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                         THE HEART OF SCOTLAND

                         _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_


                            BONNIE SCOTLAND

                CONTAINING =75= FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
                             IN COLOUR BY
                             SUTTON PALMER

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                           THE HIGHLANDS AND
                          ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND

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                             IN COLOUR BY
                          WILLIAM SMITH, JUN.

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[Illustration: THE PASS OF KILLIECRANKIE]




                                  THE
                           HEART OF SCOTLAND

                              PAINTED BY
                             SUTTON PALMER

                             DESCRIBED BY
                         A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF

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                                 MCMIX




Preface


“Bonnie Scotland” pleased so many readers that it came to be
supplemented by another volume dwelling mainly on the western “Highlands
and Islands,” which was illustrated in a different style to match their
wilder and mistier features. Such an addition gave the author’s likeness
of Scotland a somewhat lop-sided effect; and to balance this list he has
prepared a third volume dealing with the trimmer and richer, yet not
less picturesque region oftenest visited by strangers--that is,
Perthshire and its borders. This is shown to be the _Heart of Scotland_,
not only as containing its most famous scenery, but as best blending
Highland and Lowland charms, and as having made a focus of the national
life and history. Pict and Scot, Celt and Sassenach, king and vassal,
mailed baron and plaided chief, cateran and farmer, Jacobite and
Hanoverian, gauger and smuggler, Kirk and Secession, here in turn
carried on a series of struggles whose incidents should be well known
through the _Waverley Novels_. But these famous romances seem too little
known to hasty readers of to-day; and some glimpses of Perthshire’s past
life may not prove over-familiar, at least to strangers in a county
where the author is at home.




Contents


                                                                    PAGE

I. PERTHSHIRE                                                          1

II. TAYSIDE                                                           20

III. ATHOLL                                                           52

IV. BREADALBANE                                                       80

V. STRATHEARN                                                        104

VI. THE MACGREGORS                                                   134

VII. ROB ROY AND HIS SONS                                            160

VIII. MENTEITH                                                       182




List of Illustrations


1. The Pass of Killiecrankie                               _Frontispiece_

                                                             FACING PAGE

2. A Highland Moor                                                     8

3. A Highland Strath                                                  17

4. Perth from the Slopes of Kinnoull Hill                             24

5. Autumn in the Highlands                                            33

6. Dunkeld and Birnam                                                 40

7. A Highland Cottage                                                 49

8. The Trossachs                                                      56

9. The Falls of Tummel                                                65

10. The Moor of Rannoch                                               72

11. The Head of Loch Tay                                              81

12. The Dochart                                                       88

13. “The Lady of the Woods”                                           97

14. A Highland River                                                 104

15. A Highland Lake                                                  113

16. Glenfinlas                                                       120

17. Loch Lubnaig                                                     129

18. In the Macgregor Country                                         136

19. Loch Achray                                                      145

20. The Head of Loch Lomond                                          152

21. Silver Strand, Loch Katrine                                      161

22. The River Teith                                                  168

23. The Crags of Ben Venue                                           177

24. Stirling Castle                                                  192




THE HEART OF SCOTLAND




I

PERTHSHIRE


My text is taken from a writer to whom every discourse on our country
goes for authority and illustrations.

     Among all the provinces in Scotland, if an intelligent stranger
     were asked to describe the most varied and the most beautiful, it
     is probable he would name the county of Perth. A native, also, of
     any other district of Caledonia, though his partialities might lead
     him to prefer his native county in the first instance, would
     certainly class that of Perth in the second, and thus give its
     inhabitants a fair right to plead, that--prejudice
     apart--Perthshire forms the fairest portion of the northern
     kingdom.

Scott was an alien in Perthshire, his judgment of which, then, should be
“neither partial nor impartial,” as the Provost of Portobello desired;
while it is so much my native heath that I give it no place but that of
first in all the counties of Britain. There can be small doubt of the
verdict pronounced by visitors, who take the Scottish Highlands as the
cream of our island’s scenery, and in most cases know little of the
Highlands beyond this central maze of mountains and valleys, falling to
the rich plain of Strathmore, spread out between the rugged Grampians
and the green hills of Ochil and Sidlaw.

Here arose the ancient Alban, or realm of Alpin, the core of historic
Scotland, a name that has been fondly identified with that of the Alps;
but I am not going to entangle myself in the snares of philology. If the
Perthshire Bens seem insignificant beside the Alps, for the former, at
least, no boastful pretensions are made by their sons, who familiarly
speak of them as the “hills” rather than the mountains. _Hill_, indeed,
is used in the Highlands in a rougher sense, to denote the wild heathy
land as distinct from the cultivated glen. I have heard an old-fashioned
sportsman speak of going out on “the hill,” when he was actually
descending to a lower level; and so R. L. Stevenson has it--

    Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
    And the hunter home from the hill.

Alban appears to have extended above Perthshire, taking in at least the
headwaters of the Spey and other streams flowing north. It certainly
included the basin of the Tay and the upper waters of the Forth. And as
Lowland and Highland scenery are finely mingled on these rivers, so here
met and blended the confluent torrents of blood and language swelling
into a steady stream of national life. What may be called a Scottish
kingdom first took shape on the banks of Tay, where long was fixed its
chief seat. Something like a pattern spun by the shuttle of war comes at
last to light on a torn web of blood-dyed, mist-dimmed checks and
stripes, hitherto a puzzling blur for the most erudite spectacles. The
Muse of early history seems like that chameleon, whose fate was
explained by a Highland soldier: “I put it on my bonnet and it went
black; I put it on my coat and it turned red; but when I let it oot on
my kilt, the tartan fairly bursted it.”

It is an old reproach against us that every Scot looks on himself as
descended from “great and glorious but forgotten kings.” If, indeed, we
calculate by geometrical progression how many millions of ancestors each
of us can claim in the last thirty generations or so, the chances seem
to be against any Briton not having some strain of quasi-royal blood in
his veins. Scotland had, at least, many kings to be descended from,
several apocryphal dozens of them, as named and numbered by George
Buchanan, before he comes down to chronicles that can be verified. But
to our critical age, the long row of early royal portraits exhibited at
Holyrood, painted by a Dutchman at so much the square foot, seem worth
still less as records than as works of art. The most ardent Scottish
patriot no longer sets store by such fables as historians like Hector
Boece wove into their volumes; nor is it necessary to examine so fond
imaginations as that of descent from a Pharaoh’s daughter, Scota, or
from a Ninus king of Nineveh. Finn and Fergus, Oscar and Ossian, we must
leave in cloudland, looking downwards to pick our steps over slippery
rock and boggy heather, among which there is no firm footing upon traces
of an aboriginal pre-Celtic stratum of humanity.

When the Romans garrisoned rather than occupied southern Scotland, and
made reconnoitring expeditions into the north, its fastnesses were
stoutly defended by fierce Caledonians, woodland savages, and Picti,
painted warriors, who may or may not have been the same people. If the
same, they may well have split into hostile tribes, warring against each
other like the kindred Mohawks and Hurons, sometimes amalgamated by
conquest, sometimes uniting to make raids on richer Lowland clearings.
After the false dawn of Roman annals ceases to throw a glimmer on those
hardy barbarians, darkness again falls over mountain and forest, lit
only by the twinkling lamp of adventurous missionaries. Then the
twilight of middle-age history shows a Pictish kingdom seated in
Charlemagne’s age on the Tay and its tributaries, but there presently
overthrown by pushful invaders.

These were the Dalriad Scots from Ireland, who began their independent
career by getting precarious foothold on the nearest coastland
promontory of North Britain. Baffled, as it seems, in an attempt thence
to master the country of their origin, then driven, perhaps, from their
coast settlements by a stronger swarm of Scandinavian hornets, this
stirring race shoved their way across the western Highlands to take a
firmer stand in the heart of Scotland, when Kenneth MacAlpine overthrew
the Pictish kingdom at Scone, its capital. Buchanan reports two
successive battles, the scene of the former a few miles off, at
Forteviot, where he makes Kenneth act on the motto of the Celtic
Society, _Olim Marte, nunc arte_. His chiefs, we are told, not being
very keen for the encounter, while they lay snoring off their drink, the
king worked upon them by means of a young cousin of his, disguised as
an angel in phosphorescent fish-skins, and equipped with a sort of
primitive megaphone, through which he roused the sleepers by a promise
of victory, then slipped off his celestial raiment to disappear in the
darkness before these heavy-headed warriors were wide awake. It is not
often we are taken so well behind the scenes of a miracle.

At Forteviot, a name whose prefix is held as one of the rare Pictish
vocables left to build philological theories, Kenneth appears to have
fixed his own seat. The capital of such a kingdom would be no more
permanent than Abyssinia’s chief camp at Gondar or Abbis Abbeba. At all
events it was hereabouts that currents of molten metal came together to
mingle, cool and harden into the foundation of the Scottish nation. As
yet it was the kingdom of Alban which spread around like a lava flood,
to overrun a more or less imperfect amalgamation of Briton and Saxon to
the south, of Norseman and Celt to the north and west, while, on all
sides, it once and again had nearly been drowned by fresh waves of
invasion from the Baltic. When, nearly two hundred years after Kenneth’s
Perthshire victories, Malcolm II. had added Lothian and Strathclyde to
his volcanic realm, the style of Scotia appears in history, by which the
settlers now dominant in Caledonia seem to kick off their connection
with Ireland, where their name dies out as it is born again in the
growing Scotland, and Duns Scotus becomes no longer in danger of being
confused with a Scotus Erigena.

There is early Scottish history boiled down to a page or two, on which
one might work in other changes that had made less violent progress,
while the tops of the Grampians were being weather-worn into silt for
the Tay. Those Picts had been in part conquered by the Cross before they
fell under the sword. The disciplined faith of Rome overlaid the wild
Christianity implanted from Iona. The ecclesiastical metropolis was
removed from the West to Dunkeld, then for a time to Abernethy, another
old Pictish centre, and finally to St. Andrews. Intercourse with the
world, and especially with the Norman conquerors of England, imported
the feudal system with its dovetailing of power and ambition between
kings who were in turn sovereign and vassal on different estates of
their territories. The English tongue began to absorb that of the Gael,
as the Celtic leaven seemed to be lost in the Saxon dough. But when
Malcolm Canmore and his Anglicising queen did so much to bring Scotland
into touch with its more civilised neighbour, they moved their chief
seat no nearer the new border than Dunfermline.

For long after Scotland had developed into a vertebrate organism, its
heart beat in the geographical centre. Its kings were crowned at Scone,
Charles II. the last of them, when indeed the immemorial sanctity of
that Pictish palace had fallen into some disesteem. The adjacent city of
Perth, with its Castle, its Cathedral, and its four monasteries, was the
Winchester of Scotland, as Scone the Westminster. The early Parliaments
met at Perth more often than at other towns that might suit the
convenience of kings who had to be much on the move through their
agitated dominion. During the English intrusion, Perth was garrisoned by
the Edwards’ lieutenants, and suffered repeated attacks from Wallace and
Bruce, who found concealment and rallying-place in the wild woods
within a few miles of the city walls. The honour of being the capital
was not definitely taken from Perth till the murder of James I. showed
it too near the stormy Highlands, while the Dunedin citadel seemed no
longer in close peril from the English side.

Before the seat of government came to be fixed at Edinburgh, king and
parliament are often found at Stirling, with Linlithgow for the
Versailles of Scottish Royalty. Perth still held a high place,
recognised by a decree of James VI. as second in the kingdom. Down to
the end of his reign, its Provosts were as often as not the great lords
of the neighbourhood. It had a leading voice in national opinion. Some
of the earliest martyrs suffered here; then here broke out the first
tumult of the Reformation. Later on, it became a hot focus of
Presbyterian and Covenanting zeal; and after the popular worship had
been firmly established, it was around Perth that sprang up several of
its sectarian offshoots.

Accident of situation rather than its own choice again made Perth a
centre of affairs, when Mar’s melting army lay here through the winter
of 1715, watching King George’s force at Stirling; and the forlorn Old
Pretender reached Scone in time to chill the spirits of his partisans,
already too near freezing-point. Prince Charlie made a more dashing
appearance at Perth for a few days; but when he had marched on, the
douce burghers let it be seen that their hearts did not go with him.
They more warmly received the Duke of Cumberland, as representing the
orderly settlement that was good for trade. The wild Highlandman, with
his uncanny weapons and his unbusiness-like sentiments, was here looked
on as suspiciously as the Red Indian warrior in a border city of
America, who in New York or Philadelphia would draw more sympathy or
staring curiosity. The Fair City, while willing to keep friends with the
Tory lairds whose names have been familiar to her for centuries, cast
her douce vote for prosperity and progress. In the Georgian age she
gained some such reputation as Norwich in England, cultivating arts and
letters as well as trade, and becoming known, in a modest way, by her
printing presses, of which the _Encyclopædia Perthensis_ was the most
notable production.

Meanwhile, the blending of once hostile races had gone on faster in the
centre of Scotland than at its extremities. Where first a national
government had come into being, a higher organisation of tribal life was
evolved. Here, as elsewhere, civilisation proceeded by steps over which
civilised philanthropy shakes its head. The Perthshire Highlands, not to
speak of Strathmore, contained fertile straths and valleys that offered
themselves as cheap reward for the followers and favourites of Scottish
kings. Norman, Saxon, and still farther-fetched adventurers got charters
to make good by the sword against the sons of the soil. Its lords,
native or _fremd_, lost and won at taking a hand in the general game of
Scottish history, as when the abetters of Bruce turned out to have
played on the right card, or again, when the murderers of James I. paid
dearly for their crime, to the profit of those who hunted them down.
But, in the main, plaids did not hold out against coats of mail, so that
for centuries the great lords of Perthshire have been of Lowland origin.
Like doughty Hal Smith of the

[Illustration: A HIGHLAND MOOR]

Wynd, the sons of the plain in old times had claws as sharp as the
mountain cats’; it was only when cultivators and craftsmen had ceased to
handle arms, unless for holiday sport, that a spate of Highland war
could burst through the passes, even then soon to scatter and spend
itself in the face of disciplined resistance.

But while those strangers rose to power and wealth upon the heather,
they fell captive to its spirit, taking on the manners, sentiments, and
dress of the dispossessed clans. The Stewarts from England, the
Campbells from Ireland, was it? the Drummonds from Hungary or where?
among other names of chivalrous antecedents, bloomed out as clans, with
new tartans, feuds, and legends, to complicate the native pattern of
flesh and blood; and in no long time they became more Highland than the
Highlanders themselves. Most remarkable is the adoption of what has come
to be called the Scottish national dress, which, according to some
modern critics, ought rather to be the mackintosh. There was a time when
Stewart or Murray looked on the plaid as badge of a savage foeman; there
would be a time when the imported Highlanders grew as proud of kilt and
bagpipes as if these had come down to them straight from Adam. All over
the world have gone those badges of a race that gave them to its
conquerors in exchange for its proudest blood. The cult of the tartan,
revived in our own age by romantic literature and royal patronage, is an
old story. One of the early emigrants to the Southern States of America
is said to have rigged out all his negroes in kilts and such-like,
teaching them also to speak Gaelic and to pipe and reel among cotton
fields and cane swamps. But when one of those blackamoor retainers,
liveried in a kilt, was sent to meet a practically-minded countryman
landing from Scotland, the effect of so transmogrified a figure proved
appalling. “Hae ye been long oot?” stammered the newcomer, and took his
passage back by the next ship.

Away from Scotland, all true Scots carry over the world an outfit of
which the colours, the trimmings, and the gewgaws come from the
Highlands, while the hard-wearing qualities of the stuff are rather of
Lowland manufacture. Both spinning and dyeing, I maintain, have best
been done in Perthshire, a county of varied aspects, which set me the
example of passing to a change of metaphor. It is in this central region
that a right proportion of the Saxon dough and the Celtic yeast, baked
for centuries by fires of love and war, have risen into the most crusty
loaf of Scottish character. In the damp western Highlands and the cold
north the baking may have been less effectual, producing a more spongy
mass, not so full of nutriment, but more relished by some as a change
from the stodginess of modern life. In some parts of the Lowlands,
again, the dough turns out more dour and sour, not enough leavened by
fermentations that leave it too leathery for all teeth. While all over
Scotland there has been going on a more or less thorough interaction and
coalescence of once repellent bodies, in Perthshire, I assert, the
amalgamation has been most complete. “Hae ye been happy in yer jeels?”
is a civil question I have heard one old wife ask of another. Here
nature seems to have been happy in a due mixture of sweet and acid,
shredded and stirred, boiled and moulded, with the success of Dundee
marmalade.

The same fusion as between Highlander and Lowlander, between Norman and
Saxon, it has been the work of time to bring about between Northerner
and Southerner, the process there hindered by a fixed border-line of
hostile memories, of variant creeds, customs, and laws, going to keep up
natural antipathies. But such fences are now so much fallen down that
there is little to stop different breeds from straggling on to one
another’s fields, the movement indeed being mostly one way, since the
leaner flock is more tempted from hill-sides eaten bare to the green
pastures of the south. What is as yet a mechanical mixture tends to
become a chemical one, as these wandering atoms find affinities in a
fresh environment; then the substance of national life should be
enriched, as every generation goes on incorporating the coarse
good-humour and practical temper of the plainsman, with the generous
affections and mettlesome hardihood of the mountaineer. The result as
yet may be best seen in London, that crucible of blood and manners,
where there are Englishmen who would fain affect to be Scots, and Scots
who have forgotten all but their pride in Scotland. I met one such the
other day in a train, who had his boy arrayed in a kilt, but neither of
them knew what tartan it was. Where a Campbell wears the colours of a
Cameron with indifference, he unconsciously continues what was begun by
a Graham or a Gordon inventing a tartan for himself, and may end in
plaid and tweed taking their turn of fashion with serge and broadcloth,
when _Tros Tyriusque_ are indistinguishably mixed in one name and
nature.

Such is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But there are centrifugal
as well as centripetal forces at work. When the fear of a foreign foe no
longer hangs over us, we fall into wars of interests, of classes, of
sexes; and piping times of peace breed likewise artificial injuries,
useless martyrdoms, unpractical patriotisms, by which we would fain set
our teeth on edge from the real sufferings of our fathers. Idly
retrospective persons find nothing better to do than to rub up old sores
into an imitation of plague spots, instead of leaving them to heal and
vanish in the way of nature. Some discontented spirits among my
countrymen have lately been agitating for the protection of Scottish
rights and sentiments: it would appear more to the purpose if Englishmen
got up a league to bar out northern aggrandisement. While the sovereign
of the United Kingdom is bound to be of Scottish descent, and while
custom fills the English archbishoprics with an apostolic succession of
sons of the Covenant, there still, indeed, remains such a scandal as the
Prime Ministership being occasionally open to mere Englishmen. This
apart, however, most of our grievances may be comfortably digested by
chewing the cud of the Union in John Bull’s own spirit of easy
good-nature.

    Laurel crowns cleave to deserts,
    And power to him who power exerts:
    Hast not thy share? On wingèd feet,
    Lo! it rushes thee to meet.
    And all that Nature made thine own,
    Floating in air, or pent in stone,
    Shall rend the hills and cleave the sea,
    And like thy shadow follow thee.

The sorest gall of Scotland seems to be that her name has been like to
merge in England’s greater one, to which smart a plaster must be applied
in the revived title of Britain. No school-book would sell north of the
Tweed in this generation that let an English army serve a king of
England. Yet we cannot play the censor on the speech of our Continental
neighbours, who denounce as England the power that has ruled the waves
to their loss; and it is England which so many sons and dependents, in
so wide regions of the world, speak of as “home.” In the London Library
some vague hint of dirks and claymores has availed to keep Scottish
History a separate department; but one notes with concern how works on
the Topography of Scotland are scattered under the head of England,
while London is set up with a heading to itself. But what is this slight
to the carelessness of foreign authors quoting Scott and Burns among the
English poets!

It is perhaps inevitable that a firm with a long title should come to be
best known by the name of the prominent partner. One never could be
expected to style Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap in full, unless by way
of formal address; had it been no more than Dodson and Fogg, one might
make shift at an Austria-Hungary bracketing. Lord Bute is accused of
prompting George III. to pride in being born a _Briton_; but the
grievance seems more philosophically handled in a story of two Sandy
tars at Trafalgar, one of whom found fault with Nelson’s famous signal:
“‘England expects’--aye, but nothing about poor old Scotland!” was his
grumble. “Hoots!” answered his comrade, “don’t they know that every
Scotsman is sure to do his duty?”

I confess to having lukewarm sympathy with the perfervid patriotism that
is too ready to find quarrel in straws. Scotland has got quite her share
of practical benefit from the “sad and sorrowful Union,” and need not
grudge to England the nominal advantages of size and wealth, which the
latter sometimes appears to occupy as caretaker for her neighbour. So
long as Scottish enterprise, thrift, and industry are allowed fair play
on both sides of the Border, it seems childish to lament over lost
titles and ensigns, toys of history, that only in a museum may escape
being broken, and sooner or later will be swept into time’s dustbin.
When one sees how we have peacefully imbued our fellow subjects with our
best blood, I for one am not too sorry that our dark record of feuds and
slaughter and bigotry falls into its place in the background of a
grander scene, and that instead of cherishing thistly independence as a
romantic Norway or an austere Portugal, we merge our national life into
the greater kingdom’s, which, by good luck or good guidance, has come to
stand so high in the world for freedom, enlightenment, and solidity. In
this kingdom we take much the same place as the Manchus in China. All
over the world we go forth to prosper like that Chosen People of the old
dispensation, with this difference, that we have our Sion in our own
hands, to which come pilgrims from all nations. The comparison would fit
better if it allowed me to call Perthshire the Scottish land of Judah.

True Scots should have more philosophy than to imitate unenlightened
patriotisms that would interrupt a natural process defined by Herbert
Spencer as change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent
heterogeneity accompanied by the dissipation of motion and the
integration of matter. So Penelope peoples, in their darkness, undo the
work of civilising daylight. Let Bohemia rage and the states of the
Balkans imagine vain things. But why should Scotland waste time and
electric light on looking back too fondly to the things that are behind,
while she cannot help pressing forward to the inevitable destiny before
her? With the warning of Ireland at hand, some of us cry out for Home
Rule and such-like retrogressions that might go to giving back, at one
end of the United Kingdom, the shadow of its cloudy dignity along with
the substance of its old discords.

Where is this reactionary _Particularismus_ to stop? There are parts of
Caledonia which, in its stern and wild times, were independent of each
other, some that still are as different from one another in blood and
speech, as most of Scotland is from England. Shall Badenoch or Buchan
awake its overlaid individuality? May not Galloway and Strathclyde set
up for recognition of their ex-independence? Then why not encourage
Strathbogie, the Cumbraes, the Braes of Bonny Doon, or the parish of
Gandercleugh, to lament upon the fate that has made them members of one
greater body? Nay, now that the clans are broken up, could they not
contrive to respin their warp of local loyalty, crossing the woof of
national patriotism? Such _reductio ad absurdum_ is worth thinking
about, when at this moment there are signs of relapse in the long
convalescence from that Jacobite fever that “carried” hard heads as well
as soft hearts, and set old grudges against the Union flaunting in
plaid and philibeg.

