they passed." A further evidence of the feelings under which the public laboured during this crisis, is to be found in these papers, in a letter from the well-known Sir Andrew Mitchell to the Lord President.

"If I had not lived long enough in England to know the natural bravery of the people, particularly of the better sort, I should, from their behaviour of late, have had a very false opinion of them; for the least scrap of good news exalts them most absurdly; and the smallest reverse of fortune depresses them meanly.”—P. 255.

In fact the alarm was not groundless;-not that the number of the Chevalier's individual followers ought to have been an object of serious, at least of permanent alarm to so great a kingdom,—but because, in many counties, a great proportion of the landed interest were Jacobitically disposed, although, with the prudence which distinguished the opposite party in 1688, they declined joining the invaders until it should appear whether they could maintain their ground without them. If it had rested with the unfortunate but daring leader of this strange adventure, his courage, though far less supported either by actual strength of numbers or by military experience, was as much "screwed to the sticking-place" as that of the Prince of Orange. The history of the council of war, at Derby, in which Charles Edward's retreat was determined, has never yet been fully explained; it will, however, be one day made known;-in the mean time, it is proved that no cowardice on his part, no wish to retreat from the desperate adventure in which he was engaged, and to shelter himself from its consequences, dictated the movement which was then adopted. Vestigia nulla retrorsum had been his motto from the beginning. When retreat was determined upon, contrary to his arguments, entreaties, and tears, he evidently considered his cause as desperate: he seemed, in many respects, an altered man; and from being the leader of his little host, became in appearance, as he was in reality, their reluctant follower. While the Highland army advanced, Charles was always in the van by break of day;-in retreat, his alacrity was gone, and often they were compelled to wait for him ;-he lost his spirit, his gaiety, his hardihood, and he never regained them but when battle. was spoken of. In later life, when all hopes of his re-establishment were ended, Charles Edward sunk into frailties by which he was debased and dishonoured. But let us be just to the memory of the unfortunate. Without courage, he had never made the attemptwithout address and military talent, he had never kept together his own desultory bands, or discomfited the more experienced soldiers of his enemy; and finally, without patience, resolution, and fortitude, he could never have supported his cause so long, under successive. disappointments, or fallen at last with honour, by an accumulated and overwhelming pressure.

with a dexterous celerity, as remarkable as the audacity of the advance. With Ligonier's army on one flank, and Cumberland's in the rear-surrounded by hostile forces,-and without one hope remaining of countenance or assistance from the Jacobites of England, the Highlanders made their retrograde movement without either fear or loss, and had the advantage at Clifton, near Penrith, in the only skirmish which took place between them and their numerous pursuers. The same good fortune seemed for a time to attend the continuation of the war, when removed once more to Scotland. The Chevalier, at the head of his little army, returned to the north more like a victor than a retreating adventurer. He laid Glasgow under ample contribution, refreshed and collected his scattered troops, and laid siege to Stirling, whose castle guards the principal passage between the Highlands and Lowlands. In the mean while, General Hawley was sent against him; an officer so confident of success, that he declared he would trample the Highland insurgents into dust with only two regiments of dragoons; and whose first order, on entering Edinburgh, was to set up a gibbet in the Grass Market, and another between Leith and Edinburgh. But this commander received from his despised opponents so sharp a defeat, at Falkirk, that, notwithstanding all the colours which could be put upon it, the affair appeared not much more creditable than that of Prestonpans. How Hawley looked upon this occasion, we learn by a letter from General Wightman.

"General Hy is in much the same situation as General C-e; he was never seen in the field during the battle; and every thing would have gone to wreck, in a worse manner than at Preston, if General Huske had not acted with judgment and courage, and appeared every where. H--y seems to be sensible of his misconduct; for when I was with him on Saturday morning at Linlithgow, he looked most wretchedly; even worse than C-e did a few hours after his scuffle, when I saw him at Fala."-P. 267.

Even when the approach of the Duke of Cumberland, with a predominant force, compelled these adventurers to retreat towards their northern recesses, they were so far from being disheartened that they generally had the advantage in the sort of skirmishing warfare which preceded their final defeat at Culloden. On this occasion, they seem, for the first time, to have laboured under a kind of judicial infatuation. They did not defend the passage of Spey, though broad, deep, rapid, and dangerous; they did not retreat before the duke into the defiles of their own mountains, where regular troops pursuing them could not long have subsisted; they did not even withdraw two leagues, which would have placed them in a position inaccessible to horse and favourable to their own mode of fighting; they did not await their own reinforcements, although three thousand men, a number equal to one half of their army, were within a day's march;—but, on the contrary, they wasted the spirits of their people, already ex

the purpose of a night attack, which was hastily and rashly adopted, and as inconsiderately abandoned; and at length drew up in an open plain, exposed to the fire of artillery, and protected from the charge of cavalry only by a park wall, which was soon pulled down. This they did, though they themselves had no efficient force of either description; and in such a hopeless position they awaited the encounter of an enemy more than double their numbers, fully equipped, and in a complete state for battle. The result was what might have been expected the loss, namely, of all but their honour, which was well maintained, since they left nearly the half of their army upon the field.

What causes, at this critical period, distracted those councils which had hitherto exhibited sagacity and military talent, it would be difficult now to ascertain. An officer, deep in their counsels, offers no better reason than that they must have expected a continuation of the same miraculous success which had hitherto befriended them against all probable calculation and chance of war-a sort of crowning mercy, as Cromwell might have called it, granted to the supposed goodness of their cause, and their acknowledged courage, in defiance of all the odds against them. But we believe the truth to be, that the French advisers who were around the Chevalier had, by this time, the majority in his councils. They were alarmed at the prospect of a mountain war, which presented a long perspective of severe hardship and privation; and being, at the worst, confident of their own safety as prisoners of war, they urged the adventurer to stand this fearful hazard, which, as we all know, terminated in utter and irremediable defeat.

