but illegal it certainly was not; and to
pronounce it illegal was to outrage common sense. The Whig leaders
however were much more desirous to get rid of episcopacy than to
prove themselves consummate publicists and logicians. If they made the
abolition of episcopacy an article of the contract by which William was
to hold the crown, they attained their end, though doubtless in a manner
open to much criticism. If, on the other hand, they contented themselves
with resolving that episcopacy was a noxious institution which at some
future time the legislature would do well to abolish, they might find
that their resolution, though unobjectionable in form, was barren of
consequences. They knew that William by no means sympathized with their
dislike of Bishops, and that, even had he been much more zealous for
the Calvinistic model than he was, the relation in which he stood to the
Anglican Church would make it difficult and dangerous for him to declare
himself hostile to a fundamental part of the constitution of that
Church. If he should become King of Scotland without being fettered by
any pledge on this subject, it might well be apprehended that he would
hesitate about passing an Act which would be regarded with abhorrence
by a large body of his subjects in the south of the island. It was
therefore most desirable that the question should be settled while the
throne was still vacant. In this opinion many politicians concurred, who
had no dislike to rochets and mitres, but who wished that William might
have a quiet and prosperous reign. The Scottish people,--so these men
reasoned,--hated episcopacy. The English loved it. To leave William
any voice in the matter was to put him under the necessity of deeply
wounding the strongest feelings of one of the nations which he governed.
It was therefore plainly for his own interest that the question, which
he could not settle in any manner without incurring a fearful amount of
obloquy, should be settled for him by others who were exposed to no
such danger. He was not yet Sovereign of Scotland. While the interregnum
lasted, the supreme power belonged to the Estates; and for what the
Estates might do the prelatists of his southern kingdom could not hold
him responsible. The elder Dalrymple wrote strongly from London to this
effect, and there can be little doubt that he expressed the sentiments
of his master. William would have sincerely rejoiced if the Scots could
have been reconciled to a modified episcopacy. But, since that could not
be, it was manifestly desirable that they should themselves, while
there was yet no King over them, pronounce the irrevocable doom of the
institution which they abhorred, [305]

The Convention, therefore, with little debate as it should seem,
inserted in the Claim of Right a clause declaring that prelacy was an
insupportable burden to the kingdom, that it had been long odious to the
body of the people, and that it ought to be abolished.

Nothing in the proceedings at Edinburgh astonishes an Englishman more
than the manner in which the Estates dealt with the practice of torture.
In England torture had always been illegal. In the most servile times
the judges had unanimously pronounced it so. Those rulers who had
occasionally resorted to it had, as far as was possible, used it in
secret, had never pretended that they had acted in conformity with
either statute law or common law, and had excused themselves by saying
that the extraordinary peril to which the state was exposed had
forced them to take on themselves the responsibility of employing
extraordinarily means of defence. It had therefore never been thought
necessary by any English Parliament to pass any Act or resolution
touching this matter. The torture was not mentioned in the Petition
of Right, or in any of the statutes framed by the Long Parliament.
No member of the Convention of 1689 dreamed of proposing that the
instrument which called the Prince and Princess of Orange to the throne
should contain a declaration against the using of racks and thumbscrews
for the purpose of forcing prisoners to accuse themselves. Such a
declaration would have been justly regarded as weakening rather than
strengthening a rule which, as far back as the days of the Plantagenets,
had been proudly declared by the most illustrious sages of Westminster
Hall to be a distinguishing feature of the English jurisprudence, [306]
In the Scottish Claim of Right, the use of torture, without evidence,
or in ordinary cases, was declared to be contrary to law. The use of
torture, therefore, where there was strong evidence, and where the crime
was extraordinary, was, by the plainest implication, declared to be
according to law; nor did the Estates mention the use of torture among
the grievances which required a legislative remedy. In truth, they could
not condemn the use of torture without condemning themselves. It had
chanced that, while they were employed in settling the government, the
eloquent and learned Lord President Lockhart had been foully murdered in
a public street through which he was returning from church on a Sunday.
The murderer was seized, and proved to be a wretch who, having treated
his wife barbarously and turned her out of doors, had been compelled by
a decree of the Court of Session to provide for her. A savage hatred of
the judges by whom she had been protected had taken possession of his
mind, and had goaded him to a horrible crime and a horrible fate. It
was natural that an assassination attended by so many circumstances
of aggravation should move the indignation of the members of the
Convention. Yet they should have considered the gravity of the
conjuncture and the importance of their own mission. They unfortunately,
in the heat of passion, directed the magistrates of Edinburgh to strike
the prisoner in the boots, and named a Committee to superintend the
operation. But for this unhappy event, it is probable that the law of
Scotland concerning torture would have been immediately assimilated to
the law of England, [307]