I am informed of a movement for putting the kingdom of Fife in its right
place before a world too apt to jest at its pretensions. These are many
and serious. Of old, _Fibh_ had kings of its own, of such immemorial
antiquity that their very names, much more their portraits, are not
forthcoming. Enclosed between two firths, this region makes almost an
island, with the Ochils as border-line cutting it off from the rest of
Scotland. Thus the Roman legions thundered by it; and its maiden
independence was never violated, if we reject a scandalous suggestion as
to Cupar being the Mount Graupius of Tacitus. The kings of Scotland were
much at home here, notably Malcolm Canmore, that effectual founder of
the modern kingdom. If Bruce were born who knows where, he came to be
buried at Dunfermline. History tells how Queen Mary was lodged at
Lochleven, and how more than one King James had to be snatched away, by
force or fraud, from his chosen residence in Fife. The dialect of Fife,
mixed with that of Lothian, made the standard Court language, while
Gaelic was ebbing out of the Perthshire straths. The see of the old
Scottish Church was at St. Andrews, where arose the first northern
university, the local Saint Regulus being supplanted by that apostle
who, according to scoffers, was chosen as Scotland’s patron because of
the keen eye he showed on earth for loaves and fishes. In Protestant
days, several of the religious leaders--Knox, the Melvilles, the
Erskines, John Glas, Edward Irving, Thomas Chalmers--were all either
natives of or sojourners in Fife. This

[Illustration: A HIGHLAND STRATH]

many-havened coast was the nursery of the Scottish navy and commerce.
The most famous national product, next to flesh and blood and whisky, is
golf, whose headquarters are in the East Neuk of this choice shire. When
we consider the many towns of Fife, its wealth in horn and corn, and
coal and fish, its output of textile fabrics, and remember its past
history, should we not allow that this and not Perthshire is truly the
heart of Scotland? It has even a Wales in Kinross, whose craving for
separate status might one day raise a troublesome question. Nor does it
want a classic bard to invoke for it the trumpet of fame:

    Nymphae, quae colitis highissima monta Fifaea,
    Seu vos Pittenwema tenent, seu Cralia crofta,
    Sive Anstraea domus, ubi nat haddocus in undis,
    Codlineusque ingens, et fleucca et sketta pererrant
    Per costam, et scopulis lobster monifootus in udis
    Creepat, et in mediis ludit whitenius undis, _etc._

Gentle reader, can you guess what standard poet I quote? _Je vous le
donne en cent._ The most hackneyed citation, it seems, ought nowadays to
be labelled, for when in _Bonnie Scotland_ I aired a verse beginning,
“Fairshon had a son who married Noah’s daughter,” a certain Caledonian
newspaper critic was moved to applaud by calling for the author. Such be
the proficient patriots who scunner at King Edward’s title as Seventh
across the Tweed, and at other bawbeeworths of offence to Scottish
nationality!

After this fling by the way, I fall back into my jogtrot. It seems
claimable for Fife, then, that its county council be glorified as a
parliament sitting by turns at Cupar, Dunfermline, and Kirkcaldy; or,
at least, that in a revived Scottish parliament its representatives
shall assert their old privilege of voting first, before that
presumptuous Perthshire. The sovereign’s title raises some difficulty.
Edward VII., of course, is out of the question. But it has to be
admitted that Edward I. of England received the homage of Fife at
Dunfermline, so his present Majesty might justly be styled Edward II.
_qua_ King of Fife. There being, indeed, a doubt as to how far Edward
Baliol made his reign a _fait accompli_ in Fife, some precisians propose
to meet the case by treating our king locally as the second and a half
Edward. In the army, of course, it is not to be borne that the Fife
contingent shall be lumped together with English forces. In future, one
or more British regiments must be equipped and distinguished as Fifers.
The epithet Fifeish should come into more constant use; but as
misconception might arise from vulgar misuse, _Fifeian_ may be coined as
an untarnished adjective, the old one to be applied to the less
admirable or more commonplace features of the county, its distilleries,
railway junctions, colliery villages, east winds, and so forth, while a
discrimination is to be made in quoting those qualities and achievements
that have made Fife the noblest member of the greatest empire in the
world, whose style shall forthwith run, at least in local acts, The
Kingdom of Fife, with the adjacent kingdoms of Scotland, England, and
Ireland, and the rest of the British dominions, etc., etc.

For Perthshire, I make no such pretensions to isolated dignity, only for
having set a pattern to all Scotland, and thus exhibiting some title to
be taken as hub of the universe. But in rambling over its hills and
glens, I hope to let it show for itself the truth of Scott’s estimate,
justified by his reference to other writers, such as might be quoted by
the hundred, all in the same tale of due admiration.

     It is long since Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, with that excellent
     taste which characterises her writings, expressed her opinion that
     the most interesting district of every country, and that which
     exhibits the varied beauties of natural scenery in greatest
     perfection, is that where the mountains sink down upon the
     champaign, or more level land. The most picturesque, if not the
     highest hills, are also to be found in the county of Perth. The
     rivers find their way out of the mountainous region by the wildest
     leaps, and through the most romantic passes connecting the
     Highlands with the Lowlands. Above, the vegetation of a happier
     climate and soil is mingled with the magnificent characteristics of
     mountain-scenery; and woods, groves, and thickets in profusion,
     clothe the base of the hills, ascend up the ravines, and mingle
     with the precipices. It is in such favoured regions that the
     traveller finds what the poet Gray, or some one else, has termed,
     Beauty lying in the lap of Terror.




II

TAYSIDE


I see that certain critics accuse me of being flippant, discursive,
garrulous, gossiping, everything that your gravely plodding writers are
not, and they no doubt find readers to their mind. It must be confessed
that as a model of style I have an eye rather on the upper waters of the
Tay, with its swirls and eddies and ripples, than on its broad and
placid flow by the fat Carse of Gowrie. All I can say for myself is that
I keep my course amid windings and tumblings, and that my foaming
shallows may sweep along the same silt as loads drumlier currents lower
down. Yet one loves to please all tastes, within reason, so for once let
me try to be as steady and slow as the mill-lead at Perth, which, if all
traditions be true, began as a Roman aqueduct, and so may give itself
airs of classical authority.

The Tay, then, is the principal river of Scotland, which discharges into
the North Sea a larger volume of water than any other in Britain. Its
head-streams rise upon the borders of Argyll, but only after issuing
from Loch Tay does it assume a name apparently derived from a Celtic
word for quiet-flowing water, in other parts of the kingdom taking such
forms as _Taw_ and _Tavy_. The Tay has its course of 120 miles almost
entirely in Perthshire, receiving many tributaries from the mountains on
either side, and thus draining a basin of some 2400 square miles. At
Perth it becomes navigable for small vessels, and debouches at the
thriving port of Dundee, where its estuary separates the shires of
Forfar and Fife. For further details, see any geographical work.

There now! no Aristarchus can find fault with that paragraph, in which I
have not broken into a single anecdote or metaphor, though tempted to
say _en passant_ that the basin of the Tay only needs flattening out to
over-measure that of the Thames. But this formal style sits on me as
uneasily as Saul’s armour upon David, so I leave it to rust in the works
of reference; and as a stone for my scrip, snatch up a well-worn
quotation already slung by a mightier hand:

    “Behold the Tiber!” the vain Roman cried,
    Viewing the ample Tay from Baiglie’s side;
    But where’s the Scot that would the vaunt repay
    And hail the puny Tiber for the Tay?

Scots are not in the way of belittling their own advantages; but a
certain Italian writer gravely comments on this statement by giving an
estimate as to the depth of the Tiber at Rome, whereas he himself has
seen a bare-legged boy wading the Tay above Perth bridge to pick up
pebbles. Being unable to refute his main contention, I would have him
know that this laddie was probably risking wet breeks at low tide, not
in search of pebbles, but of pearls, sometimes picked up here; that a
bridge would naturally be built near a ford; and that a mile higher up,
beyond the tide-flow, the Tay is deep enough to drown boys in its
treacherous pools, and might make Julius Caesar himself call for help if
he tried swimming across it in spate. If classic poets are to be
trusted, yellow is the best epithet of the Tiber, while Ruskin
admiringly tells us how the pools of the Tay glint brown and blue among
black swirls and rippling shallows. In the matter of climate, at all
events, we are not going to let any foreigner over-brag us, for as the
local poet, Alexander Glas, exclaims beside the Tay:

    In scorching sun, the Italian cries in vain:
    O, happy, happy Caledonian swain!
    Whose groves are ever cool, and mild the skies,
    Where breezes from the ocean ever rise.

This bard, perhaps, was not aware that the snow lies longer on Soracte
than on Kinnoull Hill; nor does he confess that for two or three months
in the year the happy Caledonian swain may now and then welcome Italian
ice-cream merchants; and in fair prose he ought to own his ocean breezes
for east winds on this side of the country. The city of Perth, indeed,
stands hardly a score of miles back from the sea, and made a thriving
port in days when it was an advantage to unload goods up-country, well
out of the way of attack. Its mariners carried on not only a coasting
trade, but sailed to the Hanse ports, and took a turn at fighting with
their English rivals when competition would sometimes be pushed to the
point of piracy. It appears that trading craft plied as far up as Scone,
below which a row-boat is now apt to stick in shallow rapids.

Through the international war-time flourished at Perth a notable line of
Mercers, who appear as wealthy traders, magistrates, and benefactors of
their native city, sometimes rising to higher posts in the state, coming
to make noble alliances through which their head branch is now engrafted
in the Lansdowne title. The old staple trade of the Fair City was
glove-making; its skinners became an important corporation, and tanning
held out to our day, but has been overlaid by dyeing, trades that might
all merge into each other. Perhaps as a branch of dyeing sprang Todd’s
Perth Office Ink, which I note to be now glorified as Moncrieff’s Ink,
and long may it flow under that auspicious name! Another industry of
Perth used to be shipbuilding, where, up to the end of the eighteenth
century, vessels came and went by the hundred, and a smack sailed for
London every few days. Perth was in the way of improving her port and
deepening its approaches, when railways brought about a permanent low
tide in the Tay traffic.

While ships were growing larger, the Tay estuary had been silting up and
narrowing as its flat shores were reclaimed into the fertile Carse of
Gowrie. This dry ground was won by _inches_, a name often met along
Tayside, where what were once islands have become welded on to the
shore. The Inches, _par excellence_, are the public parks above and
below Perth; _the_ Inch being its North Inch, in which the Romans are
fondly believed to have hailed their Campus Martius--_Parvam Trojam,
simulataque magnis Pergama_.

Higher up the river, in its great bend to the south, another flat bears
the suggestive name of “Bloody Inches”; and the Perth Inches too have
been arena for many a fray. The chief martial memory of the South Inch
is as site of Cromwell’s citadel, in the construction of which were used
the walls of the Greyfriars, with hundreds of its tombstones, besides
other monuments of the city. The North Inch is best known to fame for
the battle of the Clans in 1396, when threescore Highlandmen let out
most of their quarrelsome blood before an excited multitude, the king
and court looking on from what served as a grand stand, the Gilten
Arbour in the Dominican Gardens, a structure that probably stood near
the present site of the Perth Academy in Rose Terrace.

There can be no doubt about the authenticity of this battle; a record is
extant of making the lists for it, the number of combatants being
expressly stated as sixty. But, among the pregnant confusion of Highland
names, it is not easy to be sure who those champions were. We used to be
taught from _Tales of a Grandfather_ that they represented hostile
confederacies called the Clan Kay and the Clan Chattan, the latter
perhaps wild cats of the mountains, the former by no means to be
identified with the Mackays of the north. But the Kay and the Chattan
names appear to cover one another, while the other party seems better
distinguished as the Clan Quhele, in whom some see the Camerons and a
hint of Loch_iel_, others the Macdougals, their name thus transformed by
a _tour de force_ of etymology, while also it has been conjectured that
this mysterious clan did not survive its defeat, scattered and absorbed
into luckier kindreds.

A writer, wearing both the names of Shaw and Macintosh, who has given
piously profound study to

[Illustration: PERTH FROM THE SLOPES OF KINNOULL HILL]

the subject, concludes that those adversaries were the sons of an Adam
and a Dougal, clans known to have fought against each other in the wars
of Bruce, which as likely as not means an old tribal feud. Adam, it
seems, in this wet climate, is quite capable of being weathered down
into Ay, Hay, or Kay. The name Dougal sounds in Gaelic something like
_Gooil_, or _Hooil_, which Lowland writers might make a shot at as
_Quhele_, _Quhevil_, _Queill_, _Chewill_, and other forms in which it
appears. Their rivals in certain books are called _Clachinyha_, which
Dr. R. C. Maclagan claims as the origin of his own name, and to
illustrate the contention, presents some forty spellings of Maclagan
varied through four centuries, also nearly a dozen used by the same
family in the records of one generation. Not only at home, indeed, are
Scottish names apt to be transmogrified. Belize, in Honduras, is said to
be a corruption of Wallace, the pirate, not the patriot; and there is a
story that a Macdougal, shipwrecked of old on the Barbary coast, so much
impressed himself on the natives as a _santon_ that his tomb stood
mumbling godfather to the port of Mogador.

In Wyntoun’s Chronicle, the leaders’ names are anglicised as “Christy
Johnson” (Gilchrist MacIan) and “Sir Farquhar’s son,” the latter
elsewhere called Little Schea or Shaw. The Shaws hold themselves a
branch of the Mackintoshes, who claim the headship of Clan Chattan, also
claimed by the MacPhersons, “sons of a parson,” or at least of some one
boasted by a certain bard as a “superior person.” The matter seems to
have begun with an encounter in which the Sheriff of Angus was
killed--a long way from the Cameron country--in quelling such a
disturbance as often vexed the Highland line. The king sent the Earls of
Dunbar and Crawford to do what justice could be done upon this outrage;
and they have the credit of suggesting the settlement of an obstinate
feud by picked bloodshed in the royal presence. Some writers have wasted
ink on the feebleness of Robert III. as to blame for what strikes them
as a revolting scene; but such a show of gladiatorship was as much in
keeping with the manners of the age as a football match with ours; and
to the king’s advisers it no doubt seemed excellent policy to let those
wild cats cripple or punish each other in a holiday spectacle. As a
matter of fact it is recorded that the border had peace from the
caterans for long after this signal blood-letting. “The forwardest of
both parties being slain,” says George Buchanan, “the promiscuous
multitude, left without leaders, gave over their trade of sedition for
many years after, and betook themselves to their husbandry again.”

The early historians differ as to details. Eachin MacIan, the young
chief who loses heart, owes a good deal to Scott’s dramatic instinct;
but Goethe was not well posted in the facts, when to Eckermann he
extolled the novelist’s “art” in “contriving” to make one man fail on
the day of combat that his place may be taken by the hero, Smith: “there
is finish! there is a hand!” One story makes the fugitive escape by
swimming before the fight. Several mention a man as missing from the
Clan Quhele ranks, to fill whose place a sturdy Perth craftsman
volunteered on promise of reward. More than one Perthshire family has
been proud to claim descent from this bandy-legged champion. If it be
true, as somewhere stated, that his posterity, the Gows, were recognised
as a shoot of Clan Chattan, it may be that Harry Smith was the real
Conachar, apprenticed at Perth to a trade which Highland chiefs might
well see cause to patronise. Scott, however, seems romancing in putting
the combatants into shirts of mail. All the accounts agree as to two
bands of next to naked Highlandmen hacking and hewing each other with
swords, axes, and dirks, till of one side only ten or eleven were left
sorely wounded, and of the other, one escaped or was taken prisoner, his
fate being variously stated as pardon and hanging. No doubt the show
furnished as much satisfaction to its public as when, sixty years ago,
the German traveller, J. G. Kohl, found the Inch again covered with
people eager to see a circus clown give bold advertisement to his
company by crossing the Tay in a washing-tub drawn by four geese. It has
been supposed, by the way, that the combat of Highlanders may have been
arranged partly for the amusement of a body of French knights then
visiting the Scottish court, and no doubt finding it dull as well as
rude.

Since that slaughterous day, some real fights and many sham ones have
been enacted on the Inch of Perth. Of one I may say, _pars magna fui_,
and though my militation was without glory it did not want an accursed
bard who, in the columns of the _Perthshire Constitutional_, sang, a
long way after Tennyson, how “some one had blundered.” These were the
early days of the Volunteer movement, inspired by more zeal than
knowledge, when, in my teens, I served as sole officer to a company of
the Perthshire Volunteers, after some slight apprenticeship in a school
cadet corps, equipped with discarded carbines. One of my first
appearances in efficient arms was at the head of a column that marched
on to the lower end of the Inch before more spectators than would be
gathered about the arena of that clan-combat. The foe here coming into
view, it behoved my company to extend in skirmishing order, covering the
deployment of our column into line. So much I could do; and we found
ourselves exposed in the van facing a hostile line of Dundee Highlanders
who held the centre of the Inch. But the report of what then befell is
so little to our credit that I throw it into shamefaced small print.

     We advanced boldly, blazing away our blank cartridges as fast as we
     could load and fire; while the enemy’s skirmishers, as arranged in
     the programme, fell back before us. My men were delighted with this
     movement, which gave the effect of our winning the battle by our
     special prowess; and not knowing better, we went on fighting for
     our own hand, till we had nearly run out of ammunition. Meanwhile
     from our side rang out imperious bugle-calls, which made me none
     the wiser. At last, when the enemy’s thin red line could no longer
     be seen for the cloud of smoke, I bethought myself to look round,
     and observe how my devoted band was spread out half-way between the
     two armies, exposed on either side to an exterminating fire of
     cannon and rifles. There seemed something wrong here; but before I
     could consider what to do about it, an aide-de-camp galloped up,
     shepherding us with objurgations: “What on earth are you about,
     sir! Get out of the way! Close and retire!” There was stronger
     language that did not help to enlighten me. In my confusion, I
     closed to the left, whereas our place was by this time on the right
     of the line, the result being that we had to run the gauntlet of
     our own army’s fire, then to turn and double up behind it to gain
     our vacant post. That was not the worst of it. The drill of those
     days made an important point of a company being pivoted on its
     right or left flank; I forget the principle, but this I remember
     too well that, whereas we ought to have come up “right in front” or
     “left in front,” we had got the wrong way on, and reached our place
     in the line with our rear turned to the enemy. My military science
     was at a loss how to remedy this mistake; but I modestly ventured
     on the order “right counter-march,” the effect of which was marred
     by the right-hand man--who indeed as a haunter of the Barracks knew
     more about soldiering than myself--_sotto voce_ giving the word and
     example, “left counter-march.” How at last we got ourselves
     straight and in face of the foe, I can hardly tell, but I, for one,
     was ready to imitate poor Conachar by plunging into the Tay,
     covered not with wounds but with blushes.

Another disgrace had nearly stained my company’s name, when we served as
guard of honour for Queen Victoria, on the inauguration of Prince
Albert’s statue at the foot of the North Inch. For once Her Majesty came
late--I forget through what delay--and we had to stand expectant for
hours under a hot sun, kept on the alert by a constant passing of
dignitaries, and pressed upon by a crowd that tried to break through our
ranks as often as a stately equipage drove up to excite the cry, “That’s
her, that’s her!” In vain I demanded the experienced help of police; on
us raw warriors fell the whole work of keeping the way clear, a very
fidgety task for a short-sighted young officer, who had not seen his
sovereign since he was young enough to be disappointed that she wore a
straw bonnet instead of a golden crown. When at last she came, it was
without observation, the crowd having given her up; then I shall always
be thankful that my lucky star showed me a carriage filled with ladies
in black, to which I was able to present arms just in the nick of
time--a moment more and the Queen would have been let go by in silence
without any salutation even from her heedless guard!

And already I had made a blunder of etiquette. A considerable force of
regulars were present, while we, as a local body, held the place of
honour. During the hours of uncertainty officers of rank kept galloping
to and fro, to whom I was uncertain whether or no I should pay military
compliments. I asked my colonel, who was as much at a loss as myself.
Then I consulted the staff-sergeant on whom I depended as my coach, and
his advice struck me as full of wisdom: “I don’t know what the practice
is, sir, but it would be safer to do it too much than too little.” So I
began presenting arms to every cocked hat that came by, and as I could
never be quite sure whether this or that one had been already saluted,
our rifles were going up and down all morning like the keys of a piano.
Afterwards I learned that the Sovereign’s guard should ignore any other
personage.

I could tell other tales of the Perthshire Volunteers in their early
days, but all I will say here is that if the Territorials who have taken
our place are more smart and efficient, they cannot surpass us in
good-will to serve our country. Some of us can remember an older and
perhaps less serviceable force, the tottering Pensioners who turned out
at least once a year upon the Inch to fire a _feu de joie_ for the
Queen’s birthday. I rather think I knew that Peninsular lieutenant of
whom Sir Evelyn Wood tells a touching tale--though here I am a little
confused between two bearded veterans that gave kindly words to a
boy--how he had lived obscurely at Perth, unnoted by two generations,
till Major Wood took a public occasion of pointing him out to his
fellow-citizens as one of the heroes of Albuera; then the old man in a
back seat bowed his head in tears of pride and joy--“_Let me
greet!_”--overcome to hear that fiery day not forgotten by soldiers of
another age. To a veteran of a former generation quartered at Perth was
born a son, afterwards well-known as Charles Mackay, editor and poet,
and as stepfather of one of the most popular novelists of our day, whose
modestly retiring disposition is so notorious that I do not mention her
name.

In my youth the neighbourhood of Perth was strongly garrisoned by
retired officers, some of whom belonged to the Sandemanian congregation
here, an exclusive body that, like the Plymouth Brethren in England, had
a curious attraction for old Indian soldiers. The sons usually went with
their fathers, while in some cases the mothers and daughters attended
the Episcopal “Chapel,” where my _Wenigkeit_, as son of an Englishwoman,
escaped the long sermons and Shorter Catechism of Presbyterian boyhood.
The Anglican form of worship has in the last generation made great way
among townsmen, but it then was apt to mark either English associations
or hereditary Toryism. Perth had a Cathedral, looked on askance in those
days as “Puseyite,” so that even the bishop for a time held aloof from
it; at all events he preached regularly in our smaller church, his lawn
sleeves attracting youthful reverence beside the black-gowned pastor of
those Protestant days. Now, so strongly has turned the tide of
ecclesiastical fashion, it is the Cathedral at whose door a string of
equipages may be seen standing of a Sunday morning, and three or four
English prelates officiating at the altar in the shooting season. But
half a century ago, and later, the “Chapel,” as we called it, as yet
ignorant that we were “the Church in Scotland,” made the more genteel
place of worship, with peers, baronets, and lairds as thick as
blackberries in the congregation, their carriages breaking the Sabbath
quiet of the street. The English soldiers were marched to it from the
other end of the town, though that empty Cathedral stood neighbour to
their barracks; and thereby hangs a tale to be caught at in my
reminiscent mood.

One warm summer forenoon, some of the congregation may have been finding
the sermon too long, when it was broken on by a stirring incident. A
whispered message came to the officer of the military party. The men
abruptly rose to clatter out, heedless of the pulpit. Presently the
captain sent back for his sword, and his wife turned pale before the
surmising eyes of the congregation. What could be the matter? Had the
French landed? Neither preacher nor people could give all their minds to
the conclusion of the service. As we streamed forth, all agog with
curiosity, the street showed the unusual Sabbath sight of cabs full of
policemen dashing up towards what was then the General Prison for
Scotland, beyond the South Inch. Report soon spread that the inmates of
this Penitentiary, hundreds strong, had broken out and might be expected
to scatter over the country like ravening wolves, after an alarming

[Illustration: AUTUMN IN THE HIGHLANDS]

example familiar to me from the pages of--was it not?--_Midshipman
Easy._

The excitement that followed seemed a godsend to youngsters, and perhaps
to older captives of the dull Sabbath. But, as usual, rumour
exaggerated. There had been a conspiracy to break prison, which, in the
case of the men, proved a fiasco; while the women, after throwing their
Bibles at the chaplain as signal of revolt, got loose into a yard, but
failed either to make their escape from the walls or to release the men,
as had been plotted. These incidents I state with reserve, after the
example of the Father of History in dealing with facts beyond his own
observation. The story that passed current was that our gallant
centurion reached the scene of action in hot haste, but on beholding the
enemy he marched off in high dudgeon, flatly refusing to lead his
company against a mob of women. In the end, we understood, those
Bacchanals were quelled by the artillery of the Fire Brigade.