It was not till after these events, which we have hastily retraced, that the Highlanders, with the peculiarity of their government and habits, became a general object of attention and investigation. And evidently it must have been matter of astonishment to the subjects of the complicated and combined constitution of Great Britain, to find they were living at the next door to tribes whose government and manners were simply and purely patriarchal, and who, in the structure of their social system, much more resembled the inhabitants of the mountains of India than those of the plains of England. Indeed, when we took up the account of Caubul, lately published by the Honourable Mr Elphinstone, we were forcibly struck with the curious points of parallelism between the manners of the Afghaun tribes and those of the ancient Highland clans. They resembled these Oriental mountaineers in their feuds, in their adoption of auxiliary tribes, in their laws, in their modes of conducting war, in their arms, and, in some respects, even in their dress. A Highlander who made the amende honorable to an enemy, came to his

held by the point; an Afghaun does the same. It was deemed unworthy, in either case, to refuse the clemency implored, but it might be legally done. We recollect an instance in Highland history-William Macintosh, a leader, if not the chief, of that ancient clan, upon some quarrel with the Gordons, burnt the castle of Auchindown, belonging to this powerful family; and was, in the feud which followed, reduced to such extremities by the persevering vengeance of the Earl of Huntley, that he was at length compelled to surrender himself at discretion. He came to the castle of Strathbogic, choosing his time when the earl was absent, and yielded himself up to the countess. She informed him that Huntley had sworn never to forgive him the offence he had committed, until he should see his head upon the block. The humbled chieftain kneeled down, and laid his head upon the kitchen dresser, where the oxen were cut up for the baron's feast. No sooner had he made this humiliation, than the cook, who stood behind him with his cleaver uplifted, at a sign from the inexorable countess, severed Macintosh's head from his body at a stroke. So deep was this thirst of vengeance impressed on the minds of the Highlanders, that when a clergyman informed a dying chief of the unlawfulness of the sentiment, urged the necessity of his forgiving an inveterate enemy, and quoted the scriptural expression, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord," the acquiescing penitent said, with a deep sigh," To be sure, it is too sweet a morsel for a mortal." Then added, "Well, I forgive him; but the deil take you, Donald" (turning to his son), if you forgive him."

Another extraordinary instance occurred in Aberdeenshire. In the sixteenth century, Muat of Abergeldie, then a powerful baron, made an agreement to meet with Cameron of Brux, with whom he was at feud, each being attended with twelve horse only. But Muat, treacherously taking advantage of the literal meaning of the words, came with two riders on each horse. They met at Drumgaudrum, a hill near the river Don; and in the unequal conflict which ensued, Brux fell, with most of his friends. The estate descended to an only daughter, Katherine; whose hand the widowed Lady Brux, with a spirit well suited to the times, offered as a reward to any one who would avenge her husband's death. Robert Forbes, a younger son of the chief of that family, undertook the adventure; and having challenged Muat to single combat, fought with and slew him at a piacd railed Badenyon, near the head of Glenbucket. A stone called Clachmuat (i. e. Muat's stone) still marks the place of combat. When the victor presented himself to claim the reward of its valour and to deprecate any delay of his happiness, Lady Brux

should go to Robert Forbes's bed while Muat's blood was yet reeking upon his gully" (i. e. knife). The victor expressed no disapprobation of this arrangement, nor did the maiden scruples of the bride impede her filial obedience.*

One more example (and we could add an hundred) of that insatiable thirst for revenge, which attended northern feuds. One of the Leslies, a strong and active young man, chanced to be in company with a number of the clan of Leith, the feudal enemies of his own. The place where they met being the hall of a powerful and neutral neighbour, Leslie was, like Shakspeare's Tybalt in a similar situation, compelled to endure their presence. Still he held the opinion of the angry Capulet, even in the midst of the entertainment, "Now by the stock and honour of my kin,

To strike him dead I hold it not a sin."

Accordingly, when they stood up to dance, and he found himself compelled to touch the hands and approach the persons of his detested enemies, the deadly feud broke forth. He unsheathed his dagger as he went down the dance-struck on the right and left-laid some dead and many wounded on the floor-threw up the window, leaped into the castle-court, and escaped in the general confusion. Such were the unsettled principles of the time, that the perfidy of the action was lost in its boldness; it was applauded by his kinsmen, who united themselves to defend what he had done; and the fact is commemorated in the well-known tune of triumph called "Lesley among the Leiths."

The genealogies of the Afghaun tribes may be paralleled with those of the clans; the nature of their favourite sports, their love of their native land, their hospitality, their address, their simplicity of manners exactly correspond. Their superstitions are the same, or nearly so. The Gholée Bea baun (demons of the desert) resemble the Boddach of the Highlanders, who "walked the heath at midnight and at noon." The Afghaun's most ordinary mode of divination is by examining the marks in the blade-bone of a sheep, held up to the light; and even so the Rev. Mr Robert Kirk assures us, that in his time, the end of the sixteenth century, "the seers prognosticate many future events (only for a month's space) from the shoulderbone of a sheep on which a knife never came. By looking into the bone they will tell if whoredom be committed in the owner's house; what money the master of the sheep had; if any will die out of that house for a month, and if any cattle there will take a trake (i. e. a discase), as if planet-struck.+

* Vide note to "Don," a poem, reprinted by Moir, Edinburgh, 1816, from an edition in 1742.

Essay on the Nature and Actions of the subterranean invisible people, going under