Having settled the Claim of Right, the Convention proceeded to revise
the Coronation oath. When this had been done, three members were
appointed to carry the Instrument of Government to London. Argyle,
though not, in strictness of law, a Peer, was chosen to represent the
Peers: Sir James Montgomery represented the Commissioners of Shires, and
Sir John Dalrymple the Commissioners of Towns.

The Estates then adjourned for a few weeks, having first passed a vote
which empowered Hamilton to take such measures as might be necessary for
the preservation of the public peace till the end of the interregnum.

The ceremony of the inauguration was distinguished from ordinary
pageants by some highly interesting circumstances. On the eleventh of
May the three Commissioners came to the Council Chamber at Whitehall,
and thence, attended by almost all the Scotchmen of note who were then
in London, proceeded to the Banqueting House. There William and Mary
appeared seated under a canopy.
A splendid circle of English nobles, and
statesmen stood round the throne: but the sword of state as committed to
a Scotch lord; and the oath of office was administered after the Scotch
fashion. Argyle recited the words slowly. The royal pair, holding up
their hands towards heaven, repeated after him till they came to the
last clause. There William paused. That clause contained a promise that
he would root out all heretics and all enemies of the true worship of
God; and it was notorious that, in the opinion of many Scotchmen,
not only all Roman Catholics, but all Protestant Episcopalians, all
Independents, Baptists and Quakers, all Lutherans, nay all British
Presbyterians who did not hold themselves bound by the Solemn League and
Covenant, were enemies of the true worship of God, [308] The King had
apprised the Commissioners that he could not take this part of the oath
without a distinct and public explanation; and they had been authorised
by the Convention to give such an explanation as would satisfy him.
"I will not," he now said, "lay myself under any obligation to be
a persecutor. " "Neither the words of this oath," said one of the
Commissioners, "nor the laws of Scotland, lay any such obligation on
your Majesty. " "In that sense, then, I swear," said William; "and I
desire you all, my lords and gentlemen, to witness that I do so. " Even
his detractors have generally admitted that on this great occasion he
acted with uprightness, dignity, and wisdom, [309]

As King of Scotland, he soon found himself embarrassed at every step by
all the difficulties which had embarrassed him as King of England, and
by other difficulties which in England were happily unknown. In the
north of the island, no class was more dissatisfied with the Revolution
than the class which owed most to the Revolution. The manner in which
the Convention had decided the question of ecclesiastical polity had
not been more offensive to the Bishops themselves than to those fiery
Covenanters who had long, in defiance of sword and carbine, boot and
gibbet, worshipped their Maker after their own fashion in caverns and on
mountain tops. Was there ever, these zealots exclaimed, such a halting
between two opinions, such a compromise between the Lord and Baal? The
Estates ought to have said that episcopacy was an abomination in
God's sight, and that, in obedience to his word, and from fear of
his righteous judgment, they were determined to deal with this great
national sin and scandal after the fashion of those saintly rulers who
of old cut down the groves and demolished the altars of Chemosh and
Astarte. Unhappily, Scotland was ruled, not by pious Josiahs, but by
careless Gallios. The antichristian hierarchy was to be abolished, not
because it was an insult to heaven, but because it was felt as a burden
on earth; not because it was hateful to the great Head of the Church,
but because it was hateful to the people. Was public opinion, then, the
test of right and wrong in religion? Was not the order which Christ had
established in his own house to be held equally sacred in all countries
and through all ages? And was there no reason for following that order
in Scotland except a reason which might be urged with equal force for
maintaining Prelacy in England, Popery in Spain, and Mahometanism in
Turkey? Why, too, was nothing said of those Covenants which the nation
had so generally subscribed and so generally violated? Why was it not
distinctly affirmed that the promises set down in those rolls were still
binding, and would to the end of time be binding, on the kingdom? Were
these truths to be suppressed from regard for the feelings and interests
of a prince who was all things to all men, an ally of the idolatrous
Spaniard and of the Lutheran bane, a presbyterian at the Hague and a
prelatist at Whiteball? He, like Jelin in ancient times, had doubtless
so far done well that he had been the scourge of the idolatrous House of
Ahab. But he, like Jelin, had not taken heed to walk in the divine
law with his whole heart, but had tolerated and practised impieties
differing only in degree from those of which he had declared himself the
enemy. It would have better become godly senators to remonstrate with
him on the sin which he was committing by conforming to the Anglican
ritual, and by maintaining the Anglican Church government, than to
flatter him by using a phraseology which seemed to indicate that they
were as deeply tainted with Erastianism as himself. Many of those who
held this language refused to do any act which could be construed into a
recognition of the new Sovereigns, and would rather have been fired upon
by files of musketeers or tied to stakes within low water mark than have
uttered a prayer that God would bless William and Mary.