If all tales be true, this is not the most ignominious retreat forced
upon our gallant soldiers at the hands of Scotswomen. In Penny’s
_Traditions of Perth_ it is told how, in the old martinet days, half a
dozen soldiers were flogged in public on the North Inch. Mobs of that
century seem rather to have enjoyed such spectacles, as a rule; but
pressed enlistments had made military discipline a sore point in
Scotland; and now the poor fellows’ cries excited angry pity among the
lookers-on. When it came to the turn of a married man, sentenced to five
hundred lashes for stealing a few potatoes to feed his family, their
feelings boiled over. His own wife was present, who, as he screamed
under the lash, rushed in to hold the drummer’s arm; then other women
began to pelt the executioners with stones. Led by these pitying
Amazons, the crowd broke through the ranks to rescue the sufferer, and
his fellow-soldiers apparently made no stout resistance. The officers
were set to flight, the unfortunate adjutant being captured, whom the
women are said to have stripped and whipped on the spot as a lesson in
humanity. That made the last flogging on the North Inch.

Perth has had the soldiers of many armies quartered upon it, including
Cromwell’s troopers, and the Hessians encamped for long on the Inch
after the Rebellion of ’45. At that time barracks were so deficient that
Cumberland’s men had to be lodged in the parish church and
meetinghouses, turned into dormitories by deal boards laid across the
pews. Later on, soldiers would be billeted upon the townsfolk, as the
militiamen were in my recollection; and their pay was so poor that, like
that culprit already mentioned, they did not always prove honest guests.
Gowrie House, presented by the loyal townsfolk to the victor of
Culloden, was made into an Artillery Barrack, but afterwards given back
to the town to serve as its jail and county buildings in exchange for
ground above the South Inch, where the General Prison came to be built.
This was originally a depôt for French prisoners of war, the first batch
of whom, confined in a church on their way from Dundee, stole all the
brass nails, green baize, and other fittings they could lay hands on.
The prisoners became increased to thousands, who on the whole must have
behaved better, for they are said to have been missed at the peace,
having, indeed, spent in the city a good deal of money which they earned
in part by ingenious industries. These foreigners appear as the
unexpected means of importing cricket into Scotland, first played on the
Inches of Perth by the English regiments sent to guard the depôt.

English soldiers, one supposes, are not now needed to guard Perth, its
ordinary garrison a small body of the Black Watch or other local
regiment. Gone, too, are the militia whom I once came upon drawn up at
the top of the “Whins” without a stitch of uniform on, stripped to bathe
by word of command. Military displays on the Inch will be less common
than games of golf, cricket, and football, the last in its more
unsophisticated forms, since this public space does not lend itself to
the collection of gate-money; but the barefoot laddies who here kick
about the “leather” for their own divert, are the buds of those
professionals that bloom out to such applause in English enclosures. And
the rules of football have changed even since my youth, when a band of
youngsters from various public schools, gathered on the Inch for a
Christmas game, found themselves all at loggerheads in an anarchy not
yet divided into the kingdoms of “Rugger” and “Soccer.” Still more has
the game been refined since a day when country folk coming down to
market, about two miles out of Perth, met a man charging along the
Crieff road, chased by a party of the Forty-Second with their kilts
streaming in the wind; at first sight the fugitive was taken for a
deserter, and the farmers drew aside to give him a fair chance, but it
was only a Methven lad carrying off the ball from a match on the North
Inch, nor could he be tackled till it was goaled in his house, half a
dozen miles from the field. Scone had once a name for rough matches, at
which limbs were often broken, but, as the proverb went, “A’s fair at
the ba’ of Scone.”

The example of that hero warns me not to linger on the Perth Inch, but
to be off up the Tay, keeping as near it as one can for parks, and for
the jealously guarded banks of valuable salmon fisheries. For the first
two miles there is a public walk up the right bank to the Almond mouth.
On the opposite side, hidden in lordly foliage, lies Scone Palace and
the site of the old Pictish capital. The Scot is so notoriously modest
that English example has often led him to mishandle his own names:
before Scone gets corrupted, then, let me insist that it is pronounced
_Scoon_, as the eatable _scone_, so mumbled in Cockney mouths, should
rhyme with _on_, and not be treated as their _own_.

To modern Scone we could come on that side by a tramway which is turning
this goodly village into a suburb of Perth. Even when we get into the
Highlands we shall find how the squalid “Tullyveolans” and “Glenburnies”
have been improved away generations ago. At the gates of great
proprietors, at all events, a Scottish village usually compares well
with an English one in point of comfort if not of picturesqueness. The
former commonly wears an air of stiff neatness and coldness toned by its
grey stone walls and slated roofs; the hand of the laird and factor is
seen over it all, and only here and there are left such wigwam
makeshifts as might still move Waverley’s disgust in the
poverty-stricken Hebrides. The Southern village, even if a model one,
is apt to be more taking to the eye, with its show of warm brick
scattered among the green, its unstudied variety of thatched and
lichened roofs, of gabled, plastered, and half-timbered walls, where
paddocks and gardens divide an age-mellowed block of farm buildings from
a row of picturesquely decayed hovels; and over all rises the tower or
spire of some much-patched church, neighboured by a smug chapel that
throws the ancient fane into striking relief. The churches of Scotland
make no such points of dignity, as a rule; but their old austerity now
often becomes relaxed by more ambitious architecture of Anglican-aping
days; and here and there has been spared some stout hull that weathered
the Reformation storms.

One feature of a northern parish seems past praying for. The churchyard,
if not miserably neglected, is apt to look grim, dismal, forbidding, in
contrast with those flowery God’s acres of a less stern faith, that
sometimes tempt poor human nature to be half in love with death. As a
child I remember my nurse, and she was an Englishwoman, pointing out to
me for reprobation what seemed the Popish sacrilege of a wreath laid
upon a grave. Such Protestant superstition has been broken down in the
last half-century. Large towns, even so long ago, had more or less
ornamentally laid-out cemeteries, which were allowed to be the goal of a
Sabbath walk. But still, in out-of-the-way parts, the disposition is not
to mantle the king of terrors in any sentimental disguise; and weeds may
be more common than flowers about tombstones that give lessons of
warning rather than of consolation. The memorials of the dead are
oftenest plain and practical, like the homes of the living, whose very
gardens run rather to kail and berries than to flowers. Yet where a
Scotsman’s time is less taken up by wringing a bare subsistence from his
poor soil, he can treat himself to the luxury of bloom; his grey walls
are more and more lit by hardy creepers; and on heathery slopes you may
see cottages covered with gay tropæolum, which I cannot coax to flourish
on a London balcony.

But Scone, in its semi-urbanity, is no fair specimen of a Scottish
village, nor are we yet in the Highlands, though hints of them peep to
view as we pass up towards the blue Grampian barrier. We soon come,
indeed, to a manufacturing nook, a “white country” of Perthshire, where
the river, swollen by several streams uniting as the Luncarty Burn,
washes the bleach-fields of that ilk and the cotton mills of Stanley.
But these meads of Luncarty were once dyed red rather than white, when
the Danes had almost overcome a Scottish king, till a peasant named Hay,
with his two sons, held a narrow pass so well with his ploughshare that
the Vikings in turn were put to flight by those rustic champions,
claimed as ancestors for the House of Errol. Be this a fable or no, when
the bleach-field came to be laid out, several tumuli were opened
containing skeletons and weapons.

The whole country on both sides of the river is studded with Druidical
stones, with camps and gravemounds, and with sites of old tradition,
such as that ascribed to Macbeth’s castle, where the Sidlaw Hills swell
up behind the left bank of the Tay, winding round them under the wooded
cliffs of Kinnoull, making such a bend that a house I have reason to
know stands equidistant between two reaches, which are nearly a score of
miles apart by the bank. Should I be spared another score of years or
so, I could tell some queer tales about more than one late laird in this
nook, whose memory at present must rest in the truce _de mortuis_. As
for Macbeth’s memory, I have already shown some hint of materials for
whitewashing it. Why was not Shakespeare told of this Thane being an
elder in the Wee Free Church, when King Duncan must needs send his loons
south, one to Oxford and one to Cambridge, who came back dropping their
_h_’s, whustling on the Sabbath, and such-like; then what for no should
an outraged patriot but yoke with the sword of Gideon on the whole
Erastian hypothec? As for Lady Macbeth, does not Shakespeare himself
admit evidence to justify a soft-hearted verdict of temporary insanity?

Above the mills of Stanley we come to Campsie Linn, the first romantic
scene of the Tay, on which is set the last tableau in _The Fair Maid of
Perth_. Such a picturesque nook tempted the monks of Cupar to build a
retreat on the precipitous rock above its cataract; and here was the
country seat of the Mercers, that mediæval trading family of Perth,
already mentioned as growing into nobility. But the great name
hereabouts in the old days was the Drummonds, lords of Stobhall on the
Tay, their principal residence till they built a more lordly one in
Strathearn.

This family, long so powerful in Perthshire, claim to be descended from
an Hungarian chief, settled in Scotland under the civilising patronage
of Malcolm Canmore. So well did his line thrive here that a daughter of
the house of Drummond sat to watch that North Inch combat as Robert
III.’s queen, Anabella, mother of the unfortunate Duke of Rothesay, who
comes to such a tragic end in Scott’s romance. A century later, when the
family had moved their main seat to Drummond Castle, another connection
with royalty again brought about a mysterious crime. James IV., all his
life much misled by Cupid, took for his mistress or left-handed wife
Bonnie Margaret Drummond; it is said that he proposed to marry her
openly as soon as a dispensation from the Pope unloosed their bonds of
kindred. Be that as it may, other Scottish nobles looked askance on the
growth of the Drummonds, while politic statesmen may well have sought to
clear the way to peace with England by the King’s marriage to Margaret
Tudor; there is also a suspicion of jealousy on the part of another
royal lady love. By unknown hands, Margaret Drummond and her two sisters
were poisoned at Drummond Castle, and they lie beneath three slabs of
blue marble in Dunblane Cathedral. A daughter of this doubtful union was
married successively to the Earl of Huntly, the Duke of Albany, and to a
kinsman of her own; then her infusion of Stuart blood has passed into at
least a score of Scottish noble families.

The strain of royal descent was reinforced when the head of the Drummond
house married a daughter of this lady by the Stuart Duke of Albany. By
James VI. Lord Drummond was made Earl of Perth, a title augmented by the
French dukedom of Melfort. The Perth earldom was blown out into an empty
dukedom by the Pretender,

[Illustration: DUNKELD AND BIRNAM]

whose fortunes its holder followed into France, leaving his possessions
to be confiscated, and his honours attainted. The peerage was restored
to a Drummond under George III., but died out for want of heirs male;
then through marriage of a daughter the property passed to Lord Gwydir
of Wales, and through the Willoughby d’Eresbys to the English Earl of
Ancaster. I fear to make the reader’s head ache in the labyrinth of
Drummond genealogy. Enough to say that the earldom of Perth and Melfort
was restored in Victoria’s reign to a Drummond who held a French title.
Supported by a pension from a more fortunate kinsman, he lived latterly
in seclusion at Kew, and was buried there a few years ago, his life
shadowed by a painful tragedy that left his house without a direct heir
to its pride and its poverty. His home was literally a cottage, a
striking contrast to the glories of Drummond Castle; but to friendly
neighbours, who respected his misfortunes, he could humorously boast of
being by rights a duke in two countries.

A tragedy in humbler life has been commemorated in a Tayside ballad,
_The Weary Coble of Cargill_. The hero, Davie Drummond, is described as
a “brave page,” also as the “butler of Stobhall,” who, with the keys of
the mansion hanging at his belt, undertook to cross the swollen Tay one
night in a coble or ferry-boat: this local Leander seems to have had a
Hero on each bank, and to have played the perilous part of not being off
with one love before being on with another. The heroine, “the lass of
Ballathie,” took strong measures in a fit of jealousy, when Davie would
not stay the night on her side the river--

    His bed was made in Ballathie town,
    Of the clean sheets and of the strae;
    But I wat it was far better made
    Into the bottom o’ bonnie Tay.

    She bored the coble in seven pairts,
    I wat her heart might hae been sair,
    For there she got the bonnie lad lost,
    Wi’ the curly locks and the yellow hair.

    He put his foot into the boat,
    He little thocht o’ ony ill,
    But before that he was mid-waters,
    The weary coble began to fill....

    I wat they had mair love than this
    When they were young and at the schule;
    But for his sake she wauked late
    And bored the coble o’ bonny Cargill.

The poor youth was taken out a corpse; then too late came lifelong
repentance to his resentful sweetheart--

    There’s ne’er a clean sark gae on my back,
    Nor yet a kame gae in my hair,
    There’s neither coal nor candle light
    Shall shine in my bower for ever mair.

    At kirk or market I’se ne’er be at,
    Nor yet a blythe blink in my e’e,
    There’s ne’er a ane shall say to anither,
    That’s the lassie garr’d the young man dee.

Above Cargill, the river is spanned by the Caledonian railway; then on
the left bank comes in the Isla leading up to Blairgowrie, behind which
opens one of the great passes into the Highlands. Between Meikleour and
Kinclaven Castle, taken and burned by Wallace, the Tay makes an
extravagant circumvention of inches and haughs, flowing north for one
reach, then turning south, as it comes round from its eastward course
by Murthly. The Highland line cuts across this elbow bend to pass
opposite Caputh, reached by a floating bridge that looks safer than that
coble of Cargill. In _Bonnie Scotland_ I could not but speak of the
grounds of Murthly, with their show of ambitious structures; but I am
not sure if I did justice to the gardens and miles of magnificent
avenues, that, like those of Meikleour and Ballathie lower down, and of
Dunkeld above, might call a blush to the cheek of Dr. Johnson’s ghost,
if it could visit this edge of the Highlands. From near Murthly station
one may walk for two and a half straight miles on a grass ride bordered
by coniferous trees, bringing us down to the Dunkeld road, beyond
Bankfoot, a highway which has taken care not to follow the vagaries of
the river.

It is only fourteen miles to Dunkeld from Perth, whence houses on the
Grampian slope may be made out on a clear day. Strangers here who would
take the very shortest way for a peep at the Highlands may now from
Strathord station reach Bankfoot on a light railway up the Ordie Burn,
and over the native heath of Robert Nicoll, who, but for an early death
and his consuming zeal for reforming politics, might have been better
known as a Perthshire Burns.

    Sae weel I lo’ed a’ things of earth--
    The trees, the buds, the flowers,
    The sun, the moon, the lochs and glens,
    The Spring’s and Summer’s hours,--
    A wither’d woodland twig would bring
    The tears into my eye,
    Laugh on! but there are souls of love
    In laddies herding kye.

Beyond Bankfoot and its annexe Waterloo, the road comes to close
quarters with the mountains, where it winds up to a rugged face of woods
and grouse moors, then under Rohallion joins the river and the railway
in the pass of Birnam, guarded by the village city of Dunkeld. Here we
leave the valley of Strathmore to enter one of the famous Highland
gates, at the mouth of which a watery hollow called the Stare-dam was
long a place of dread to wild mountaineers, for whom its “Hanged Men’s
Trees” made such a warning as did the “kind gallows” of Crieff.

Of Dunkeld, the Highland border town, I gave account in _Bonnie
Scotland_, so that here I will rather repeat what has been said about it
by others. The Rev. Prebendary Gilpin, that original of _Dr. Syntax in
search of the Picturesque_, who had found Arthur’s Seat “odd, misshapen
and uncouth,” unpleasing from every point of view, except that the
streets of London had been paved out of its quarries, this severe critic
is more gracious to Dunkeld, where “the wild unshapely desert begins to
separate into parts, and form itself into hills, hung with wood and
broken with rock.” He can find no fault with the Tay, here “broad, deep
and silent,” nor with “the grand screen of mountains” encircling it; and
our generation is not much concerned with his criticism that it will
take a century for the woods to grow up so as “to give a proper degree
of sylvan richness to the scene.” Since then the woods have had time to
clothe this fine amphitheatre, some inaccessible crag faces having been
planted by the device of firing canisters filled with seeds against them
from a cannon. Mr. Gilpin goes so far as to applaud Nature’s efforts in
the side ravine of the Braan, though he shakes his head over the duke’s
“improvements,” such as often caused so much division of opinion among
those pundits of the picturesque. He agrees with our taste in condemning
the “Claud Lorraine glasses” and other optical devices with which the
Hermitage at the Falls of Braan was furnished, being “apt to believe
that Nature has given us a better apparatus for viewing objects in a
picturesque light than any the optician can furnish.” Also he shows very
proper disgust on coming, among the sights of this demesne, upon a
hollow in the rock with an inscription recording the names of a set of
gentlemen who, on such and such a date, had drunk it full of punch.

But when from Dunkeld he takes his way on up Strath Tay, this
Aristarchus almost forgets to be critical of scenes that “call aloud for
the pencil.” The poet Gray, one of the earliest appreciative visitors to
the Highlands, was not less admiring, though he gives a more
matter-of-fact account of a “road winding through beautiful woods, with
the Tay almost always in full view to the right, being here from three
to four hundred feet over. The Strath-Tay, from a mile to three miles or
more wide, covered with corn and spotted with groups of people then in
the midst of their harvest. On either hand a vast chain of rocky
mountains, that changed their face and opened something new every
hundred yards, as the way turned or the cloud passed: in short,
altogether it was one of the most pleasing days I have passed these many
years.” Then, before leaving Atholl, he would exclaim, “Since I saw the
Alps, I have seen nothing sublime till now!” And of the Highlands in
general this precursor of the next century exclaims: “A fig for your
poets, painters, gardeners and clergymen that have not been among them;
their imagination can be made up of nothing but bowling-greens,
flowering shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet ditches, shell-grottoes and Chinese
rails!”

Many a visitor of our day, weather permitting, gets here from coach or
rail a general impression of “nothing but sunshine and fresh breezes,
and bleating lambs, and clean tartans.” To go behind this fair scenery,
set as if for the joy of poets and painters, we might turn up some burn
into the rough background, and look through Ruskin’s eyes at nooks
easily coloured by his “pathetic fallacy”; he knew the Highlands as not
all filled by tourists, sportsmen, and prosperous sheep-farmers.

     A Highland scene is, beyond dispute, pleasant enough in its own
     way; but, looked close at, has its shadows. Here, for instance, is
     the very fact of one, as pretty as I can remember--having seen
     many. It is a little valley of soft turf, enclosed in its narrow
     oval by jutting rocks and broad flakes of nodding fern. From one
     side of it to the other winds, serpentine, a clear brown stream,
     dropping into quicker ripple as it reaches the end of the oval
     field, and then, first islanding a purple and white rock with an
     amber pool, it dashes away into a narrow fall of foam under a
     thicket of mountain-ash and alder. The autumn sun, low, but clear,
     shines on the scarlet ash-berries and on the golden birch-leaves,
     which, fallen here and there, when the breeze has not caught them,
     rest quiet in the crannies of the purple rock. Beside the rock, in
     the hollow under the thicket, the carcass of a ewe, drowned in the
     last flood, lies nearly bare to the bone, its white ribs protruding
     through the skin, raven-torn; and the rags of its wool still
     flickering from the branches that first stayed it as the stream
     swept it down. A little lower, the current plunges, roaring, into a
     circular chasm like a well, surrounded on three sides by a
     chimney-like hollowness of polished rock, down which the foam slips
     in detached snowflakes. Round the edges of the pool beneath, the
     water circles slowly, like black oil; a little butterfly lies on
     its back, its wings glued to one of the eddies, its limbs feebly
     quivering; a fish rises and it is gone. Lower down the stream, I
     can just see, over a knoll, the green and damp turf roofs of four
     or five hovels, built at the edge of a morass, which is trodden by
     the cattle into a black Slough of Despond at their doors, and
     traversed by a few ill-set stepping-stones, with here and there a
     flat slab on the tops, where they have sunk out of sight; and at
     the turn of the brook I see a man fishing, with a boy and a dog--a
     picturesque and pretty group enough certainly, if they had not been
     there all day starving.

From Dunkeld up to Logierait, the river runs south, when its eastward
course has been joined by the full swollen Tummel, that, coming down
straight from Pitlochrie, seems here to be the parent stream. At
Logierait Wordsworth could still see the remains of the Duke of Atholl’s
court-house and the prison--said to be now represented by an
inn-stable--from which Rob Roy made one of his daring escapes. He did
well to escape, when his ducal captor had not yet lost the power of pit
and gallows, who about the same time wrote to the Provost of Perth for
the loan of an executioner. There was no lack of gallows in those days,
yet apparently a short supply of hangmen, for we find the Fair City, in
turn, borrowing the Drummonds’ executioner, to be returned when
required; then again Lord Breadalbane’s, on an undertaking by the
magistrates “to give the Earl the use of him at all times.” Perth had
then three gallows of its own, while each of the great noblemen about it
could hang or imprison his vassals; and even the Baron of Bradwardine is
recorded as having once exercised his hereditary privilege by putting
“two poachers in the dungeon of the old tower of Tully Veolan, where
they were sorely frightened by ghosts, and almost eaten by rats.”

On the other side of the confluence, Ballinluig railway junction marks
the forking of two routes of travel. The main line leads up into Atholl
by Pitlochrie and Killiecrankie, “the Caledonian Thermopylae.” From
this, we turn for the present to follow Strath Tay, adorned with a
succession of mansions and policies, chief of them the restored Castle
of Grandtully, for which is claimed that it was the Tully Veolan of
_Waverley_. Other candidates for the honour are Craig Hall, above
Blairgowrie, and Traquair House, near Innerleithen. The contention
between these mansions makes for the Scottish newspapers what the great
gooseberry and the sea serpent used to be in the South; but of course
the truth is, as Scott says, who ought to know, that he took a composite
picture from several models, getting some features from old mansions
about Edinburgh--Ravelston, Dean House, and Warrender House beside
Bruntsfield Links--while he seems to point out Grandtully as the best
prototype of the Baron’s seat. As for the geography of the tale, that
baffles all inquiry, the only thing clear being that Waverley, at the
farthest point of his wanderings, had got well behind the Pass of
“Ballybrough,” which must be Killiecrankie.

[Illustration: A HIGHLAND COTTAGE]

The branch line up the Tay soon ends at Aberfeldy, famous for the Falls
of Moness in a wooded glen, where arises a question as to whether its
“Birks of Aberfeldy” were not a mere poetic ornament of a poet’s fancy,
copied from older songs such as the “Birks of Endermay.” At all events,
birches are not now prominent among the rich foliage; and, of course,
Burns, no more than Scott, would “swear to the truth of a song.”
Aberfeldy, thriving on a small manufacture of Highland tweed, has an
historic note as the place where the Black Watch regiment was embodied
out of its looser organisation as independent companies; this is
recorded by a monument set up on a cairn where nature and art join hands
for striking effect. It is also notable for the first bridge, above
Perth, over the Tay, built by the road-making General Wade. Another name
that has been connected with Aberfeldy is Andrea Ferrara’s, a foreigner
of infuscated _habitat_, who made so many blades for Scotland that
tradition has represented him as working a forge here. A rival legend
places his workshop in Menteith, where Doune was a more authentic
arsenal of firearms for the Highlanders, specially notable for the
making of steel pistols.

Aberfeldy Bridge leads us across to Weem, said to be so called from
Picts’ houses burrowed in the womb of earth; to Castle Menzies in its
park of ancient trees; to Dull, with its memories of a monastery and a
hermitage of St. Cuthbert. The whole district is full of moving
traditions and traces of forgotten faith and history older than the
saints who have left misty relics here, as, for instance, the stone
circle at Croft Moraig, “field of Mary,” and the Cave of Weem that has
a legend recalling that of Hamelin, as to a child being saved by
slipping off a malignant water-horse when it carried away her companions
to be drowned in the loch above, with which this cave was believed to
communicate. And hereabouts, as elsewhere, there is a legend of hunted
Macgregors taking refuge in a tree that was cut down to hurl them to
destruction. As to the beauties of the valley, let the Rev. Hugh
Macmillan speak, as a son of its soil:--

     Westward of the old glacial barricade, to the neighbourhood of
     Aberfeldy, the Strath, with its numerous farms and small crofts, is
     a patch-work, a “quilted landscape,” with corn and potato fields
     and meadows stitched in squares, or rather, to use an image more
     appropriate to the locality, a continuous web of large-checked
     tartan laid along the bottom and slopes of the valley. Eastward,
     beyond Cluny, the Strath is a vast green cup filled to the brim
     with beauty. There the warm sun, in sheltered nooks, woos the
     primroses and violets out of the soil earlier than anywhere else.
     The hillsides are musical with freckled burns, alive with trout;
     and the copses that line their course are filled with hazel nuts
     and wild rasps and brambles, which would make a feast for Pan
     himself, while patriarchal trees linger on many an ancestral farm,
     and link the generations together, each of them a towering mass of
     verdant leafage, under whose cool shadow you can sit in the fervid
     noon with a sigh of relief, and gaze upwards as into the heights of
     an emerald heaven. On the wide uplands hangs nature’s own tapestry
     of bell-heather and broom, the purple of the one and the glowing
     gold of the other mixed in harmonious splendour; and here and there
     a little tarn--the largest, Loch Derculich, a lonely heron-haunted
     loch, held close to the heart of the moorland--lifts its blue eye
     to catch the smile of heaven.

If we are to visit every part of Perthshire, we must tear ourselves away
from this characteristic antechamber of Highland scenery, to the sides
of which open Atholl and Breadalbane. So let us take leave of the Tay,
under its own name, by passing up the last reach of avenue-like road
from Aberfeldy to the policies of Taymouth, where it breaks full-born
from its lake reservoir. Should we have come from Logierait by road or
rail on the south side, we may well be tempted to turn back by the north
bank of the noble river, a way which leads us on the rough edges of
Atholl.




III

ATHOLL


The Atholl monument at the confluence of the Tay and the Tummel reminds
us how we are fairly in Atholl, which indeed comes down to Dunkeld. One
can hardly fix the precise bounds of this old province, at one time of
such importance that it became an estate of the Crown; its name, too, is
said to come from a Pictish king. It may be roughly defined as the
northern part of Highland Perthshire, the glen basins on the Tay’s left
bank, lying below a stretch of the Grampians by which it is shut off
from Braemar and Deeside. Its central valley is Glengarry, up which runs
the Highland Railway, till, at the height of nearly 1500 feet, passing
from Perth into Inverness, this main stream of traffic dips by the Boar
of Badenoch and the Sow of Atholl down the basin of the Spey, where
Badenoch was once as signalised a name as Atholl.

This maze of mountains, glens and waters, studded with spots of delight
and scenes of fame, may be called the heart of the show Highlands, or at
least one lobe of its heart, for tourist circulation, the other being
the Trossachs and Loch Lomond neighbourhood, where also hotels and
hydropathics are now more common than castles and clachans. Dunkeld is
its city of old renown; Blair Atholl is the Versailles of its duke; but
the present-day capital of the tourist domain seems to be Pitlochrie, a
smart young town that was an offshoot of Moulin, whose Black Castle
stands in ruin, haunted by dim memories as the Wolf of Badenoch’s lair,
and by a more gloomy tradition that it once served as a plague-house, so
that its infected stones escaped the fate of being used as a quarry. All
the lions about Pitlochrie are so familiar to guide-books and their
patrons, that I need hardly even name them: the pyramid of Ben Vrackie,
with its grand and easily won prospects; the Pass of Killiecrankie,
where in a few minutes of fierce onset the Protestant succession in
Scotland had nearly been throttled; the wooded and parked sides of Glen
Garry; the ducal demesne of Blair; the Falls of Bruar, glorified by
Burns; the dark ravines of Glen Tilt leading up to the guarded wilds of
the Great Atholl Deer Forest; with many a fall and spout and foaming
chasm, more or less renowned, unless for the want of public access and
of a sacred bard less discreet than he who kept the secrets of
“picture-like beauty, seclusion sublime.”

    There is a stream,--(I name not its name, lest inquisitive tourist
    Hunt it, and make it a lion, and get it at last into guide-books,)
    Springing far off from a loch unexplored in the folds of great mountains,
    Falling two miles through rowan and stunted alder, enveloped
    Then for four more in a forest of pine ... attaining a basin
    Ten feet wide and eighteen long, with whiteness and fury
    Occupied partly, but mostly pellucid, pure, a mirror;
    Beautiful there for the colour derived from green rocks under;
    Beautiful, most of all, where beads of foam uprising
    Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the stillness.
    Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendent birch-boughs,
    Here it lies, unthought of above at the bridge and pathway,
    Still more concealed from below by wood and rocky projection,
    You are shut in, left alone with yourself and perfection of water,
    Hid on all sides, left alone with yourself and the goddess of bathing.

Clough, who sets his heroes to “verify Black,” leaves his own principal
scene not clearly identified, which one guesses at as somewhere on the
western edge of Atholl. The _Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_ itself lay far
in the Western Highlands; but was it not in Rannoch that Philip met his
first charmer? Towards this region we turn on the other side of
Pitlochrie, where open the softer scenes of the Tummel, its Falls that
pour over almost the central boss of Scotland, its lovely swelling into
a lake, the thinning and roughening of its valley below the head of
Schiehallion, as it rises to Loch Rannoch, a long sheet of water
darkening under fragments of the Black Wood, and reaching up to the
barren moor of Rannoch, most desolate region in Britain. This was once
shaded by that great Caledonian Forest, of gloomy renown in mediæval
romance, where Ariosto brings one of his heroes, following tracks of
Arthur, Lancelot and Gawaine--

    In those woods he might be sure
      Many and strange adventures would be found,
    But deeds, there wrought, were, like the place, obscure,
      And, for the greater part, not bruited round.

Here meet the borders of Perth, Argyll, and Inverness; and this
wilderness must often have been wet by the blood of plaided warriors if
not of mailed knight-errants. In our time, I am told, a lad fishing in
one of the Rannoch lochs brought up a rusty sword to confirm the local
legend of a meeting between Atholl and Lochiel to discuss a boundary
dispute. Each chief was to come unattended; but each, like Roderick Dhu,
had a force of clansmen hidden close at hand. When they got to hot
words, Atholl first gave the signal, at which--

    Instant from copse and heath, arose,
    Bonnets and spears and bended bows.

“These are Atholl wethers!” was their proud chief’s explanation, to
which Lochiel replied by whistling up a troop of Camerons, whom he
introduced as “Lochaber dogs.” But before it went beyond showing teeth
the rivals drew upon that Caledonian prudence often found mingled with
hot Highland blood. They agreed to settle their difference peacefully,
in token whereof their claymores were hurled together, like Excalibur,
into the dark waters of the mere.

In my own youth, this region still seemed a hunting-ground for
adventurous experience. It is nearly half a century ago that I started
out to walk through Atholl with some vague idea of roaming farther. From
morn to eve I tramped on from Stanley, and got the length of Blair, some
ten leagues. But a boy’s will, one knows, is the wind’s will: I found a
train due at Blair, and took it home, I no longer remember why, unless
that the day was hot and dusty, as it may well be on this sunny side of
the Grampians, where, as a local guide-book puts it, the rain-clouds are
apt to “have the bottom knocked out of them by the mountain peaks”
fencing Atholl towards the Atlantic. But that fiasco of a walking tour I
turned to account by writing a description, which I had the temerity to
send to a London magazine. Strange to say, it found favour with the
editor, perhaps because--heaven forgive me!--it was spiced by an
affectation of Cockney jocularity as the point of view; and so appeared
my first magazine article, which now, after many years, strikes me with
shame and confusion. How many sympathetic authors might tell the same
tale of callow efforts that filled them with pride to appear in print,
but the day came when they would gladly have repaid tenfold that once
welcome cheque, could they but cancel those pages, which at least may
have the luck to blush unseen in some cobwebbed volume!

Coming back to Atholl after many days, my pen hopes to be guided in
writing its name consistently. In my spelling days, it would be rather
_Athole_ and _Argyle_; but the ducal lords of these regions seem to have
set a fashion for the double _ll_. Also, by the light of nature, I
pronounce the first syllable long and broad, as _Aw_tholl, whereas those
of more picked speech say _Ah_tholl, which is easier to say than to
sing. As to the spelling, Wordsworth appears to follow an older form--

    Among the hills of _Athol_ was he born.

Was he, though? The poet makes no doubt of it. “The Boy of whom I
speak,” came from a “native glen” among “Garry’s hills,” where his
parents, though “exceeding poor,” had a “small hereditary farm.” This
son of an Atholl bonnet-laird had duly gone “equipped

[Illustration: THE TROSSACHS]

with satchel to a school,” and so well improved his opportunities of
elementary education that in old age he was able “with an eye of scorn”
to turn over the leaves of Voltaire in the original. He had a thorough
Caledonian respect for the Sabbath, and for

            Those godly men
    Who swept from Scotland, in a flame of zeal,
    Shrine, altar, image.

He even refused “wine and stouter cheer,” when offered by a fellow
Atholman, who must have unlearned the native teetotalism while serving
abroad--

            Chaplain to a military troop
    Cheered by the Highland bagpipe, as they marched
    In plaided vest.

It may be more by good luck than good guidance that the poet does not
try for a stroke of local colour in letting his abstinent hero sit down
to a supper of “Atholl Brose.” The above hints of character, which will
be recognised by patient Excursionists, go to show how Daddy Wordsworth,
though he had the advantage of a visit to the Atholl Highlands, made the
common English mistake about their inhabitants. John Bull will not
understand how Scotland is inhabited by two different stocks, whose
differences were much less blended in that Wanderer’s youth. It could
then be said that the Sabbath had not yet got above the Pass of
Killiecrankie; and it will be remembered how the Captain of Knockdunder
proposed to deal with any “sincere professor” who scrupled to join in a
unanimous call to whatever pastor pleased the duke and his deputy. Even
in the poet’s day nobody seems to have rebuked him when he drove his
poor beast along Highland roads on Sunday. An Atholl man’s clearest
memory of Covenanters would be the check given to the victors of
Killiecrankie when Cleland’s Cameronians held Dunkeld against those
ex-oppressors of “godly” Whigs. The most “moderate” Presbyterian
ministers had sometimes to be inducted by force in the Highlands, where
still many of the people cling to the old faith. The Sandemanians sent
missionaries into Atholl, who were received with indifference or
ridicule; it was only two generations later that such evangelical
gospellers as J. A. Haldane and Rowland Hill succeeded in blowing up,
through the far North, a new flame of Calvinist enthusiasm, which in our
time has turned this end of Scotland into a sanctuary for strict
Sabbatarianism, much relaxed among city folk and even among the
descendants of westland Whigs.

The Highlanders of the old dispensation had virtues of their own, but
the poet was much left to himself when he conceived Glengarry as cradle
for his idealised Scot, brought up among such a good Presbyterian family
as would be more at home in the _Cottar’s Saturday Night_ upon the
Carrick border--a picture quoted in full by Gilpin as an illustration of
Highland manners!

    Pure livers were they all, austere and grave,
    And fearing God, the very children taught
    Stern self-respect, a reverence for God’s word,
    And an habitual piety, maintained
    With strictness scarcely known on English ground.

The plain truth is that Wordsworth here was for confusing oil and
vinegar. He had heard at school of a Drummond Jacobite exile who took
asylum among the Lakes; and there he must often have met Scottish
pedlars; then he indiscriminately “combined his information,” perhaps
led astray by Walter Scott’s glorification of the Highlands. Behind the
Highland line, where a tourist with a knapsack has in our time been
hailed as a pedlar, there went about of old such itinerant dealers, who
seem to have borne a quasi-sacred character when some such safe-conduct
was much needed; but they, like Bryce Snailsfoot, were more apt to be
canny Lowlanders, and so little of teetotallers that, as Scott tells us,
“the chapman’s drouth” was a sly proverb in Scotland, where a colporteur
of tracts could praise the “continual mercy” of a dram at every farm. In
England the pedlar’s trade was so much in the hands of Scots--at one
time counted by thousands across the Border--that these two titles to
somewhat qualified respect appear to have become almost synonymous at
the time when Wordsworth’s pedlar was laying up his little fortune.
Instances of this may be found in that curious novel, _The Spiritual
Quixote_, showing how a young gentleman who took to Methodist preaching
passed among Derbyshire countryfolk as a “Scotch pedlar,” or simply as
“a travelling Scotchman”; while in chapbooks of the period a “rider” is
the term for that more exalted emissary of commerce who came to be a
“traveller” _par excellence_, or a “drummer” in the figurative language
of America. “Traveller” would hardly suit such an one in Scotland, where
to “travel” implies specially the use of Shanks’ Naigie. Both in England
and Scotland those packmen were sometimes looked on with suspicion by
the authorities, accused of being political agitators as well as
newsmongers, and, later on, of diffusing irreligious publications. On
the Continent, also, Scots sought their fortune as pedlars, when no
longer in such demand as soldiers.

Every one does not know how the Scottish pedlar has left heirs of direct
succession in our day of stores and bargain sales. Quiet houses in
certain streets of London that look down on open shops, would be found
to have their back rooms full of drapery goods for hawking about at area
doors or to working-men’s wives, cajolable into making purchases on
credit which may ruin domestic peace. These tempters of humble Eves are
likely to be Scots of the baser sort, and I venture to guess them as
Lowlanders; they are said to be chiefly recruited in Galloway. Their
dubious business is popularly known as the Scotch trade; and this seems
to be responsible for keeping asmoulder among the lower classes such
prejudices against the Scot as were fanned by Wilkes and Johnson,
unequally yoked together in one antipathy. In Scotland, where the law is
less hard-hearted and customers are more hard-headed, the “Scotch trade”
does not now flourish; it is one thing Scottish which we need not be
proud of bringing into England. Of course, there was a time when the
northern pedlar played a useful and grateful part, as he tramped about
out-of-the-way countrysides with his burden of wares and gossip--

    A lone pedestrian with a scanty freight,
    Wished-for, or welcome, wheresoe’er he came
    Among the tenantry of thorpe and vill.

But I would bet all Whiteley’s stock against the poet laureate’s butt
of sherry, that Wordsworth’s Wanderer spake not with the accent of
Atholl but of Paisley or Kirkcudbright.

Having thus criticised an English poet, I venture to raise some doubt as
to whether a native school of minstrels had gone deep into the matter,
when they made lads with the philibeg come down from Atholl, chanting
such ditties as--

    The crown was half on Charlie’s head,
    Ae gladsome day, ae gladsome day;
    The lads that shouted joy to him,
    Are in the clay, are in the clay.

The Atholl men had been notably full of fight in older days: when
Mackay’s bayonets were swept away at Killiecrankie, they no doubt took
keen part in the chase; and in the ’15 they gave their quota of slippery
recruits to Mar’s army at Perth. Not that even then all tartans, nor all
fellow-clansmen, were under the same standard. At Killiecrankie a chasm
bears the name of the Soldier’s Leap, the tradition about it being that
a Highlander of Mackay’s army, flying before his own brother’s claymore,
sprang nearly a dozen feet from rock to rock, and, when thus put in
safety, jeeringly flung back his snuff-mull to the pursuer as a
fraternal farewell. In the upper ranks of clandom such oppositions were
more marked. When Dundee marched to Killiecrankie, Blair Castle was
defended against the Revolution by a Jacobite factor, while the shifty
Marquis of Atholl took the Bath waters as excuse for being out of the
way. The first duke intrigued with the Jacobites, but proclaimed King
George; then his heir having been attainted for loyalty to the Old
Pretender, a younger son, James, held the dukedom, who in the ’45 could
not but stand by the House of Hanover, or at least kept himself snug in
London, while three of his brothers were out for Prince Charlie. There
were notable instances at that time of father and son, husband and wife,
taking opposite sides; sometimes, it is understood, by politic
arrangement through which, in any case, the estate might be kept in the
family. There would also be the case of rival claimants to
chieftainship, like that one who provoked Fergus MacIvor’s ambition.

What with the puzzling division of opinion among their chiefs, and with
a growing civilisation beside the Lowland border, the Atholl men might
well halt between two opinions; and many of them had no more mind to die
for Prince Charlie than for the “German lairdie.” The exiled Duke
William, on the retreat to Culloden, turned out some couple of hundred
men only by the strong measure of burning their houses over their heads.
Lord George Murray, making a raid into his own country, gathered another
force by sending round the Fiery Cross, for the last time on record,
according to Mr. Walter Blaikie; but the heather thus set on fire soon
smouldered out. The tenant of a snug farm in Strath Tay or Strath
Tummel, within reach of market towns, had been somewhat fattened out of
the ancestral taste for bloodshed, and was more inclined to look on at a
game now played by professionals. But in such a time of transition,
would-be spectators could not yet look on at ease, like the newspaper
audiences of our distant wars. A good deal of plundering and burning
came about, requisitioning of horses and vivers on both sides, both
alike in a want of pay, when men were pressed into the service of one or
the other, sometimes of both in turn, then naturally took the first
excuse to desert.

Here is one specimen of the seamy side in that last romantic episode of
our history. Its prosaic hero was a Glenalmond farmer, one Gregor
Macgregor, who, his own clan being proscribed, had taken the name of
Murray on coming under the patronage of Atholl. Arrested as a rebel
after Culloden, from the Dunkeld tolbooth he pitifully makes affidavit,
that may or may not be the whole truth, but represents the straits to
which many Atholl men would be put in times to try men’s souls, and also
their speculating judgment. He declares that, as a peaceable subject and
a faithful tenant, he raised a force of his neighbours to join Cope’s
army, with which he marched north for several days, “each living on his
own pocket,” till the deponent for one was reduced to a sixpence, and no
more pay being forthcoming, “the men withdrew and dispersed themselves.”
He then lived quietly at home “till attacked” by Duke William, “who, as
the elder brother assuming a right to us, made several insinuations and
we as many refusals; at length threatened with military executions and
devastation, I, to eschew these impendent threatenings, took up arms and
witnessed the raising of the men, and with reluctancy marched, and all
the journey was to Crieff, about two miles from our own country, where
we gradually dispersed.” When “orders upon orders came to raise and
rally again ... so often did we at times make a show and at other times
wink at.” Duke William, coming by once more after Falkirk, “set us
again on foot, and in a march for Perth; where I gave it as advice every
man to make way for himself, upon which we again dispersed and ever
since continue peaceably at home. And when His Gr/s orders were issued
to bring in all our arms in or before 24 Feb. current, my resolution was
and can be made appear, I intended to obey that day. But was intercepted
by a party on the 22,”--and so unworthily lie in prison, who deserve
rather reward from the winning side.

Other Perthshire lairds had the same complaint to make of their tenants
as wanting in chivalry at this time; and several legal depositions might
be quoted to show what force was put upon such reluctant warriors. The
ladies of Jacobite families seem to have been especially active in
sticking white cockades “into the bonnets of such as would allow them.”
It was easy for the minstrel of Gask to make Charlie a darling in
retrospect; but he may well have seemed a nuisance to tenants whom the
Lady Nairne of the ’45 is described as ordering to turn out on pain of
eviction and seizure of their cattle; and the Duchess of Perth abused
the Whiggish Crieff folk as “d--d Judases to their master, the Duke.” At
farm towns, as well as kirk towns, men were now beginning to question
hereditary masterships. Of course unwillingness to take arms on the
beaten side would be made the most of immediately after the Rebellion;
but it seems to have been quite as genuine a sentiment as that of the
ladies and gentlemen who in our day sing so sweetly of dying for the
young Chevalier, not to speak of stronger enthusiasts who have devised a
postage-stamp bearing the

[Illustration: THE FALLS OF TUMMEL]

effigy of the Bavarian princess they recognise as their legitimate
sovereign--with which, indeed, “for the sake of practical convenience,”
they are advised to use also the head of “the Lord Edward,” turned
upside down.

Civil war brought sufferings in high as well as in low life, when Lord
George Murray besieged his own ancestral seat of Blair, garrisoned by
English soldiers, and tried to set it on fire with red-hot balls, but
had to make off towards Culloden. He, who had taken part in all the
Jacobite movements of the century, escaped to die in France; and his son
eventually succeeded to the dukedom. Less fortunate was poor Duke
William, the eldest brother, who bore the second title of the family,
while the Pretender decked him with a vain dukedom of Rannoch. He died
in the Tower, betrayed for a reward of a thousand pounds by a Scot who
earned also the scorn of the English officers concerned. Lord George,
the best soldier of the Prince’s army, got little enough gratitude from
the master who frowned on him in their common adversity. All along he
seems to have been much distrusted by his own party; and his fame has
not always fared better with posterity, though now well-armed champions
come forward to clear his memory from such charges as the “no quarter”
order at Culloden.

Duke James, who throve at the expense of his brothers, did not play a
very heroic part at this time, appearing on the scene only in the Duke
of Cumberland’s tail, to find his castle half ruined by that siege;
then, perhaps at a hint from Government, he dismantled its
fortifications, turning it into a _château_. But that second duke cuts a
misty figure as possible hero of romance, the heroine, in real life,
being a rich Hammersmith widow whom he married. To this couple’s wooing
is attributed the well-known song of “Huntingtower,” a Scottish variant
of the “Nut Brown Maid” and of Prior’s “Henry and Emma,” in which, after
representing himself as poor, a married man with three children, and a
gay deceiver, the lover declares that he has been only trying the lady’s
heart--“And all that’s mine is thine, lassie.”

Except “St. Johnston’s Bower,” thrown in for rhyme, the properties
enumerated in the song did belong to the Duke of Atholl; this Duke seems
the only “Jamie” of the race; and his first bride was a Jean. But this
must in any case be a much idealised account of a courtship, probably
carried on more by means of lawyers’ settlements than of sentimental
duets. A more clear case of romance, turned the other way out, seems to
be that the Duke’s second wife, Jean Drummond, had jilted a less
eligible lover, Dr. Austin, who revenged himself by the song, “For lack
of gold she left me O!” but eventually, in marrying another lady of
rank, found consolation for the heart-breaking of what is also an old
story:

    She me forsook for a great Duke,
    And to endless woe she has left me O!
    A star and garter have more art
    Than youth, a true and faithful heart;
    For empty titles we must part--
    For glittering show she has left me O!

Murray, the Atholl duke’s family name, on to which have been grafted two
of Perthshire’s proudest titles, is an exotic here, like the larches
that, the earliest on British soil, were transplanted from Tirol to
Dunkeld; and, indeed, the same thing may be said of several great
Highland families, no more autochthonous in their present habitat than a
brick suburb on a chalky soil. The presumed Murray ancestor is said to
have been a Flemish knight, who, like other foreign adventurers, set up
a Scottish house in the service of feudalising kings. If he took his
name from Moray, it was not in this region that his family struck deep
root. The historical earls of Moray bore other names, while in the
upsetting time of Bruce and Baliol, the Murrays are seen gaining
charters on the Forth and the Clyde; then presently they have crept
northwards into Strathearn, and under the James reigns came to be firmly
seated in the Perthshire Highlands, overlaying there the royal name of
Stewart, that also had spread from the south. The Atholl earldom they
got by marriage with a Stewart. Their dukedom dates from the beginning
of the eighteenth century, when the Government sought to bind in
strawberry leaves several of those Highland Samsons.

At that time the Duke of Atholl seemed the most powerful of them all. In
1715 he was reckoned as having 6000 claymores at his call, as many as
the two great Campbell families put together; but the call behoved to be
against the Government, for most of the clan followed his sons in
intermittent service of the Pretender. Through their chief taking the
prosaic side, or through the growth of new conditions of life, by 1745
his influence had shrunk so that his following was estimated as having
fallen by a half; then, as we have seen, it did not rise heartily either
at his bidding, or at his Jacobite brother’s. There seems hint of a
reason for this in the fact that Lord George Murray’s own regiment was
counted not among the Highland but the Lowland contingent of Prince
Charlie’s army; then a recently published official report, written 1750,
on the state of the clans, hardly mentions Atholl, treating it rather as
brought to Lowland law and order. Leases, as once charters, came to be a
solvent for the old adhesiveness of clan life.