Yet the King had less to fear from the pertinacious adherence of these
men to their absurd principles, than from the ambition and avarice of
another set of men who had no principles at all. It was necessary
that he should immediately name ministers to conduct the government of
Scotland: and, name whom he might, he could not fail to disappoint
and irritate a multitude of expectants. Scotland was one of the least
wealthy countries in Europe: yet no country in Europe contained a
greater number of clever and selfish politicians. The places in the
gift of the Crown were not enough to satisfy one twentieth part of the
placehunters, every one of whom thought that his own services had
been preeminent, and that, whoever might be passed by, he ought to
be remembered. William did his best to satisfy these innumerable and
insatiable claimants by putting many offices into commission. There were
however a few great posts which it was impossible to divide. Hamilton
was declared Lord High Commissioner, in the hope that immense pecuniary
allowances, a residence in Holyrood Palace, and a pomp and dignity
little less than regal, would content him. The Earl of Crawford was
appointed President of the Parliament; and it was supposed that this
appointment would conciliate the rigid Presbyterians, for Crawford was
what they called a professor. His letters and speeches are, to use his
own phraseology, exceeding savoury. Alone, or almost alone, among the
prominent politicians of that time, he retained the style which had
been fashionable in the preceding generation. He had a text of the
Old Testament ready for every occasion. He filled his despatches with
allusions to Ishmael and Hagar, Hannah and Eli, Elijah, Nehemiah,
and Zerubbabel, and adorned his oratory with quotations from Ezra and
Haggai. It is a circumstance strikingly characteristic of the man, and
of the school in which he had been trained, that, in all the mass of his
writing which has come down to us, there is not a single word indicating
that he had ever in his life heard of the New Testament. Even in our own
time some persons of a peculiar taste have been so much delighted by the
rich unction of his eloquence, that they have confidently pronounced
him a saint. To those whose habit it is to judge of a man rather by his
actions than by his words, Crawford will appear to have been a selfish,
cruel politician, who was not at all the dupe of his own cant, and whose
zeal against episcopal government was not a little whetted by his desire
to obtain a grant of episcopal domains. In excuse for his greediness, it
ought to be said that he was the poorest noble of a poor nobility, and
that before the Revolution he was sometimes at a loss for a meal and a
suit of clothes, [310]

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 had tendered 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 Secretaryship was, not indeed in dignity, but in real
power, the highest office in the 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
conventicles, and at another time for harbouring 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, [311] William therefore preferred Melville, who, though
not a man of eminent talents, was regarded by the Presbyterians as a
thoroughgoing friend, and yet not 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 adviser 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. In courage and fidelity he resembled Burnet; but
he had, what Burnet wanted, judgment, selfcommand, 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 antechambers of the palace by the significant
nickname of the Cardinal, [312]

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 Whigs, as severely disappointed as himself by the
new arrangements, readily submitted to the guidance of so bold and
able a leader. Under his direction these men, among whom the Earl of
Annandale 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, [313] With these dishonest
malecontents, whose object was merely to annoy the government and to get
places, were leagued other malecontents, 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 formerly been bent on making a merely
nominal general of Argyle, [314] A man far superior morally and
intellectually to Hume, Fletcher of Saltoun, belonged to the same party.
Though not a member of the Convention, he was a most active member of
the Club, [315] He hated monarchy: he hated democracy: his favourite
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 the Parliament. In other words, the country
was to be absolutely governed by a 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 tranquillity. Trade,
industry, science, would have languished; and Scotland would have been
a smaller Poland, with a puppet sovereign, a turbulent diet, and an
enslaved people. With unsuccessful candidates for office, and with
honest but wrongheaded 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. [316] 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, [317]

While Montgomery was labouring 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 greatgrandfathers, 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 any thing was known
about the Celtic part of Scotland; and what was known excited no feeling
but contempt and loathing. The crags and the glens, the woods and the
waters, were indeed the same that now swarm every autumn with admiring
gazers and stretchers. The Trosachs wound as now between gigantic walls
of rock tapestried with broom and wild roses: Foyers came headlong down
through the birchwood 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 Cruachan rose, as it still rises, over the willowy
islets of Loch Awe. Yet none of these sights had power, 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 develope 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 in imminent danger of falling
two thousand feet perpendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent which
suddenly whirls 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 civilised world, wrote
an account of his wanderings. He was evidently a man of a quick, an
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
Invernessshire. But, writing with the feeling which was universal in
his own age, he pronounced those mountains monstrous excrescences. 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 disagreeably did those misshapen masses
of gloomy brown and dirty purple affect the eye. What a contrast, he
exclaimed, between these horrible prospects and the beauties of Richmond
Hill! [318] 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 round Leyden, the vast expanse of verdant
meadow, and the villas with their statues and grottoes, trim flower
beds, and rectilinear avenues. Yet it is difficult to believe that
the author of the Traveller and of the Deserted Village was naturally
inferior in taste and sensibility to the thousands of clerks and
milliners who are now thrown into raptures by the sight of Loch Katrine
and Loch Lomond, [319] His feelings may easily be 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 inns had succeeded to dens of
robbers, till there was as little danger of being slain or plundered
in the wildest defile of Badenoch or Lochaber as in Cornhill, 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 mountain
tops.

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 is 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 repasts,
the dresses, the marriages, the funerals of Laplanders and Hottentots,
Mohawks and Malays. 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 indefatigable 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. But, when
we examine his narrative, 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, [320] In the reign of George
the First, 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, [321] We may well doubt whether, in
1689, one in twenty of the well read gentlemen who assembled at Will's
coffeehouse 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 armour 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 vigour, 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 uncivilised 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 honour 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 wreaked
on hereditary enemies in a neighbouring valley such vengeance as would
have made old soldiers of the Thirty Years' War shudder. He would have
found that robbery was held to be a calling, not merely innocent, but
honourable. 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 labour, 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 Duinhe Wassel 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 highborn 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 Highlands was a rude mixture of
Popery 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 bulls' 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 enquirer would have found very
few who could read. In truth, he might easily have 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 sojourned 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 but 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 cutaneous 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, [322]

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 erred greatly who imagined that he bore any
resemblance to villains who, in rich and well governed communities, live
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 Raleighs and Drakes considered 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 rigour 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 highwaymen who
stopped coaches on Blackheath. His inordinate pride of birth and his
contempt for labour and trade were indeed great weaknesses, and had done
far more than the inclemency 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, selfrespect, and that noble sensibility which makes dishonour
more terrible than death. A gentleman of this sort, whose clothes were
begrimed with the accumulated filth of years, and whose hovel smelt
worse than an English hogstye, would often do the honours of that hovel
with a lofty courtesy worthy of the splendid circle of Versailles.
Though he had as little booklearning as the most stupid ploughboys
of England, it would have been a great error to put him in the same
intellectual rank with such ploughboys. 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
Caermarthen, 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 Otway or of the vigour of Dryden.

There was therefore even then evidence sufficient to justify the belief
that no natural inferiority had kept the Celt 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 civilising 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 fiercest among borderers; and the enmity
between the Highland borderer and the Lowland borderer along 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 dangled
in a row on the gallows of Crieff or Stirling. Fairs were indeed held on
the debatable land for the necessary interchange of commodities. But
to those fairs both parties came prepared for battle; and the day often
ended in bloodshed. Thus the Highlander was an object of hatred to his
Saxon neighbours; and from his Saxon neighbours 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, [323]

This contemptuous 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 for ever. 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 defenceless 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 effectually broken; and
scarcely had this change been accomplished when a strange reflux of
public feeling began. Pity succeeded to aversion. The nation execrated
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 Derby 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 became
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 civilisation, 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 tie, they said, had been parental: the new tie
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 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 this 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 skilful 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 Epigoniad, were pronounced to be fifteen
hundred years old, and were gravely classed with the Iliad.