Not only in Scotland was Atholl’s Duke a great man. By the spindle side,
he inherited the Derby Earl’s kingship of the Isle of Man, a too
pretentious title abridged to that of Lord, and finally sold to the
Crown for nearly half a million in all, which went to tame and adorn
Atholl. When claymores could be beaten into ploughshares, the dukes were
not behind other great Highland proprietors in improving their estate,
turning robbers’ lairs into snug farms, the camps of turbulent
chieftains into trim parks, and covering the bare glens with lordly
plantations, among which tens of thousands of trees came to be blown
down by that storm that wrecked the Tay Bridge. One of those dukes is
said to have planted trees by the million. At the same time they
cultivated what may be called an ornamental Highland feeling; and if
nowadays they are not so wealthy as British nobles enriched from City
moneybags or American pork butcheries, they have a considerable holding
in sentimental loyalty not wholly uprooted by sheriff courts and
railways. An hereditary taste for sport helped to win the hearts of a
people cherishing so much of their ancestral instincts, while efforts to
keep the northern wilds of Atholl as a deer forest rather than a tourist
ground did not go to gild this coronet in the eyes of Southerners. The
most outstanding of the race in our times was that Duke of the Victoria
and Albert days, of whom hard things were said in newspapers when he
tried to shut up Glen Tilt. In _Bonnie Scotland_ I echoed those
revilings, so now, _per contra_, let me quote Dr. John Brown’s
appreciation of this last of the Highland chiefs.

     He was a living, a strenuous protest in perpetual kilt against the
     civilisation, the taming, the softening of mankind. He was
     essentially wild. His virtues were those of human nature in the
     rough and unreclaimed, open and unsubdued as the Moor of Rannoch.
     He was a true autochthon, _terrigena_,--a son of the soil,--as rich
     in local colour, as rough in the legs, and as hot at the heart, as
     prompt and hardy, as heathery as a gorcock. Courage, endurance,
     staunchness, fidelity and warmth of heart, simplicity, and
     downrightness were his staples; and with them he attained to a
     power in his own region and among his own people quite singular.
     The secret of this was his truth and his pluck, his kindliness and
     his constancy. Other noblemen put on the kilt at the season, and do
     their best to embrown their smooth knees for six weeks, returning
     them to trousers and to town; he lived in his kilt all the year
     long, and often slept soundly in it and his plaid among the
     brackens; and not sparing himself, he spared none of his men or
     friends--it was the rigour of the game--it was Devil take the
     hindmost. Up at all hours, out all day and all night, often without
     food--with nothing but the unfailing pipe--there he was, stalking
     the deer in Glen Tilt or across the Gaick moors, or rousing before
     daybreak the undaunted otter among the alders of the Earn, the
     Isla, or the Almond; and if in his pursuit, which was fell as any
     hound’s, he got his hand into the otter’s grip, and had its keen
     teeth meeting in his palm, he let it have its will till the pack
     came up,--no flinching, almost as if without the sense of pain. It
     was this gameness and thoroughness in whatever he was about that
     charmed his people--charmed his very dogs; and so it should.... But
     he was not only a great hunter, and an organiser and vitaliser of
     hunting, he was a great breeder. He lived at home, was himself a
     farmer, and knew all his farmers and all their men; had lain out at
     nights on the Badenoch heights with them, and sat in their bothies
     and smoked with them the familiar pipe. But he also was, as we have
     said, a thorough breeder, especially of Ayrshire cattle. It was
     quite touching to see this fierce, restless, intense man--_impiger,
     acer, iracundus_--at the great Battersea show doating upon and
     doing everything for his meek-eyed, fine-limbed, sweet-breathed
     kine.

Besides doing much to stock his domain with the best cattle honestly
come by, this duke fell in with the fashion set by his royal mistress in
keeping up its Highland character and sentiment. A German visitor, Herr
Brand, took a note how tartans had faded out of Scotland, except in the
case of soldiers; but he modified that statement when he got the length
of Blair and came in for the Atholl Gathering, to see a whole regiment
of the duke’s dependents, gamekeepers, gardeners, herds and the like,
paraded for this holiday occasion as kilted Highlanders. The Atholl men
can even claim to have added a new feature to the Highland dress, by the
Glengarry cap worn in the army, which has almost entirely replaced the
old broad bonnet and the “Balmorals” of my youth. But if Fergus McIvor
could have risen from his grave to behold an Atholl Gathering, what
would have most amazed him would be the fact of the duke’s honorary
bodyguard being captained by a Robertson of Struan.

The Robertsons, for all their Lowland-sounding name, were the oldest and
once the proudest clan known to history as seated in those glens, their
chiefs holding princedom over Atholl before Murrays had pushed
themselves across the Highland line. They own to being sprung out of
the MacDonalds, but from the chieftain of a vigorous offshoot they
called themselves Clan Donnachie, sons of Duncan. This hero was a
comrade and favourite of Robert Bruce, who no doubt stood godfather to
his son, then the name came to be anglicised as Robertson. To King
James’s wit is ascribed a saying that while all the other
_sons_--Wilsons, Watsons, Thomsons and so on--were carles’ sons, the
Struan Robertsons were gentlemen. They were ignorant Parisians who, at a
later date, mistook the _chef_ of Clan Donnachie for a cook.

Along with other clans, this one came into fresh favour with the Crown
by lending a hand to apprehend the murderers of James I. Then by obscure
defeats, mistakes, and turns of fortune, Clan Donnachie in turn lost its
pre-eminence in Perthshire. In 1745 it still counted some hundreds of
claymores; and perhaps Scott had it in his eye as a prototype of the
MacIvors, divided by a frequent contention as to headship. Now, while
their name is as widely scattered over the world as that of any other
Highland stock, most of them have half forgotten their Highland descent,
and a melancholy burial-place at Dunalaister, near Loch Rannoch, is the
monument of their old glory, in a country where Struan has become best
known as a link of tourist travel, and another seat of their chief, at
the farther end of the lake, is or was styled The Barracks, as having
been built for the soldiers of King George.

The most notable member of this stock in modern times was that Alexander
Robertson, whose memory gave Scott one model for his Baron of
Bradwardine, a no doubt composite picture for which Lord Pitsligo is
also said to have sat. This Robertson seems to have been an “original,”
bearing among his neighbours the nickname “Elector of Struan,” and not
quite such an honourable reputation as did Waverley’s father-in-law. He
was “out” in all the Jacobite risings, from Killiecrankie to
Prestonpans, yet, with intervals of exile, he managed to live jovially
for the most part in his own country; and his great age in 1745 perhaps
induced the Government to let him die peacefully at home a few years
later, when his funeral was attended by two thousand mourners on a march
of a dozen long miles. His heir, indeed, had some of the woeful
experiences of lurking out of the way of capture, as described in
_Waverley_. The old laird was in more danger from bailiffs, against
whose invasions he had the passes guarded, and once got into trouble
with the law through his “tail” having stripped one of these venturesome
enemies and ducked him almost to death. He was a poet and a scholar as
well as a warrior, who in his youth had run away from St. Andrews
University to join Dundee. His verses are hardly remembered now, unless
for those specimens of classical translation put by Scott into the
Baron’s mouth.

    Cruel love has garter’d low my leg,
    And clad my hurdies in a philabeg.

Also his vernacular rendering of _Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis,
acer_--

    A fiery etter-cap, a fractious chiel,
    As het as ginger, and as stieve as steel.

--which may have been a fair description of the poet’s

[Illustration: THE MOOR OF RANNOCH]

own personality, when sober. Much of his verse was not fit for
publication, his Muse being evidently nursed more on brandy and claret
than on the midnight oil. A little volume published in his name a few
years after his death, contains a good deal of Strephon, Damon, and
such-like, with other hints of classical inspiration, but also religious
pieces that read as if written in headachy morning hours. He appears a
mixture of pedant, soldier, and sot, whose life, prolonged over
fourscore years, makes no edifying example for teetotallers.

That worthy would certainly not have stooped to serve under the Duke of
Atholl, as did his descendant, of whom also Dr. John Brown speaks in
warmly reminiscent terms which this “Captain of the Atholl Guard” seems
to have well deserved. In my youth a rival chieftain gave himself bold
advertisement, a fuliginous personage--I think he was a coal merchant by
trade--who under the style of Dundonnachie, stalked about Perth in fiery
tartans, and carried on raids upon the duke as to freeing the bridge of
Dunkeld from toll, by which he got himself into duress vile, but was not
otherwise taken very seriously.

Several old clans, beside the Robertsons, have been submerged here
beneath the flood of Murraydom. The nucleus of Blair Castle is called
Comyn’s Tower, and appears to have been a stronghold of the Red Comyns
of Badenoch. The earldom of Atholl was long held by royal offshoots like
that truculent Wolf of Badenoch, whose skeleton has lately been turned
up in Dunkeld Cathedral; and their following went to dot the region with
Stewart graves. Another name to be read on its tombstones is Ferguson,
that might claim descent from more or less mythical kings; but sons of
Fergus are famed rather in the victories of peace. Their most
illustrious scion is perhaps the philosophic historian Adam Ferguson,
born at Logierait, though, as being a son of the manse, his root in the
soil may be questionable. The Menzies appear as intruders from the
South, like the Murrays; but very old inhabitants were the Mackintoshes
of Glen Tilt, who exalt themselves against the Macphersons as heads of
the Clan Chattan. The Macbeths are said, not by themselves, to have
fallen to become helots under later lords of Atholl. Then, all over this
district and far around, twinkle traditions of the Macgregors, that
famous broken clan, of whom I have much to say farther on. Murray itself
is a name not so common as distinguished in Perthshire; and we saw above
how a farmer who had taken it along with allegiance to Atholl, was by
blood a Macgregor.

In more than one foreign book one comes across a statement, the origin
of which I cannot trace, that early in last century a census was made of
Highland names, which brought out Macgregor at the head of the list with
a numeration of 36,000. One knows not how such a count could be
effectually made; and it would be surprising if this name, so long cut
down by law, should have sprung up again with such dominant vitality.
Signor Piovanelli, an Italian writer who quotes that estimate, tells us
how he whiled away one probably wet evening of Highland travel by
counting names in an Inverness Directory. The sum of his calculation was
that out of a little over 4000 names, 1320 had the prefix _Mac_, 240
being Macdonalds, but they were surpassed by 415 Frasers, a name strong
in that belt of the country; and forty Alexander Frasers made the most
solid phalanx of nomenclature among the Inverness citizens. Some years
later Mr. A. Macbain undertook the same task more seriously, analysing
the Inverness Directory in a little book which confirms the Italian
tourist’s rough calculation, except as showing the Macdonalds to have
gained on the Frasers; he finds the Macgregors coming in with the ruck,
only 44 of them, and John beating Alexander as the commonest Christian
name.

Half a century ago, “for want of other idleness,” I had counted the
names in an Edinburgh Directory, and my recollection is that Robertson
came out highest. I have now had a census taken in the current Edinburgh
Directory, the result being that Robertson still stands top with,
roughly, 500 entries. Smith, with 450, runs second, and might not be far
behind if the Gows were counted in, who have kept the Gaelic form of
their name. The next on the list is Thomson, including no doubt many
Celtic MacTavishes; then come Lowland stocks, Browns, Andersons, and
Wilsons. Stewarts or Stuarts (300) stand highest among names that
nowadays seem to fit tartans, then Campbells and Macdonalds are equal
(240), both a little above Murrays and Frasers, so far from the Fraser
country. Most Macs make a poorer show, the Macgregors here amounting to
only some 100, and other plaided names hardly deserving a place; while
one is surprised to find Jamiesons not so numerous as might be expected
from a long succession of royal godfathers.

In a Glasgow Directory, as might be guessed, the figures come out
differently. Here Brown heads the list (530), Smith a good second (500),
and Stewart third (450), while Robertson has fallen to 330. Campbell
(380) takes a rather higher place than in Edinburgh; Macdonalds (260)
and Macgregors (130), slightly increased here, bulk less in what is, of
course, a much larger population, of more miscellaneous antecedents. All
those estimates are made somewhat roughly, and serve only for comparison
between the prevalence of different names. On turning to a London
Directory, one finds the Smiths in full pre-eminence, with a tale of
nearly 1300 names, to which may be added a reinforcement of Smyths and
Smythes. Brown and Jones are each about half as strong. Robertsons here
have shrunk to under a hundred, who indeed might call cousins with more
than 500 Robinsons and Roberts and smaller bodies of Robsons, Robins,
and so forth. A slightly larger force of Stewarts and Campbells have
sought fortune in the capital, where Macgregors stand at a bare two
dozen. So much for the Commercial section; to more patient statisticians
I leave the task of searching the Court, Professional, and Suburban
Directories, and drawing a moral that may or may not appear from the
number of Scottish names they find there.

It were, indeed, a labour of Hercules truly to measure Celtic
nomenclature, which takes as many shapes as Proteus. My friend, Mr. D.
MacRitchie, who has given much attention to such matters, tells me of
his connection with the Mackintoshes, sons of a _Tosh_ or chief, who in
time came to be scattered under more _aliases_ than a mere Sassenach can
trace. One scion of it, being a Richard, perpetuated his Christian name
in a branch of MacRitchies who in the Lowlands might have become
Dicksons. A Davidson branch is also recognised in the Highlands, who
claim for their McDhai forbears the honour of having brought on that
quarrel fought out on the Inch of Perth. Another got to be McTavish,
from the Gaelic form of Thomas; but not to mention those who anglicised
themselves outright as Thompson or Thoms, there are also MacThomases,
and MacCombies, the latter from _Hombie_, which, it appears, is a
corruption of Thomas. In fact, so liquid are Gaelic consonants that the
Clan Chattan, which the Mackintoshes claim to head, is held by some
philologists to bear the _alias_ of Kay as a variant of Adam’s name,
whose ancestry we could all boast without question till higher criticism
came to disturb this pride. But in all questions of Highland descent we
do well to “ca’canny,” as Eve was bidden by that first chief of Clan
Chattan, when she seemed to be taking too large a bite at the apple. It
is not alone slippery syllables we have to deal with, but the custom of
whole clans being adopted or absorbed, and the frequent case of others
shooting out new names to grow up about the memory of some distinguished
hero, who may indeed have branded his descendants with a mark of no more
dignity than the sobriquet “wry mouth,” or “crooked nose.”

Let me show by an imaginary case how hard it may be to catch the
chameleon tints of Highland blood. There is a youth much at home in
Perthshire, as carrying on there, and elsewhere, the highest form of
sport, at which he seldom misses his aim, yet often puts his victims to
a great deal of needless pain. He was well known to Robertson of
Struan, and quite as familiar in the Georges’ Court. He appears not to
have worn the kilt, nor yet breeches, but he has as much right to a
tartan and a pibroch as many Highland clans once strangers here. Now if
he had settled down and founded a family in Atholl, it might have come
to be known as MacEros, or Vich Venus, or FitzZeus, if he chose to hark
back to the fame of his grandfather. His own birth, in strict Scottish
law, should have been registered under the presumed name of MacVulcan;
but Struan Robertson could tell us how there were family scandals
tending to fix on him that of MacMars or MacMercury, which could be
translated as FitzAres or FitzHermes; then one episode in his career
might have obfuscated his descendants as MacPsyches, which, on coming to
try their fortune in London, they would be well advised to translate
into Cupidson; or as the Earl of Bute’s butler transposed MacCall into
Almack, they might find it convenient to be known as Lovemakers, unless
they took a fancy for Lovell as a name found in Perthshire, and said to
be of gipsy origin. But then they never could be sure that one or other
of their forbears had not found good reason for altogether changing his
name, perhaps having been out in the ’45, where Cupid intrigued on both
sides, if we may trust Captain Waverley’s experiences.

Should the reader sniff at this flight of mine, let him know how it is
all taken on a single feather stolen from Sir Walter’s wing, who in the
famous romance that has Atholl for one of its scenes, makes the
prejudiced English colonel own that he “could not have endured Venus
herself if she had been announced in a drawing-room by the name of Miss
MacJupiter.” The history of Olympus, as of Atholl, is a little obscure;
but its celestial tartan, too, seems to have been a chequer of
jealousies and kisses, feuds and favours, with revolution as the most
outstanding stripe in the pattern. And those who suffer under the
thunderbolts and vulture beaks of the present, have always looked fondly
back to a golden age, when everything went well under the chieftainship
of some Saturn whose origin is lost in distance along with any unlovely
traits of conduct, such as dethroning his father or swallowing his own
children.




IV

BREADALBANE


By Loch Tay we pass into Breadalbane, that Broad Albin of hill and vale
where many names have struggled for a mastery falling to the clan whose
Highland mettle was best tempered by Lowland canniness. While the senior
branch of the house of Campbell spread its tartans to the west and along
the Clyde, cadets of the same stock pushed north-eastward from Kilchurn
Castle into Perthshire, there to take firm root like the foreign trees
it planted on the Tay. Among the names overshadowed or displaced was
that of forbears of mine, on whose behalf, however, I have no blood feud
against the Campbells, the dealings between them seeming to have been
fair sale and purchase, as was not always the way in old Breadalbane.

It was pointed out, in _The Highlands and Islands_, how this politic
clan throve in love as in war, by prudent marriages as well as by noting
which way the wind of the time blew. Sir Colin Campbell, the founder of
the Perthshire house, had four wives, the first of royal blood, the
second a Stewart of Lorne, the third a Robertson of Struan, the fourth a
Stirling of Keir; and to their

[Illustration: THE HEAD OF LOCH TAY]

tochers was added a royal grant of land on Loch Tay, in reward for his
helping to arrest the murderers of James I. A century after his death,
another Sir Colin built himself a castle at the foot of Loch Tay, then
called Balloch, the easternmost border of his property, with the view,
it is said, of making this a new centre of extension. Legend has it that
the site was fixed where first the chief heard a mavis sing. His son,
“Black Duncan,” built or rebuilt several other houses at a time when
house property was becoming a safe investment. He was a man of some
culture, even suspected of authorship; and in his long lairdship was
written, apparently by his grandson’s tutor, that family chronicle, the
_Black Book of Taymouth_, that has been copied by the _Red Books_ and
_White Books_ compiled at a later time for other families.

“Black Duncan,” for all his dark repute, seems to have been a missionary
of civilisation, who both built and planted, as shown by old chestnut
and walnut trees now adorning his domain. He was made one of James’s
baronets of Nova Scotia. His son Colin appears in the novel character of
a Highland patron of art, employing George Jameson to execute family
portraits still preserved. Twenty marks for a half-length was the charge
of this artist, the first famous portrait-painter, not only of Scotland,
but of Britain, who is believed to have studied under Rubens at Antwerp,
with Vandyck as fellow-pupil.

The alliances of the Perthshire Campbells went on with noble and lairdly
houses; and their wealth paved the way to peerage, while they came to
look on themselves as an independent stock; yet in 1633, the head of the
Breadalbane branch is found addressing Lorne as his “lord and chief,”
and getting back the style of “cousin.” Under Charles II. Sir John
Campbell secured a reversion to the title and lands of the Caithness
Earl, whose widow he married to “mak’ siccar.” But on the Earl’s death a
right Sinclair arose to dispute this settlement; and the Breadalbane men
marched all the way to Caithness on that private invasion already
mentioned in _Bonnie Scotland_. The Sinclairs got the worst of it in the
field; but the law pronounced against the Campbell baronet’s claim, who
was consoled by the new titles, Earl of Breadalbane and Holland,
Viscount Tay, Lord Ormelie and Glenorchy, with other lordships thrown
into the lump of dignity.

This was the politician, “as sly as a fox, wise as a serpent, and
slippery as an eel,” who earned an evil name for himself through his
part in the Glencoe massacre, carried out by his vassal, Campbell of
Glenlyon. King William’s Government had placed in his hands the large
sum--when there was not a million of money in all Scotland--of £20,000,
to be spent in pacifying the Highlands, which he accounted for in this
offhand manner: “The Highlands are quiet; the money is spent; and that
is the best way of accounting among friends.” Yet William’s agent lived
to turn out his clan for the Pretender, in 1715, when they came to blows
with their kinsmen of Argyll. In the ’45, however, the next Lord
Breadalbane threw his influence on the Hanoverian side, though some of
the Perthshire Campbells joined Prince Charlie. This earl, like the
contemporary Duke of Atholl, was the second son; the elder, Lord
Ormelie, having been set aside from the succession, apparently as
weak-minded.

The direct line of Breadalbane died out in George III.’s reign with the
third earl, whose son, Lord Glenorchy, had predeceased him, leaving a
widow, known, like the Countess of Huntingdon, as a patroness of
evangelical preachers, who came to end her life at Matlock. For an heir,
the family had to cast back more than a century to one of the collateral
branches. Campbell of Carwhin, who succeeded to the earldom in 1782, at
the age of twenty, had a long and prosperous tenure, swelling the family
wealth by his marriage with a great Scottish heiress. She was daughter
of David Gavin, whose father, a poor Angus weaver, had lamented over the
son as not taking to his own trade, consorting rather with smugglers,
Dutchmen, and such-like; but the family ne’er-do-weel, drifting abroad,
made a princely fortune at Hamburg, and came back to set up as a
Berwickshire laird.

This accession of wealth the earl used in carrying out improvements on
his large property, adding to it, and building the modern Taymouth
Castle. At William IV.’s coronation he was raised to the marquisate. His
son, the second marquis, could boast of being able to ride a hundred
miles on his own land westward, for, after all, it was towards their
native seas that the Campbells stretched out, getting no farther inland
than Aberfeldy, beyond the St. Petersburg of their possessions. He it
was who in 1842 sumptuously entertained Queen Victoria at Taymouth, when
she seems to have caught that love of the Highlands that went so far to
set a fashion, delighted with the display of kilts, reels, and pipers,
in a blaze of torchlight and a din of loyal salvos. Lord Breadalbane
then kept a prince of pipers, John Mackenzie, to whom he communicated
the Queen’s wish to find for her own service such an one as himself.
“Impossible, my lord!” was the proud musician’s answer.

The second marquis, who, while Lord Ormelie, had sat in the Reformed
Parliament as a Whig, lived in esteem and prosperity till 1862, but
would perhaps have given up half his possessions for a son. At his
death, the new marquisate became extinct; and once more the clan had to
look back some generations for an heir to the estate and the earldom,
this time with appeal to law in a trial not yet forgotten. There were
popularly said to be some fourscore competitors for the prize. One of
them was a schoolfellow of mine, who invited me to Taymouth, when he
should come into his kingdom, but that hospitality fell through. The
real contest lay between Campbell of Glenfalloch and Campbell of
Boreland, both descended from the nearest collateral, a Glenfalloch who
died 1791. The question arose in the liberal view of Scots law as to
proof of marriage. The elder son, while a subaltern in an English
regiment, had eloped with the wife of one Christopher Ludlow, grocer and
apothecary at Chipping Sodbury. This husband died three years later,
both before and after which date the lady had marched with Campbell’s
regiment as his wife. Her son, through whom the claim descended, was
born after she became legally free to marry again; and the dispute
mainly turned upon this delicate point: whether a union begun in
adultery could be confirmed by the usual evidence of habit and repute
marriage. It was shown that the lady had been received at Glenfalloch as
the heir’s wife, that she had drawn a pension as his widow when he died
Quartermaster of the Breadalbane Fencibles, and, what seemed much to
the purpose, that the younger branch had not contested her son’s
legitimacy as heir of Glenfalloch, nor till the tempting prize of the
Breadalbane succession came in view. On these grounds, the Courts
presumed that eloping couple to have taken themselves as husband and
wife, so taken by the world in their lifetime: then their descendant
must be recognised head of the family.

The successful claimant gained the old earldom, the marquisate becoming
extinct, but it was revived in the person of his son, who married a
daughter of the house of Montrose, hereditary enemy of his race. He now
has reigned for a generation at Taymouth Castle, one of the noblest
Scottish seats, among finely planted grounds and gardens, where, but for
the mountain background, one would hardly believe oneself in the
Highlands. The neat model village of Kenmore also suggests anything but
a Highland clachan. Some critics, indeed, have found fault with the
glories of Taymouth as out of keeping--“an artificial and drilled scene
that seems to have been modelled in a toyshop and transplanted hither by
a chain and a theodolite”; and the celebration of them in Burns’s verse
shows his Muse for the nonce in her Sunday clothes, cut after the
prevalent fashion. At least, most of the “Temples” and such-like have
disappeared, with which this oasis of grandeur was once adorned, after a
model shown in Kew Gardens and elsewhere by the “Capability” Browns,
Chamberses, Reptons, and other “improvers” of nature in the Georgian
period. More at home seem the ruins of a Priory hidden among old
sycamore trees, on a small island in the lake, where the Campbells had
a castle of refuge, bombarded from the shore by Montrose as he swept
through the Highlands. General Monk’s soldiery were quartered on this
island, and have the traditional credit of teaching the natives to smoke
tobacco; but snuffing, at least, was older in the Highlands.

It is whispered that the lord of this lake does not trust himself on the
water that, according to old prophecy, is to be fatal to a Breadalbane.
But for undoomed strangers a tourist steamer plies on Loch Tay, “an
immense plate of polished silver, its dark heathy mountains and thickets
of oak serving as arabesque frame to a magnificent mirror.” Like the
other Perthshire lakes, this is a deep trough set in slopes furrowed by
affluents of what appears a broad river fifteen miles long. Loch Tay’s
banks are well wooded and cultivated on the south side, while the north
shows more truly Highland features, “a clan of Titans,” as Scott calls
them, commanded by “the frowning mountains of Ben Lawers, and the still
more lofty eminence of Ben Mhor, arising high above the rest, whose
peaks retain a dazzling helmet of snow far into the summer season, and
sometimes during the whole year.” Ben Lawers is now recognised as the
chieftain of Perthshire summits, only a few hundred feet short of Ben
Nevis. From the lake this is easily ascended for what Macculloch extols
as the most varied and far-reaching Highland prospect.

     To the south, we look down on the lake, with all its miniature
     ornament of woods and fields, terminating westward in the rich vale
     of Killin, and uniting eastward with the splendour of Strath Tay,
     stretching away till its ornaments almost vanish among the hills
     and in the fading tints of the atmosphere. Beyond the lake the
     successive ridges of hills lead the eye over Strathearn, which is,
     however, invisible, to the Ochills and the Campsie, and hence, even
     to Edinburgh; the details of this quarter, from Perth, being
     unexpectedly perfect and minute, and at the same time well
     indicated by the marked characters of the Lowmont hills. The place
     of Dunkeld and the peculiar style of its scenery are also
     distinctly visible; and it is equally easy to make out the bright
     estuary of the Tay, the long ridge of the Sidlaw, and the plain of
     Strathmore. Westward, we trace, without difficulty, the hills of
     Loch Lomond and Loch Cateran; and, in the same manner, every marked
     mountain, even to Oban, Cruachan and Buachaille Etive being
     particularly conspicuous. To the north, Glen Lyon is entirely
     excluded; the first objects, in this direction, being Schihallien
     and its accompanying mountains, leading us to the vale of the Tumel
     and Loch Rannoch, and even to Loch Laggan, seen as a bright narrow
     line: and thus, on one hand, to Glenco and Ben Nevis, and, on the
     other, to Ben-y-Gloe, lifting its complicated summit above the head
     of Ferrogon; beyond which the mountains at the head of Dee, of Marr
     and Cairngorm, marked with perpetual snow, were the last objects
     which I could satisfactorily determine. So great a range of view,
     with so many and such marked objects, is unexampled in any other
     spot in Scotland.

At the head of the lake, between the streams of the Dochart and the
Lochay that unite to fill it, stands the pretty village of Killin, whose
sojourners soon come upon names and relics of other clans overlaid by
the intruding Campbells. Near the pier are the ruins of Finlarig Castle,
for a time their chief seat, built by Black Duncan on the site of a
ruder stronghold he had acquired from the Drummonds, whose name is
preserved by Drummond Hill at the other end. When the Breadalbanes had
moved on to Taymouth, Finlarig became their last home, in the modern
mausoleum that has not yet gathered such gloomy note as the old
Doom-tree on which hung many a plaided offender, while a heading-stone
was provided for the shedding of gentle blood.

Black Duncan and his line did much stern work as “justiciars,”
especially on their neighbours, the Macgregors, then under James VI.
going down in a changed world, as the Campbells came up. Fetters and
shackles made an important part of the furniture at Finlarig, which has
comic as well as grim traditions of its rough-and-ready executions, like
that of the reluctant Highlander urged by his wife to more alacrity in
stepping up to be hanged “to pleasure the laird.” The axe is still shown
at Taymouth with which a Macgregor chief was executed; more than one,
indeed, coming to such an end, if all tales be true.

In one case the legend is that a Macgregor, invited to a friendly
conference, was ambushed by armed men, who dragged him to the block at
Kenmore, having killed his aged father on the way. But the stories make
some confusion of father and son; and it seems doubtful whether this
were the same victim as the “Red Macgregor” beheaded before the eyes of
his wife, herself a Campbell by birth, who cursed her kindred in a
celebrated Gaelic lament, with its burden of--

    Ochain, ochain--sad my heart, my child!
    Ochain, ochain--thy father hears not our moan!

     On Lammas morn I rejoiced with my love; ere noon my heart was
     pressed with sorrow.

[Illustration: THE DOCHART]

     Under ban be the nobles and friends who pained me so: who unawares
     came on my love, and overmastered him by guile.

     Had there been twelve of his race and my Gregor at their head, my
     eyes would not be dim with tears, nor my child without its father.

     They laid his head upon an oaken block: they poured his blood on
     the ground: oh had I there a cup I would drink of it my fill!

     Oh that my father had been sick, and Colin in the plague, and all
     the Campbells in Balloch wearing manacles!

     I would have put Gray Colin under lock and Black Duncan in a
     dungeon, though Ruthven’s daughter would be wringing her hands.

     I went to the plains of Balloch, but rest found not there: I tore
     the hair from my head, the skin from my hands.

     Had I the wings of the lark, the strength of Gregor in my arms, the
     highest stone in the castle would have been the one next the
     ground.

     Oh that Finlarig were wrapped in flames, proud Taymouth lying in
     ashes, and fair-haired Gregor of the white hands in my embrace!

     All others have apples: I have none, my sweet, lovely apple has the
     back of his head to the ground.

     Other men’s wives sleep soft in their homes: I stand by the bedside
     wringing my hands.

Another tale of Loch Tay is told almost identically of more than one
pair of hostile Highland families, but here with a picturesque opening
and a rather lame conclusion. A Macgregor had been at feud with the head
of the Breadalbane Campbells, who held out a deceitful olive branch by
proposing a treaty of peace in his new-built castle at Taymouth.
Macgregor trustfully kept the rendezvous with an appointed number of
friends. On the hill above Balloch they found an old man kneeling before
a large grey stone, uttering prayers for the dead, in which he mixed
this sentence, “To thee, grey stone, I tell it; but when the black
bull’s head appears, Macgregor’s sword can hardly save the wearer’s
fated head. Deep the dungeon--sharp the axe--and short the shrift!”
Macgregor recognised this as a warning from one who had perhaps been
bound to secrecy and thus salved his conscience; but he was not the man
to turn back. The lord of the castle received him and his men with
feigned kindness, and they sat down to meat, each Campbell having a
Macgregor on his right hand. When a black bull’s head was borne in, a
clatter of arms being heard outside, the guest took the initiative by
holding his dagger to Campbell’s breast and clutching him by the throat.
The other Macgregors were quick to follow this example so effectively
that their false host allowed himself to be dragged out of his castle,
across the loch, and to the top of Drummond Hill, where he was fain to
subscribe an amnesty and promise of future friendship, that did not long
hold good. One would like to compare the Campbell version of such
legends.

A story of the next century may have suggested to Scott the Strathyre
wedding interrupted by a messenger of the Fiery Cross, though in this
case the incidents seem less romantic. To a party gathered at Finlarig
for the marriage of the chief’s daughter to a Menzies laird, came news
of the approach of Macdonald raiders driving home their booty. Even at
such a time Campbells were not to be kept from the throats of
Macdonalds, whose offence, according to one account, was refusing to pay
toll for passage through Breadalbane, such as explorers of our age have
found exacted by African chiefs across whose territory lay their way.
The wedding guests seized their arms, and sallied forth, bridegroom and
all, to attack the Macdonalds, who were defeated in a hot encounter,
with heavy loss on both sides, including the Macdonald chief and MacIan
of Glencoe, while nearly a score of the wedding party had to be carried
home with the coronach. Such were the scenes amid which the Breadalbane
lairds sowed the seeds of more peaceful manners.

On a wooded islet of the Dochart are the tombs of the Macnabs, older
lairds of this district. They appear to have been a branch of the
Macgregors, their name being taken to mean “Sons of the Abbot,” who in
more orthodox climes might have rather been styled “nephews.” They
showed themselves right Celts, shutting their eyes to the signs of
change, trusting to claymores rather than to charters, and apt to turn
out on the losing side, so that they went under the waves of time on the
top of which the Campbells rode triumphantly.

The last laird of Macnab figured as a well-known “character” in Scott’s
day, his outer man still familiar in Raeburn’s portrait of him. He was
huge of stature, imperious in manner, irascible, proud and impracticable
to an ultra-Highland degree. To him is attributed that vaunt of the
Macnabs having a boat of their own at the Flood, also the declaration
that there were many _Mr._ Macnabs but only one Macnab, naturally the
crown and chieftain of the human race. When an arrogant scholar boasted
in the same spirit that England had only one Master of Trinity, a
stuttering don broke the awed silence with too audible comment, “Thank
God for that!” With not less irreverence a bold pretender is said to
have answered the chieftain’s pride by signing himself _The other
Macnab_. Ill would it have fared with the Sassenach body who should thus
have bearded the Macnab to his face. In Mr. P. R. Drummond’s
_Perthshire_, there is reported this instance of his wrath being
provoked by an audacious stranger:--

     It occurred after dinner, the laird being a little mellow, for as
     to being drunk, oceans of liquor would have failed to produce that
     effect, at least to the length of prostration. The unhappy querist
     began: “Macnab, are you acquainted with Macloran of Dronascandlich,
     who has lately purchased so many thousand acres in
     Inverness-shire?” This was more than enough to set the laird off in
     a furious tilt on his genealogical steed. “Ken wha? the
     paddock-stool o’ a cratur they ca’ Dronascandlich, wha no far
     bygane dawred (curse him) to offer siller, sir, for an auld ancient
     estate, sir. An estate as auld as the flude, sir; an infernal deal
     aulder, sir. Siller, sir, scrappit thegither by the meeserable
     deevil in India, sir, not in an officer or gentlemanlike way, sir;
     but (Satan burst him) makin’ cart wheels and trams, sir, and
     harrows, and the like o’ that wretched handiwork. Ken him, sir? I
     ken the cratur weel, and whae he comes frae, sir; and so I ken that
     dumb tyke, sir, a better brute by half than a score o’ him!” The
     querist interjected, “Mercy on us, Macnab, you surprise me. I
     thought from the sublime sound of his name and title, he had been,
     like yourself, a chief of fifteen centuries’ standing at least.”
     The instant this comparison was drawn, the laird’s visage grew
     ghastly with rage. His eyes caught fire and he snorted like a
     mountain whirlwind.

But for the climax of this storm, worthy of Meg Dods or of Meg
Merrilies, the reader may be referred to my authority, with the hint
that it will be wasted on who cannot interpret the vernacular eloquence
then familiar at lordly dinner-tables as in kailyard “cracks.”

Many are the stories told, in print or tradition, of the Macnab’s
sayings and doings. Mr. Drummond states that the library at Taymouth
Castle contained two scrapbooks filled with them, cut out of
publications like the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ and the _Literary Gazette_.
The most often told of these stories relates to a time when the
spendthrift laird was at last falling into the toils of law, whose
minions he looked on as very sons of the devil. The Perth men of
business, it is said, showed indulgence to his shortcomings; but a bill
of his having come into the hands of some less considerate creditor at
Stirling, a clerk, accompanied by two messengers-at-arms, ventured to
his house in Breadalbane on the perilous errand of taking the Macnab
into custody. Getting wind of their design, he kept out of the way, and
left his housekeeper schooled to play a cunning part. She welcomed the
visitors, let them understand that the laird was expected home next
morning, and after hospitable entertainment, sent them to bed, the clerk
at one end of the house and the legal myrmidons at the other. When they
awoke next morning, they were horrified to see dangling from a tree
outside what seemed the body of their companion. They quickly took to
flight on hearing from the housekeeper, as matter of course, that “a bit
clerk body had been hanged, who came here to deave the laird for
siller.” The clerk, whose greatcoat and boots had been borrowed to rig
out a stuffed figure, was not less terrified by the explanation of their
absence: “The laird’s gillies have taken them awa’ to be drooned in the
pool of Crianlarich, and they’ll be back for _you_ the noo.” That set
the clerk to flight in turn; and never again, goes the story, would
anyone venture to serve a legal process on the Macnab in his own
country.

Naturally such a personage did not thrive in his quarrel with the age;
and when he died in 1816, what was left of the Macnab property passed
into the hands of his kinsman and creditor, Lord Breadalbane, to whom
the laird had stooped his pride to become a sort of humoured hanger-on.
His nephew, heir to a load of debt, was fain to emigrate to Canada with
a following of the broken clan. But all over Britain a sprinkling of
Macnabs are found more or less flourishing, who have formed an
association, two or three hundred strong, that takes on itself the pious
duty of tending those ancestral graves at Killin, the chieftains buried
in a central square, their humbler clansmen and connections lying round
about them under the shade of funereal pine-trees. Killin has also to
show a lonely stone, taken to mark the tomb of Fingal, which is said to
have given the original name, _Kilfin_.

Kinnell House, the Macnabs’ chief seat, is now a favourite residence of
Lord Breadalbane, in which are preserved some odd relics of that last
laird, his frying-pan, his kail-pot, and so on. But the glory of the
place--Auchmore, as it is also called--is its famous vine that, to the
reproach of your Dr. Johnsons, can boast itself the largest in Britain,
and still goes on growing exuberantly, though it has been decided that
no more glass room can be provided for it.

Killin well deserves its renown in the tourist world, presenting a
lovely mixture of Highland and Lowland aspects. Its two rivers make the
same contrast, the leafy pools of the Lochay to be compared to the
tranquillising influences that have prevailed in Loch Tay, while the
untamed rapids of the Dochart suggest the wild mountain spirit dashed to
foam against rocks of hard fact. But the Lochay, too, up its beautiful
glen, has cascades and other features of romance such as we look for a
little farther back in Lowland life; and if the people forget their
Gaelic and their legends, Nature still wears her garb of bracken and
heather.

A plain sign of new times is the branch railway, link in a tourist round
that a few miles from Killin falls in with the line from Callander to
Oban. Here, turning back Lowlandwards, the rocky wilds of Glen Ogle lead
us towards the softer beauties of Loch Earn, which we shall approach
from the other end. Up Glen Dochart the railway runs into the higher yet
opener reach of Strath Fillan; and here for a little it has the close
companionship of its rival, the West Highland line, struggling on to Ben
Nevis over lofty wastes of heather. At Crianlarich the two lines cross,
then they draw apart at Tyndrum, under the ridge of Ben Lui, that
cradles the infant Tay, as yet unchristened, unless by its nursery name
of Fillan Water, where it gambols down to swell Loch Dochart, at the
foot of Ben More. By its course, along the line of the Oban railway, the
Campbells must have flowed into Breadalbane from their spring at
Kilchurn Castle on Loch Awe. But beyond the head of Strath Fillan the
streams flow to the Atlantic; and here we turn back from the Argyllshire
gates of the Western Highlands.

Strath Fillan gets its name from the Irish missionary, Fillan, who
became the patron saint of central Scotland, his memory preserved by a
monastery that had much reverence in Breadalbane. He is, indeed, such a
shadowy personage that there are said to have been two saints of the
name, the other belonging to Loch Earn. St. Fillan’s pool, near
Crianlarich, was a famous Highland rendezvous, used occasionally, as we
have seen, for ducking objectionable persons; but its chief repute was
in the cure of lunacy. The unhappy sufferer, brought here by his
friends, was three times marched round a cairn from east to west--a rite
of unconscious paganism--then after being immersed in the pool, he was
tied up for the night in an adjacent chapel. If he managed to break
loose that was a hopeful sign of his wits; but the result of this rough
treatment must often have been an effectual cure for all the ills flesh
is heir to. The reputation of St. Fillan’s well held out till quite
recently; even now, perhaps, offerings may be secretly cast into it, or
hung upon the bushes around, as pins or crossed rushes are found in the
sacred wells of Cornwall. The superstition is, of course, world-wide;
and deeper in the Highlands are wells still sought for pious hydropathy.
To St. Fillan’s bell were also attributed supernatural properties: this
and his crosier, long preserved in a family of hereditary custodians
named Dewar, after wanderings as far as Canada, have come to be
treasured at the Antiquarian Museum of Edinburgh.

In history, also, this fair strath has a name. Dalry, near Tyndrum, was
the scene of one of Robert Bruce’s traditional exploits. Defeated at
Methven, after his coronation at Scone, he had to take to the
Highlands,

[Illustration: “THE LADY OF THE WOODS”]

roving in perils and hardships like those of his unhappy descendant,
Prince Charlie. At Dalry he had gathered force enough to make a stand
against Macdougal, Lord of Lorn, eager to avenge on him the kindred
blood of the Red Comyn. Overborne by numbers, the king retreated through
a narrow pass, the mouth of which he held in person till all his men
should be out of danger. Three doughty Macdougal champions, a father and
two sons, having vowed to slay or take him alive, fell upon Bruce at
once. The sons he cut down as they tried to drag him from his horse,
then the father grasping him by the cloak so close that he could not use
his sword, Bruce dashed out this man’s brains with the hilt, or with a
hammer hanging at his saddle-bow. But the dying Macdougal kept such a
grasp on the cloak that, to make good his escape, the king had to let it
go, undoing the brooch which fastened it. Thus is said to have come into
the hands of the Macdougals that Brooch of Lorn, treasured by the family
to our time--an idle trophy, indeed, that was to cost them dear. In
Bruce’s day of triumph he did not forget those bitter foes; then on
their fall rose the Argyllshire Campbells, who have so long been Lords
of Lorne.

These scenes are well known, as made accessible by the railway, that has
ploughed up the memories of old feuds, and the patterns of native
tartans. Less visited by rapid wheels are the wilds of Glenlyon,
“crooked glen of the stones,” running westward behind Ben Lawers on the
north of Loch Tay. This is notable as the longest narrow pass in
Scotland, and in its lower part one of the most beautiful. Its village
capital, Fortingall, lies shut in among the mountains not far from
Kenmore, across Drummond Hill. The high road comes round the other side
of the Taymouth meadows, entering the glen by Garth, where one of our
modern princes of commerce has a seat near the ruined castle, once lair
of that Stuart who earned the byname of Wolf from the bloodthirsty
fierceness with which he hunted the MacIvors out of their old lairs in
Glenlyon; then this house won a milder fame from General Stuart of
Garth, the enthusiastic historian of Highland regiments.

Near Fortingall was at home that Campbell of Glenlyon who carried out
the massacre of Glencoe, for which his descendants held themselves to be
accursed. According to Robert Chambers, one of them was Rob Roy’s
mother. A name of wider ill-fame is connected with Fortingall, if we
believe a thin legend that makes it birthplace of Pontius Pilate, son of
a Roman official quartered in the camp laid out under older strongholds
ascribed to chiefs of the Fingal age. So far into the Highlands seem to
have been pushed the eyries

    Where Rome, the Empress of the world,
    Of yore her eagle wings unfurled.

Another lion is the Fortingall yew, given out as three thousand years
old and perhaps the oldest tree in Europe, which, declares a Perthshire
historian, “must have been a goodly sapling when Nebuchadnezzar had his
dwelling with the beasts of the fields”; but Dr. John Lowe shakes his
head over such reputations. In his iconoclastic book on _Yew-trees_, he
blasts the very existence of a supposed old yew at Fotheringay, the
place of Queen Mary’s execution; but he might have guessed how that
pretender crept into print, had he known that the ancient name of
Fortingall was _Fothergill_, which is also found spelt _Fortirgall_.

The most authentic renown of Fortingall is as vicarage of James
Macgregor, Dean of Lismore, who, in the first half of the sixteenth
century, along with his brother Duncan, compiled the earliest collection
of Gaelic poetry, which bears the title _Book of Lismore_, though it was
made in the centre of Perthshire. Naturally the Macgregor Dean gives a
good place to legends and achievements of his own race, whose proud
genealogy has thus been embalmed; but he admits praises of the Clan
Donachie, the Clan Dougal, and other neighbours; also preserving
memories of such misty heroes as Finn and Oscar, and many poems
attributed to Ossian, similar to those upon which Macpherson afterwards
founded his _remaniement_. The name of the supposed author is usually
prefixed to each contribution. Among the rest is the romantic legend of
Fraoch and the dragon, outlined in _Highlands and Islands_. A passage
from this, as translated by the Rev. T. Maclauglan, may be quoted to
show how poets have always drawn on the same similes and hyperboles.

    The hero lived, of matchless strength,
    The bravest heart in battle’s day.
    Lovely those lips with welcomes rich,
    Which women like so well to kiss;
    Lovely the chief whom men obeyed,
    Lovely those cheeks like roses red,
    Than raven’s hue more dark his hair,
    Redder than hero’s blood his cheeks;
    Softer than froth of streams his skin,
    Whiter it was than whitest snow,
    His hair in curling locks fell down,
    His eye more blue than bluest ice;
    Than rowans red more red his lips,
    Whiter than blossoms were his teeth;
    Tall was his spear like any mast,
    Sweeter his voice than sounding chord.
    None could better swim than Fraoch
    Who ever breasted running stream.
    Broader than any gate his shield;
    Joyous he swung it o’er his back;
    His arm and sword of equal length,
    In size he like a ship did look.
    Would it had been in warrior’s fight
    That Fraoch, who spared not gold, had died;
    ’Twas sad to perish by a Beast,
    ’Tis just as sad he lives not now.

Another characteristic feature of the collection is strings of homely
proverbial saws such as this, going to show Scottish Sabbatarianism
older than communications with Geneva--

    ’Tis not good to travel on Sunday,
    Whoever the Sabbath would keep;
    Not good to be of ill-famed race;
    Not good is a dirty woman;
    Not good to write without learning;
    Not good are grapes when sour;
    Not good is an earl without English;
    Not good is a sailor, if old;
    Not good is a bishop without warrant;
    Not good is a blemish on an elder;
    Not good a priest with but one eye;
    Not good a parson, if a beggar;
    Not good is a palace without play;
    Not good is a handmaid if she’s slow;
    Not good is a lord without a dwelling; ...
    Not good is a crown without supremacy;
    Not good is ploughing by night;
    Not good is learning without courtesy;
    Not good is religion without knowledge.

Among matters handled in this anthology, one which suggests the priest
rather than the poet, is an unchivalrous estimate of the fair sex, here,
indeed, most emphatically expressed by a rhymer taken to be the Irish
Earl Gerald Fitzgerald of Desmond--

    May my curse ’mongst woman rest,
    Although for a time I mixed with them;
    As for men who still are single,
    ’Tis best to have nought to do with women.

Another bard whose sentiments would shock suffragettes, is suspected for
no other than Black Duncan himself, who would thus appear as taking a
cynical view of the world he did so much to change. Some verses again
are of ecclesiastically edifying tone; yet there are sly hits at
monastic life, a sign of the times in which Henry VIII. took a strong
view of the same subject, that, to be sure, supplies a favourite topic
for mediæval poetry, and is all along very freely handled by the Muse of
Lowland Scotland. The Dean himself could have been no model Churchman,
for he left two sons to be legitimatised, one of whom succeeded to his
clerical dignity, while the other is, in 1552, found formally renouncing
his allegiance to the Macgregor chief and taking as his lord Campbell
of Glenorchy, who, two generations back, had supplanted the Macgregors
at the foot of Loch Tay.

Stories of the Macgregors’ doings are not wanting hereabouts, one of
which looks as if it may have given a hint to Sir Walter. A Macnaughton
was on ill terms with a John Macgregor, who had robbed him of his
daughter and made not less bold with certain fields of his in Glenlyon,
seized by way of dowry. With a band of sixty men he set out to evict the
unwelcome son-in-law from land and life. Macgregor raised a similar
force, which he ambushed in the glen, himself going forward to meet its
invaders. His person being unknown to them, they enlisted him to serve
as guide on the errand of which they made no secret. Macnaughton walking
on with them in advance, they came to a deep ditch in a swamp over which
the guide leaped nimbly, and showed the chief a way round; but when his
men came up, their attempts to imitate that mighty leap only landed them
up to the armpits in mire. To Macnaughton, for the moment left alone
with the stranger, Macgregor revealed himself by taking his hand and
telling him, “I am the man you seek.” Then at a signal from this
Roderick Dhu of real life, up started his plaided warriors from their
ambush. But the end of the encounter was peaceful. Pleased to find
Macgregor so fine a fellow, with such a band of henchmen, Macnaughton
opened his arms to his son-in-law, and the two parties feasted together
in sign of friendly alliance. Critical reporters, by the way, would like
to know how the heroes of such adventures got rid of the distinguishing
tartans or other badges of clanship, which came to be made so much of
in later song and story. To a mere Sassenach like Fitzjames the
Macgregor devices may not have been very kenspeckle; but surely a
Mohawk’s eye would have been sharper to read the totem of a Huron.

Above Fortingall, the glen contracts to a romantic pass, three miles
long, which would be as famous as Killiecrankie had it made such a
figure in history. But nearly all Glenlyon deserves better than to be
put in guide-book small print as a backwater of travel. For a dozen
miles its road runs up to Meggernie Castle, beyond which a stretch of
rougher ways, on to Loch Lyon at the foot of Ben Cruachan, leads one
into the very heart of the Highlands and the border of Perthshire.

Here a wall of unfamed Bens shuts off another basin of lakes that is the
northward course of the West Highland railway. Across this rise the high
tops of the Blackmount deer forest, still within the bounds of Lord
Breadalbane’s domain, a wilderness of heather, only here and there
broken by patches of forest in our use of the word, but homes of living
men appear rarer than cairns of the forgotten dead. Westwards opens the
way to ill-famed Glencoe. Southwards runs the Orchy to Loch Awe and Ben
Cruachan, by a knot of green glens that seem to have been the original
seat of the Macgregors, whose inveterate feuds with Macnabs and other
neighbours paved a way for the conquering Campbells. But before speaking
of the Macgregor country, let us turn back to the Lowlands to approach
it up another Perthshire strath.




V

STRATHEARN


One of the most beautiful of Scottish rivers is the Earn, half Highland
and half Lowland, winding through all the varieties of Perthshire
scenery, past hoary monuments of Scotland’s struggles for birth as a
nation, and among misty traditions of her saints and heroes. Yet
guide-books, one observes, pass over the greater part of this strath as
hurriedly as the express trains dashing across its lower end; and
strangers seldom visit any but the upper reach, which enters into a
regular tourist round. How such neglect is undeserved, I would fain show
on an arm-chair saunter from the river’s unalluring mouth to its source
in mountains of romantic fame, a distance of some forty miles as the
crow flies; but a salmon has to make a much longer trip of it. Well is
the Earn apostrophised by an admiring stranger, _Blackwood’s_ first
editor, Thomas Pringle, best known by his South African pictures, or by
the figure he cuts in the wicked waggery of the _Chaldee Manuscript_.

    Thou, mountain stream, whose early torrent course
    Hath many a drear and distant region seen,

[Illustration: A HIGHLAND RIVER]

    Windest thy downward way with slackened force,
    As with the journey thou hadst wearied been;
    And, all enamoured of these margins green,
    Delight’st to wander with a sportive tide,
    Seeming with refluent current still to glide
    Around the hazel banks that o’er thee lean.
    Like thee, wild stream, my wearied soul would roam
    (Forgetful of life’s dark and troublous hour)
    Through scenes where fancy frames her fairy bower,
    And, Love enchanted, builds his cottage home:
    But time and tide wait not, and I, like thee
    Must go where tempests rage and wrecks bestrew the sea.

The “drear and distant regions” are now more admired than the “margins
green,” through which the Earn creeps into the Tay a few miles below
Perth, where the great river broadens as an estuary about its reclaimed
islands. The steamer trip from Perth to Dundee makes a local ploy rather
than a tourist link, so few Southrons set eyes on those fat banks backed
by richly wooded hills and crags. A little above the confluence stand
the ruins of Elcho Castle, which Baddeley dismisses as “commonplace,”
and Black finds unworthy of any epithet; but the race it nursed still
stands high among Scotland’s nobles; and in or about it was a lair of
Wallace’s most daring adventures. A little below, over the Fife border,
lies the old seaport of Newburgh, surrounded by outlying spurs of the
Ochils that give fine prospects across the Carse of Gowrie upon the
opposite amphitheatre of the Sidlaws. Tourists seldom stop at Newburgh
to see the adjacent Lindores Abbey and Lindores Loch, and the site of
one of Wallace’s battlefields: so much the worse for the tourist. Two or
three generations ago, he could not so easily have avoided Newburgh,
when it was a noted station of posting and coach traffic from Perth.

To me, the flat Rhynds about the mouth of the Earn are of special
interest, since they were long the home of my forbears, edged off the
Hill of Moncrieff by a junior branch of the same stock, then again
taking refuge across the Tay, when their dwindled possessions here had
been sold to the house of Elcho. And time was when the eyes of all
Scotland turned to this now obscure corner. A mile south of the Earn’s
boldest crook, about the Western Rhynd peninsula, Abernethy is still
visited by antiquaries for its mysterious round tower, standing over
seventy feet high beside the church that has given Dr. Butler, its
incumbent, material for a goodly volume. He makes no doubt that this
tower was built upon their native models by Irish ecclesiastics,
refugees from rude Danish invasion of their own saintly island. The only
other such structure in Scotland, left unruined, is at Brechin, both of
them better built than the Irish round towers on which ’prentice hands
may have been tried. Sculptured stones of still greater antiquity have
here escaped iconoclastic zeal, to be broken relics of Abernethy’s
former state, poor and out of the way as it stands now.

The guide-books are content to dismiss Abernethy as an “ancient Pictish
capital,” but it was also a famed sanctuary till the Reformation, and
even later, a place of pilgrimage to the oak-tree shading the grave of
nine holy maidens. For a generation this became the metropolis of the
Church of Alban, while its primacy was passing from Dunkeld to St.
Andrews. Later on, it made a hotbed of Protestant zeal and of the
fissiparous energy that rent Scottish Presbyterianism with fresh
secessions. This is a matter on which I am tempted to be garrulous, as
several progenitors of mine were leaders here, both of Kirk and Dissent,
among them Archibald Moncrieff, minister of Abernethy for more than half
a century, through the trying times of the Covenant. The parish church
contains two communion cups given by those pious ancestors, in whose
memory its font was presented by the late Sir Alexander Moncrieff, his
own name better known to warriors than to priests.

In _Bonnie Scotland_, I made bold to bring up my generations-back
grandparent, Alexander Moncrieff, one of the four Original Seceders; and
now I would still further trespass on the reader’s patience by
borrowings from the _Travels_ of the Rev. James Hall of Walthamstow, who
more than a century ago, halting at Abernethy, noted some amusing
memories of those early Seceders. Ebenezer Erskine, ex-minister of
Stirling, was the leader of the body; but Hall calls Abernethy their
metropolis, and Moncrieff their patron, as being not only dissenting
minister but chief laird of the parish--no very exalted rank when,
according to this author, the title was given to any rent-free yeoman of
the Ochils, such as one he mentions who supplemented an income of ten
pounds a year by the trade of a carpenter, while the family “mansion”
made a small public-house.

The dissenting minister of Abernethy was at least wealthy enough to
build a new church for his adherents, which for a time served also as
college of the new sect. Some score of students boarded with the
farmers--at the modest rate of two shillings or so a week--attending
divinity lectures of the laird, who is said, in case of need, to have
ministered to their carnal as well as their spiritual wants. For further
instruction they would walk into Perth to sit at the feet of Mr. Wilson,
another father of Secession. In his old age Moncrieff was fain to hold
classes at his own house of Culfargie. After his death in 1761, this
Stoic school became peripatetic, moved first to Alloa with his younger
son, William Moncrieff, then straggling about in the wake of its best
qualified teachers, till the Seceders stooped their spiritual pride to
share the national provision of university training, supplemented by a
regular divinity college at Edinburgh. But it seems that their teaching
in philosophy, apart from divinity, with Locke’s _Essay on the Human
Understanding_ as text book, went on for a time longer at Abernethy,
under Matthew Moncrieff, heir to Alexander’s estate and ministry. Mr.
Hall tells a sly story of a callow student in those later days, who from
the Established minister borrowed a Euclid, which he got through in a
week: “I have read all the enunciations, which seem to be true enough
and very good reading; I did not trouble myself about the _A’s_ and
_B’s_.”

The poverty of the Seceders was not helped by their split into Burghers
and Anti-burghers, the latter the more strict sect, who flourished
rather in the north half of Scotland; then these sects again became
cross-divided as “New Lichts” and “Auld Lichts,” burning dimly still in
Mr. Barrie’s kailyard. Hall, himself a benighted Erastian, describes the
Secession theory in general as “a mixture of Popish tenets with those of
English dissenters.” He was so far right that the Seceders held, as
strongly as any Hildebrand, that the State should be the servant of the
Church, also that their body was the only true Church of Scotland, which
clung faithfully to the Covenant, consecrated for a century as
quasi-sacramental. Alexander Moncrieff, who stood doughtily by the
Cæsarship of the house of Hanover, is said to have been hardly
restrained from setting off for London to present the Covenant, on full
cock, at the wigged head of George II.

Later on, the Covenant was quietly allowed to drop, and the Seceders
relaxed their strict aloofness. Matthew Moncrieff, it seems, was of a
cheerfully social disposition counteracting his hereditary fanaticism.
There is a tradition that he had worn a red coat for a short time,
fighting, as his father preached, for King George. He had a worldly turn
for sport, and though he did not dare to shoot, he kept a couple of
greyhounds, to the scandal of his congregation. The English parson
reports a tale of him as well known. One Sunday, as he was riding across
the Ochils to preach, a hare started up, at which he flicked with his
whip, and even forgot himself so far as to gallop a little way after
poor puss. For this offence he was delated by his own servant before the
Presbytery, that rebuked him to contrition; then it would long be cast
up against him how he had broken the Sabbath. When his name came up
among the more severe, heads were gravely shaken: “He is a man that
would gar anybody like him--but oh! that beast”--to which less
strait-laced admirers would respond, “Hoot! he’s no’ a wrang man, for a’
the beast.” This phrase, “for a’ the beast,” Mr. Hall declares to have
become proverbial in that part of the country as denoting a fly in the
amber of character.

Matthew’s wife had a disintegrating effect on the body, a Miss Scott
from Fife, who, if we may believe Hall’s informants, was only a Seceder
skin-deep, and turned a natural bent for wit and raillery to making fun
of her husband’s congregation. She did not scruple to be close friends
with the parish minister, Dr. Gray, and his wife; then, while the
dissenting laird still thumped his pulpit every Sabbath against the
errors of Erastianism, the rival spiritual authorities lived on the best
of terms through the week, as could not but go to temper sectarian
bitterness, though for a time the more zealous Seceders frowned on this
compromising intimacy, as Mr. Pickwick at Sergeant Buzfuz exchanging
salutations with his own advocate. So, by and by, acrimonious zeal
cooled down all round, dying out altogether in my own family, as
“Sandemanianism” did among their neighbours the Sandemans. Some members
of our line seem, indeed, to have backslidden far from ancestral
austerity. A descendant of the Abernethy ministers became a London
tradesman--landlord of the “Rainbow” in Fleet Street by some
accounts--whose son, William Thomas Moncrieff, put on the stage _Tom and
Jerry_, with other once popular plays that did not keep him from dying
at the Charterhouse, a fellow-pensioner of Colonel Newcome. About the
same time as John Home scandalised even the lukewarm Establishment by
coming out as a playwriter, a tragedy less famous than _Douglas_ had
been published by John Moncrieff, who seems not to have long survived
it; and nothing else is known of him but that he was a dominie of sorts
at Eton, apparently private tutor to some sprig of nobility.

Of what came to be called United Presbyterianism and is now grafted on
to the United Free Church, a sturdier root first flowered in this
parish, ripening through generations into the gracious and kindly nature
of the author of _Rab and his Friends_. The first of a notable
succession of John Browns was a herd laddie here, who, like other
barefooted Scottish loons, contrived to pick up Latin and Greek almost
without schooling. There is a well-known story of his leaving his sheep
for a night walk of twenty-four miles into St. Andrews to buy a Greek
Testament, which was given him for nothing, on his proving that he could
read it. He is said to have tried the packman’s trade, but to have
carried it on in too unworldly spirit for success. When he applied for
ordination among the Seceders, I am sorry to say that my forefather
would have barred him out on suspicion that his learning came from the
devil; but this firm believer in witchcraft was overruled, and the
self-taught scholar grew to be famed as Dr. John Brown of Haddington.

These are hints of what spirit was fermenting about Abernethy under the
cold Georgian star, when in Scottish straths and glens plain living
nourished much high or hot thinking. A coarser spirit was not wanting
when, as Mr. Hall notes, the public-houses of the neighbourhood did
their chief trade on Sundays, with people tramping into Abernethy to
attend the Seceder meetings, and those of the Relief Church that soon
set up another standard of dissent. He gives at some length an anonymous
report of the “occasion” here in 1776, that is, the annual
administration of the Sacrament, spread out over a week, when preaching
flowed all day in a great tent, surrounded with booths and stands to
supply refreshment to a crowd estimated by thousands, the whole
encampment stretching out the best part of a mile. If the preacher
failed in fire or unction, his hearers, as in the House of Commons,
would drop off to the beer-barrels, flocking back to the tent when some
popular Boanerges broached hotter eloquence. Such scenes, a survival of
Covenanting conventicles, often degenerated into the scandals of Burns’s
“Holy Fair”; and it is only in our time that they cease to be recalled
by the “Preachings,” now abolished among the leading churches as having
become too much of a worldly holiday.

Travellers of Mr. Hall’s period had no admiration for the “dreary glen
of Abernethy,” nor much for the more richly planted Glenfarg into which
it leads, the latter now the main pass from Fife into Perthshire. But
this tourist parson duly admired the view from the Wicks of Baiglie,
extolled by Scott as unmatched in Britain, yet commonly missed by
railroad tourists since the leisurely day when the charms of Glenfarg
inspired Ruskin, at the precocious age of seven, to verse which may be
left unquoted. The Ruskin carriage, indeed, came by the new turnpike
that shirks that higher ground where Scott gained life-long memories of
the delight with which, as a boy of fifteen, making his first
independent excursion, from the back of his pony he looked down on such
an “inimitable landscape.”

This reminiscence of his touches a chord in my own heart, for it was on
a boy’s pony that I, too, made wide

[Illustration: A HIGHLAND LAKE]

acquaintance with Strathearn and Strath Tay. But in my case there were
hindrances that may not have presented themselves to the begetter of
_Waverley_. To him this choice country might not be so much shut up by
high park walls, or by enclosures of the rich strath lands. And in my
day there were toll bars on the roads, when a schoolboy’s pocket-money
was scrimper than seems to be the lot of this generation. One could not
ride a dozen miles in any direction without counting the cost. The
cheapest roads were twopenny ones, which thus became the most familiar.
On one or two, the charge for my small steed was threepence, which
required more consideration. One forbidding highway proudly demanded
fourpence, though on it you could trot a couple of miles before reaching
the expensive barrier. And when one had treated oneself to a fourpenny
scamper along it, there came a second lion on that path. For more than a
mile a railway ran beside the road, on the same level, separated only by
a hedge, as alarming to inexperienced Highland shelties as the broad
bridge on which another railway crossed another road askew, so as to
form a miniature Grotto of Prosilippo, where overhead might come
rumbling an invisible thunderstorm as one sped through its gloomy pass.
Once, having paid my fourpence, I had pushed on almost to the end of the
perilous stretch, when a train puffed and rattled up to meet me, which
my horsemanship failed to make the pony face in a philosophic spirit.
For all I could do, it swerved round and took to racing the engine along
the flat road, for a time keeping company with its bogy. On that highway
race, John Gilpin would not have been in it. If I had no wig to fly
away, and no stone bottles swinging by my side, what bothered me was
having an open knife in my hand, with which I had been cutting a switch
from the hedgerow, as the monster came upon us from round a corner. Our
headlong course was at last stopped by a gipsy or such-like wayfarer, as
shamefaced guerdon for whom I had only twopence in my pocket, nearly
drained by that unconscionable toll. Such trivial reminiscences I set
down partly to please myself, partly to explain how my familiarity with
this region is oddly incomplete, as in the case of a student who knew
all about Africa, America, and Asia, but had stopped subscribing to the
Encyclopædia before it touched on Europe. Yet the reader must take fair
notice that there are few roads hereabouts upon which I may not be
tempted to trot out my own early memories; and if, belike, he likes not
this mood of anecdotage, let him turn to the article on Strathearn in
some ponderous cyclopædia or plodding guide-book.

Mr. Hall, for his part, did not despise the trout-fishing for which the
Farg was notable in my youth; and he had a good day’s sport, when so few
strangers sought its shady course that he found some difficulty in
getting his host to make out a bill, that for two days’ entertainment of
man and beast, including a bottle of wine and other beverages, came to
less than ten shillings. By Culfargie, the little Farg runs into the
Earn, here a goodly river of smooth channels and deep pools, meandering
through a rich valley between the wooded bluffs of Moncrieff Hill and
the green slopes of the Ochils. Except for its craggy walls, there is
nothing Highland about this part of the strath, as thickly set with
mansions, farms, and woods as any snug scene of England. Of it, I have
already spoken in _Bonnie Scotland_; and will only add that Mr. Hall was
scandalised at the numbers of old bachelors he found resorting to the
Spa of Pitkeathly, then as frequented as “St. Ronan’s Well,” where it
appears that bachelors, young and old, were very apt to get into
mischief.

Above the Bridge of Earn, over which goes the high road to Perth, the
river is crossed by the two converging railway lines that tunnel through
Moncrieff Hill to burst into daylight on the Tay. It is the next reaches
of the winding Earn that are hardly known to strangers, unless in
glimpses from the train; yet here it flows by scenes of as much historic
interest as beauty. Forgandenny is a picturesque village, beside which
an old mansion, destroyed by fire, has been replaced by a new one,
notable for its fine gardens, like so many other seats in the
neighbourhood. Forteviot, a little higher up, has come down from the
rank of an ancient royal seat. Here died Kenneth McAlpine, 860, after
hammering the Picts into a new kingdom; and for three centuries later
shadowy Scottish kings are seen flitting through a royal stronghold that
stood on the tongue of land between the Earn and its tributary the May.

The May, one of the merriest and sweetest of Ochil streams, trips down
by the park of Invermay and the “birks” sung before Burns. As
“Endermay,” this spot inspired the Earn-born poet, David Mallet or
Malloch, whom Dr. Johnson belittled, but he filled a considerable place
in London literary life of his generation. Opposite Invermay, on the
northern slope of the Earn, stands Dupplin Castle, seat of Lord
Kinnoull, whose richly wooded grounds are now renowned, and the gardens
nursing exotics such as an araucaria thought to be the largest in the
kingdom.--“Oh, Dr. Johnson, Dr. Johnson, oh!” But these noble avenues
stand on what was once Dupplin Moor, where in 1332 Edward Balliol and
his English allies made such a slaughter among the Scots “that the dead
stood as high from the ground as the full length of a spear,” and the
work of Bannockburn was for a time undone; indeed the boy king David’s
crown might have been wholly lost, had not Edward of England’s hands
been then too full, grasping at the lilies of France as well as the
Scottish thistle that so often proved a sore handful.

Above Dupplin comes Gask, home of the Oliphants, one of whom was to win
victories of sentiment for the lost Jacobite cause dear to this family.
Carolina, Lady Nairne, the “Flower of Strathearn,” had as warm a heart
for her native stream as for memories of Prince Charlie.

    Fair shone the rising sky,
    The dewdrops clad wi’ many a dye,
    Larks lilting pibrochs high
    To welcome day’s returning.
    The spreading hills, the shading trees,
    High waving in the morning breeze,
    The wee Scots rose that sweetly blows
        Earn’s vale adorning!

The ruins of Gascon Hall beside the river claim to have made a refuge
for William Wallace, when, hunted by a sleuth-hound through Gask wood,
he struck off the head of his flagging comrade Fawdon, then could not
so easily lay that traitor’s or hinderer’s ghost. The present mansion is
the third or fourth worn out here by the Nairne family. It stands on the
site of a Roman camp, with a Roman road beside it, one of many bits of
way still locally known as “street roads.” At Gask we look over to the
mouth of Strathallan, the pass between the Ochils and the foothills of
the Grampians, that must often have echoed the clank of Roman arms.
Across the moor of Orchill, with Wade’s military road running beside it,
the Ardoch Camp is best preserved of such Roman fortresses in Britain,
and one of the largest, laid out to contain an army of 25,000 men. And
hereabouts, in Celtic stones and place-names, there are thick traces of
still older history, overgrown by the plantations and steadings of a
race enriched from regions where the Cæsars’ eagles never flew.

Ardoch stands out of the Earn basin, and the Allan flows to the Forth.
From the end of the Ochils, the Ruthven Water is their last tributary to
the Earn, whose next affluent comes off Highland moors. Strathallan
Castle seems to belie its name in being on the north side of the pass by
which the Caledonian railway debouches on a plain studded with notable
names. Here is Tullibardine, cradle of the Atholl Murrays; Kincardine
Castle shows how Montrose’s ancestral home was ruined by Argyll in their
tit-for-tat warfare; and the gallant Grahames had Aberuthven for their
burial-ground.

The chief place on this side is Auchterarder, where the first shot was
fired in the Disruption of 1843. Nor is this the sole note of the
neighbourhood in Scottish Church history. Behind Auchterarder, the
upper waters of the Ruthven come down from Gleneagles, a beautiful gorge
in the Ochils, leading over to Glendevon. Gleneagles was the old home of
the Haldanes, now replaced here by their kinsman Lord Camperdown; but
Mr. Haldane, whose name is familiar as author of our “Territorials,” has
still a seat on the Ochil slopes at Cloanden. This war-minister--who
rose to political note at an early age, for as a schoolboy I can
remember being taken into his nursery to see him invested with his first
dignity as “the new baby”--bears a name that has been better known to
Scotland in connection with its religious life, when, a century ago, his
grandfather and granduncle became the Wesleys of the Kirk then sunk to
its zero of cold morality.

Robert and James Haldane, nephews of Admiral Duncan, began life as
high-spirited lads with fair prospects of worldly fortune. The elder had
dispositions towards the ministry, repressed at a time when the Scottish
Church seemed no career for gentle blood; the younger declined the
chance of a partnership in Coutts’ Bank. The one spent some early years
in the Navy, while the other, entering the East India Company’s service,
under family influence rose to be a captain at twenty-five, a post he
could sell for a small fortune. Leaving the sea young, both brothers
conceived an evangelical enthusiasm, at first somewhat tinged with the
early hopes of the French Revolution, which so many nobler spirits of
their day hailed as a new dispensation--

    Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
    But to be young was very heaven!

For the Haldanes, as well as for Wordsworth, the democratic heaven soon
clouded over; and the brothers turned their zeal to the spread of the
gospel, after the model of such Southron preachers as Charles Simeon and
Rowland Hill, both of whom carried their awakening into Scotland. Robert
sold his estate of Airthrey, beautifully situated on the Ochils, and
proposed devoting his life and means to a mission in India, a scheme
nipped in the bud by the authorities there. James took to
field-preaching, to the scandal of parish ministers and magistrates,
itinerating all over Scotland, through the Highlands, and as far as the
Orkneys and Shetlands. Robert’s gifts were less in the way of eloquence;
he rather gave himself to organisation of the effort, training lay
preachers, buying circuses both in Edinburgh and Glasgow as chapels, and
issuing the tracts which by his school were held as special means of
grace.

Such proceedings on the part of laymen did not commend themselves to the
clergy; the stern Seceders also looked askance on this new revival. The
Haldanes, for their part, had soon drifted away from Presbyterianism;
and when the circus-like Tabernacle, still to be seen on the side of the
Calton Hill, was built at Robert Haldane’s expense, it opened as a
Congregational Chapel, with James Haldane as pastor, who continued his
evangelical tours. By and by differences of opinion arose in the new
congregation; and both brothers went over to Baptist views. Robert,
especially, in his zeal for soundness, was all along much given to
controversy--with Zachary Macaulay over a plan for bringing young
Africans to be educated in Britain, as later with his famous son anent
the ballot; with the Bible Society for its backsliding in publishing the
Apocrypha; with the degenerate Socinian Calvinism of Geneva; with the
divers errors of Irvingites and Sandemanians; and with the Presbyterian
“Voluntaries” as to their refusal to pay the “Annuity Tax,” which was
the church rate of Edinburgh. In their old age the Haldanes found more
fellowship in the Presbyterian Church, especially when it had been
warmed by Free Church enthusiasm. They seem both to have been earnest
and sincere in struggling after what they held for purity of saving
truth; and when they died in the middle of last century, they could
congratulate themselves on having stirred the life of their country in a
way that might be better remembered had they not been concerned to leave
“their work and not their name.”

Gleneagles has taken us too far from the Earn, to which we come back at
Kinkell Bridge, below the castle and collegiate church of Innerpeffray,
burial-place of the Drummonds. On the north side lies Madderty, where,
near the railway line from Perth to Crieff, may be visited the remains
of Inchaffray Abbey, whose Abbot so effectually asked a blessing on the
Scottish arms at Bannockburn. On the south side of the river runs the
older branch line from Crieff Junction, with a station for Muthill, a
goodly village that a century ago was as large as Crieff, and a century
before had been burned, with Auchterarder and other neighbours, by the
old Pretender’s forces, the harmless inhabitants being hustled out into
a January night by soldiers whom they had sometimes received as
guests--a needless cruelty to be set against that Whiggish harrying of
Glencoe.

[Illustration: GLENFINLAS]

Muthill has kept some notable ecclesiastical antiquities; and in my
youth it had, what was a rarity for a Scottish village, an English
“chapel,” if I remember right, not in communion with the Scottish
Episcopal Church, but one of several scattered over Scotland that
counted themselves as belonging to the Church of England, and looked to
Carlisle as their diocesan see. I am not sure how far this body still
holds out, its sap having been cut off by the refusal of later Carlisle
bishops to exercise their functions across the Border; then for a time
its congregations had to depend for a precarious supply of sacramental
grace upon colonial and other stray bishops who could be engaged by the
job. This small Church, in fact, represented the old evangelical party
that for the last generation has been waning on both sides of the
Border, while the Scottish Episcopalians of that day lay under a dark
imputation of being “Puseyites.” Through one of its Episcopal ministers,
Muthill had a chance of standing high in song and story, for his
daughter, Mary Erskine, is said to have been loved in vain by Walter
Scott. It was for her consolation, in the loss of a beloved child, that
Carolina Oliphant wrote _The Land o’ the Leal_.

Muthill has another connection, now almost forgotten, with the religious
life of Scotland. About the time of the Original Secession, to an
Earnside farmer in this parish was born a son named John Barclay, who
became a probationer in the Kirk, but soon fell out with its fathers
upon his interpretation of saving doctrine. He founded a sect which took
the name of the Bereans, as searching the Scriptures with peculiar zeal,
where they seem to have found assurance of salvation as a leading
tenet, on the strength of which they cultivated a grace of cheerfulness
not too common among Calvinist believers. “Rejoice evermore” is the
suggestive title of one of their founder’s books. Their communion spread
over several parts of Scotland, even into England and across the
Atlantic. When Mr. Hall was at Abernethy he heard of theirs as one of
the most flourishing congregations at Newburgh, having for its head
Alexander Pirie, who for a time had been professor of divinity at the
Seceders’ rustic college, then from an Anti-burgher softened down into a
Burgher, from which he passed on to the Relief Church, and finally found
rest among the Bereans. The English parson, who goes out of his way for
a sneer at Robert Haldane’s missionary devotion, is rather satirical on
those dissenters, whom he inclines to lump with the Sandemanians, and
hints at accusations of sinning that grace may abound. They are, he
says, “drunk or sober, as merry as grigs.” What struck him most about
their ceremonies was the social love feast in which they copied the
Sandemanians; and he repeats a scandalous story of the Crieff
congregation sending to a public-house to get wine on trust for this
function. At Crieff, which may be called its native soil, the body held
together till the middle of last century, when its property was divided
by lot among the members; and, so far as I know, the Bereans are now
everywhere extinct, unless, perhaps, in America, where so many sects
have taken fresh root on virgin soil.

Muthill lies between the grounds of Culdees Castle and of Drummond
Castle, the latter famous for its gardens, avenues, and nobly wooded
demesne. In passing up Tayside, I have told how it came into Southron
hands, when the power of its old lords split on the rock that wrecked so
many another Jacobite family; while the neighbour house of Murray tacked
and trimmed its fortunes into calm waters. Strathearn has dark memories
of the feuds between those names. When the old church of Monzievaird was
being turned into a mausoleum for the Ochtertyre family, a quantity of
charred wood and calcined bones came to light to bear out the tradition
how a band of Murrays, fleeing before Drummonds, took refuge in this
church with their wives and children, and were there burned to death by
the savage pursuers. For this atrocity, indeed, several Drummonds came
to be executed at Stirling. Only one Murray had escaped the holocaust,
by the help, it is said, of a Drummond who loved his sister; later, this
Drummond having fled for refuge to Ireland, he in turn was helped to
pardon by the man he had saved, and came back with the agname
Drummond-Ernoch, handed down to the victim of another revolting tragedy
told in the introduction to _A Legend of Montrose_.

Drummond Castle is the Versailles of Crieff, itself the capital of
Strathearn, where it stands among lovely surroundings and notable
mansions--Monzie, Abercairney, Cultoquhey, Inchaffray, Ochtertyre, names
that “fill the mouth as the mountains the eyes.” Such sounding names
are, of course, wreckage of the once familiar speech that has ebbed far
back into the Highlands. I never met any one in Perthshire who did not
speak English; and even a knowledge of Gaelic, I fancy, is exceptional
in this southern half of the country, certainly so in the lower half of
Strathearn. But I forget what writer of a century or so back can record
that at Monzie Castle--recently burned--only a mile separated the
English-speaking lodge-keeper from neighbours who could not understand
his tongue. A German traveller, in the early years of Queen Victoria,
noted the east-enders of Loch Tay as speaking English, while Gaelic was
still common about the other end. In our own generation, old inhabitants
of Crieff could remember how troops of shock-headed lads and lasses came
tramping down from the glens--like the _Schwabenkinder_ of Tirol--to
learn English by working a summer on Lowland farms, turning an honest
penny out of this course of education.

Not that Scotland was without schooling long before the days of School
Boards. In out-of-the-way parts of the Highlands, as well as in Lowland
Gandercleughs, Dr. Johnson could hear of day-schools, even
boarding-schools, kept here and there under difficulties, perhaps in
summer by a bookish youth who for his winter studies walked all the way
to Aberdeen or Glasgow. When a society seemed necessary for the
diffusion of Christian knowledge in the Highlands, thanks to John Knox
every English-speaking and Shorter Catechism-conning parish, at least,
had its dominie, who, thanks to those land-grabbing Lords of the
Congregation, was often such a “downtrodden, underfoot martyr” as
Carlyle deplores, eking out his exiguous dues by a medley of
occupations, and by unworthy perquisites that fell to him at the annual
cock-fighting holiday. He was fain not only to perform all the duties of
his school, down to mending pens and sharpening the points of his tawse,
but to act as precentor, session-clerk, and general man of business for
the parish; “even the story ran that he could gauge.” He has been known
to play the cobbler in his hours of ease. Not seldom he was a “stickit
minister,” qualified to wag his head in a pulpit, if he could get one,
hindered perhaps from that eminence by some infirmity, such as a tied
tongue or a too red nose. Often he was a “character,” who has figured in
many a tale told by graceless Roderick Randoms when they grew out of
dread of his skelpings and palmies. The most famous of such presentments
ought to be Jedediah Cleishbotham, who presents himself as quite
superfluously editing the _Tales of My Landlord_; but few impatient
readers of our day spend much time over the mystifying patter with which
that Wizard of the North thought necessary to introduce his feats of
imagination. I should like, by the way, to point out how the
self-important schoolmaster of Gandercleugh seems to have sent a
thriving progeny across the Atlantic. Surely it is one of his family
who, as the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., so long occupied a pulpit at
Jaalam, Mass., where one “talented parishioner,” Hosea Biglow, might
call cousins with the Peter Pattieson who penned a story when he should
have been engrossing rudimentary instruction on the skins of the lower
classes.

Let us drop a tear over the dominie, who in the last generation or two
has been vanishing from the world of fact. His place is now taken by
Normal-school teachers of both sexes, well-trained, well-inspected, and
less ill-paid than their predecessors. Every young Scot gets such
mouthful of learning as can be crammed into him; but, to copy Johnson’s
coarse metaphor, I am not sure that there were not better bellyfuls
going under the old dispensation of scholarship. With all his faults, of
which whisky was apt to be the worst, the snuffy dominie had sometimes
the knack of turning out silk purses among sows’ ears, and with the most
imperfect tools. The general run of his pupils perhaps profited most by
being kept out of mischief, wholesomely hardened to chastisement, and
awed by the mysteries of Effectual Calling, while the choicer natures
had their chance to be brought into touch with an inspiring example that
showed them the way to learning, a more important course of education
than the cleverness of teaching which goes to load the minds of a whole
class with not always fruitful instruction.

And those rude schools of old days had this educational advantage, that
the minister’s bairn, and even the laird’s, might tumble and quarrel
with the cottar’s, picking up the local vernacular and accent, but
little more harm at an age when all sons of Adam are in the savage state
of development, not easily inoculated with the curse of snobbery that
sets classes apart, barred from the kindly intercourse of the older
generations, among whom gentle and simple knew their place too well for
troublesome presumption or uneasy stand-offishness. The parish school at
least was a little republic, tempered sometimes, indeed, by grudges of
favouritism on the part of its president. While English squires and
parsons still looked suspiciously on the three R’s for peasants,
barefooted Scottish laddies, sometimes lassies, would tackle Latin, even
Greek, under the village dominie, who sent forth some of his pupils into
the world equipped at least with a turn of mind and a stirred ambition
that put them at advantage wherever they went. But now they go out into
a new world, in which man may not be so much master of his own fate.
What self-help could do for him is, it seems, to be done rather by the
State, conceived of as a national Trades Union, which need not consider
the chance of national bankruptcy in providing for the general welfare.
The very virtues that winged a prosperous career--thrift, industry,
enterprise, force of character--become suspected for vices in the
interest of the common herd. It is a bad lookout for Scotsmen in that
golden age of mediocrity so glibly promised by certain social reformers,
who might begin by doing away with prizes and punishments in schools, if
they cannot altogether level down Nature’s distinctions.

My own first experience of school life was near Crieff, where I spent a
year in the family of an English clergyman, whom I dimly remember as a
model for the head of the Fairchild family. For all his austerity, my
recollections are of cheerful days spent under his charge, and
especially of a keen relish for meals, which may be connected with the
fact that this was the only period in my life when I might not eat as
much as I pleased. But also I have two painful memories of this place.
The first is breaking my arm on the rocks of the Turret one Saturday
afternoon, and not getting a doctor for it till Monday evening: my
tutor, who had been a soldier before he took orders, and ought to have
known better, judged the hurt no more than a sprain; then on Sunday I
had to walk three miles to church, and back, with my arm hanging
helpless, the torment relieved only by my brother holding it up. The
other woeful experience was my own fault, and such as many sons of Adam
have to confess. Some years later, I was sent on a holiday task, a ride
of seventeen miles with a pointer pup to be handed over at Crieff to a
keeper, whose lodge made a sort of canine academy. I was to dine at the
“Drummond Arms,” after making sure to see my pony fed first--a sound
instruction to heedless youth. Somewhat elated by this independent
charge, as I strolled about the town it occurred to me that my own meal
ought to be crowned by a cigar. It was my first; it cost twopence. “Left
to myself” as I was in that rash undertaking, I had sense enough to seek
out for it a secluded spot on the banks and braes of the Earn, where ere
long my song would be--“How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair!”

At Crieff, with its two railways and everything handsome about it, we
get upon a regular caravan route of tourists, too few of whom stop to
discover the lochs, falls, and shaggy glens that around it are strung
upon the Highland line, among hills making with the Earn valley a choice
epitome of Perth scenery. I have already extolled this neighbourhood in
_Bonnie Scotland_, so now I must pass quickly over the most picturesque
part of Strathearn. Nothing could be prettier in its way than the walk
up the Earn, foaming and rippling through its leafy banks, past wooded
eminences, like Torleum, whose top makes a weather-glass for the
countryside, and Tomachastle, crowned by a monument to Sir David Baird,
the hero of Seringapatam. This local worthy’s widow cherished his renown
regardless of expense, the model village of St. David’s, below Crieff,
being also a memorial of him; but

[Illustration: LOCH LUBNAIG]

the too towering obelisk on Tomachastle challenged a thunderbolt to
rebuke the vanity of mortal fame.

Soon appear on either side mantled crags and bristling ridges, and the
mountain moors begin to close in upon fields and parks. Half-way between
Crieff and Loch Earn, Comrie stands at the head of the rich strath which
now begins to take on the features of a Highland glen, still tamed by
mansions and plantations. On one side the Ruchill Water comes in from
Glenartney, where the stag was startled from his midnight lair by
Fitzjames’s hounds; on the other, by Dunira, the Lednock rushes down a
wilder ravine over which stands out a monument to Dundas, Lord Melville,
head of the Tory oligarchy that to its own satisfaction ruled Scotland
in the days of Pitt. This satrap is not so much admired by later leaders
of Scottish politics. He has another tall column at Edinburgh in a line
with statues of George IV. and Pitt, a trio of monuments denounced as
“Vice standing between Tyranny and Corruption” by the Radical orator,
Bailie Jamieson, who went to prison for such speeches, as his more
widely famous son did for certain doings in South Africa.

As I write, newspapers record the death of a Dundas of Dunira, whose
name takes me back half a century to the morning when two of his
brothers breakfasted at our house on their way from school, wearing
scarlet flannel, then known as “Crimean,” shirts, which, to us
unsophisticated provincials, not yet “in the movement,” seemed below the
dignity of Harrow boys. Dr. Keate would have agreed with us, who, in the
former generation, gave an Eton culprit two extra cuts for the vulgarity
of having a “checked shirt” to turn up in disclosing circumstances.
Times are changed; but it is not so clear about _nos et mutamur_: one
can fancy the schoolmasters and schoolboys of to-day still cocking a
critical eye at changes of custom and costume, which in a few years will
seem matters of course.

The stranger who, to a panorama of celebrated scenes flitting before his
strained eyes, prefers settling down and photographing on memory
characteristically charming landscapes, could not do better than set up
his tent at Comrie, where he may come in for the excitement of one of
its slight earthquakes. Among the many excursions radiating hence, he
must not neglect to follow up the Earn to its parent lake. The last time
I took this lovely walk, it was in company with the late Dr. Andrew
Melville, Clerk of the Free Church, a name well-known in Scotland as
reviving that of his forbears, the Reformation champions. He made his
summer home at Comrie, which, through another sojourner, the widow of
Lord Chancellor Cairns, had come to be a resort of the English sect
called Plymouth Brethren; and I recall his telling me on our walk how a
party of sisters of that ilk, invited together to a house at Comrie,
proved to be hardly on speaking terms after a rent in this exclusive
communion. It is not only in Scotland that Seceders split up into Auld
Lichts and New. And in Scotland, by the way, the Wee Free Church that
lately made such a profitable contention for the faith as once delivered
to Calvinistic saints, begins to generate a fissiparous ferment, having
already mutinied against the lay champion who led it to victory and
booty. At least sects are fewer in Scotland, which seldom welcomes
exotic divinity, its taste being for home-made dissensions. A local
writer has an amusing account of a Plymouth Brother, at Crieff, roaring
down a Mormon missionary who promised mounts and marvels across the
Atlantic; but the contest did not tend to conversion or edification.

Our way up the Earn has led us by several eddies and backwaters of
Scottish Protestantism; but now we pass into the shadow of the hills
where the cross itself was dipped in fire and blood. When I walked up to
Loch Earn with that kindly kinsman of mine, the railway did not go
beyond Comrie, as it does now, under outlying masses of Ben Voirlich,
where wooded knolls huddle below slopes of turf and rock and fern
dappled by patches of brown or purple heather. We are here fairly in the
Highlands; and from St. Fillan’s Hill, shooting up over the river, we
look down upon a true central Perthshire prospect of a long lake
stretching below high mountains; but else, as a disappointed Cockney
complained, one can’t see the view for the hills.

The smart village of St. Fillans, spreading out along the loch foot in
villakins of rusticating townsfolk, is a modern settlement, but it may
have had ancient memories to forget, for here, or hereabouts, stood
Dundurn, capital of the Pictish land called Fortrenn, which seems to
have taken in Angus, along with Strathearn and the lower basin of the
Tay. The island in the foreground was in later times lair of a gang of
robbers named Neish, who in an ill turn for themselves undertook to rob
a servant of the Macnabs, bringing their Christmas fare from Crieff. The
Macnab of that day had a round dozen of Samsonlike sons, to whom, at
their bare board, he significantly spoke--“The night is the night, were
the lads but the lads!” On this hint the twelve set out, dragged a boat
across from Loch Tay to Loch Earn, surprised the revelling Neishes at
dead of night, and slew all but one youth who managed to slip off. Next
morning they greeted their father with the outlaws’ gory heads and the
boast, “The lads _were_ the lads!” Another account makes them exclaim on
this occasion, “Dread nought!” which has remained the Macnabs’ motto.

It is nearly sixty years ago that I spent a summer at St. Fillans, as
yet hardly known to the outside world. At times that sojourn comes back
to me as a dream of childish delight; but I was too young to gather a
faggot of impressions that would serve when--

    As less the olden glow abides,
      And less the chillier heart aspires,
    With drift-wood beached in past spring tides
      We light our sullen fires.

Perhaps the most prosaic English urchin stores up as warm memories of
“days in the distance enchanted,” spent on the fattest claylands or the
smoothest fen. Anyhow, one’s heart goes out to the bare-headed and
bare-kneed youngsters, “hardy, bold, and wild,” who from the train are
seen taking all chances of weather with frolic and glee on the banks of
Loch Earn, heedless of the cloud of “Rudiments” and “Delectus” that will
loom back upon them with the shortening autumn days.

Even less to be envied passengers have a good glimpse of this lake, as
upon a shelf above the northern side they are whisked along a fine
panorama, with Ben Voirlich’s rugged head for its background. Farther
on, the shores grow tamer, where fields come down to the water edge;
then, as by the scattering of houses at Lochearnhead the railway winds
round its upper end, it overlooks a fine retrospect of the loch’s whole
reach from St. Fillans. A few minutes more among bare green slopes, and
we are at the Balquhidder Junction of the railway to Oban, standing
lonely as if lost in the heart of the Highlands. The name seems
misleading, for it is rather at the next halting-place southward,
Kingshouse, that one turns off a couple of miles to Loch Voil and the
Braes of Balquhidder, where Rob Roy rests at peace beneath a circle of
chieftainly Bens, through which Glenfinlas would lead us to the
Trossachs region.

Thus, whichever way we take through the heart of Scotland--by Atholl, by
Breadalbane, by Strathearn--we come upon memories of the Macgregors. It
is at Balquhidder that this famous stock was most at home in historic
times; so here seems the place for some account of it, a story that will
carry us back over all those regions, and bring most of the Perthshire
clans on to its stage.




VI

THE MACGREGORS

    What perils do environ
    The man that meddles with cold iron


--in the shape of a pen! And surely the rash adventurer lays himself
open to special risks when he undertakes to touch such a thistly subject
as Scottish history, not to mention theology. It seems that I have given
offence to certain partisans, who find their sympathies ruffled by what
had to be said in my former volumes. I am accused of want of reverence
for the Sabbath--an idol that, even in the cold North, is wearing away
to a stump like snow wreaths in thaw. By an organ of that persuasion I
am rebuked, more in sorrow than in anger, for enmity to the Free Church,
my only expression of such enmity being a statement that the said
worshipful body has set its face against dancing and piping in the
Highlands, and a hint that it must be heartily ashamed of the way it
treated one of its worthiest sons in our generation. But the hottest of
my ecclesiastical assailants is a “Priest of the Church of England,” who
writes to me from a Midland county, characterising my book on the
Highlands as “nauseating,” “ungenerous,” “brutal,” and so forth. I will
not give his name, for I guess this priest not so far out of deaconship
as to be beyond a chance of learning better language in a less perfervid
country. He appears to be a Highlander of Catholic loyalty, since he
takes alike ill any aspersion on the fair fame of Glengarry or of
Argyll; but amid much abusing at large, he waxes specially indignant
that I have not been silent on the “later failings” of the poor young
Pretender. Did I not say in advance that there are three subjects on
which the hardest-headed Scot listens willingly to sentiment rather than
reason? One of them, of course, is gallant Prince Charlie; then I may be
thankful to have passed over all scandal about Queen Mary, as to have
touched lightly on the later, and earlier, “failings” of Robert Burns.

If there were as many revilers in the Midlands as there are slates on
Auld Reekie, I can do no other. I was apprenticed to fiction, which is a
school of truth in dealing with human nature. Let my critics write books
of their own, setting forth the facts as they would have them. Let them
declare that Charles Edward ended his days as a worthy citizen of Rome,
a model husband, a diligent student of Anglican divinity, and an
office-bearer of its Diocesan Temperance Society. Let them assert that
Free Church pastors have exhorted youths and maidens to skip upon the
Highland hills like young rams. Let them maintain that the Jewish
Sabbath has _semper et ubique_ been a characteristic observance of the
Christian Church, and that this doctrine flourishes as much as ever in
its last sanctuary. I, for one, do not love Scotland, or its idols,
better than the truth; and in such a cause can play the advocate
without suppressing or glossing over the evidence. There is a quotation
with which a Priest of the Church of England must be familiar, as much
aired at clerical Congresses--_Haud tali auxilio, nec defensoribus
istis!_

Of all the charges made against me, the one by which I am most concerned
is a reproach that I have spoken lightly of serious matters concerning
the Clan Macgregor. Miss Murray Macgregor, the historian of her race,
writes courteously but firmly to remonstrate with me on apparent libels
against it in _The Highlands and Islands_. My most crying offence here,
it seems, is one that would offend only a Highlander. In my haste I
spoke of the modern Macgregors as “new-made,” when the law finally
allowed them to wear their own patronymic, and I called their chief
“Murray,” whereas I ought to have precisely defined him as for certain
reasons bearing the name of Murray. Miss Murray Macgregor must accept my
apologies for having heedlessly omitted to style her grandfather Sir
John Macgregor Murray. In this contention, she seems to be unwittingly
reviving old Nominalist and Realist controversies, for her part holding
Macgregorism to be a principle with a real existence apart from its
phenomena, whereas I use the name merely as a notion that casually
labels certain sons of Adam. But hereby I recant, disavow, and seek
absolution for any words of mine seeming to imply that a Murray and a
Macgregor be not distinct entities _in rerum natura_, and _in saecula
saeculorum_.

Another offence against the Macgregors laid to my charge is one in which
I have many fellow-sinners. In

[Illustration: THE MACGREGOR COUNTRY]

a slight account of the Glenfruin battle, I have repeated the
tale--there expressly qualified as “tradition”--of the scholars of
Dumbarton slaughtered by a bloodthirsty Macgregor--as to whom I
mentioned another tradition that this crime made him an outlaw from the
clan. Its historian would have me understand how no Macgregor was ever
capable of such villainy, and more particularly points out that the
evidence for it is in this case by no means convincing. I can only reply
that if in any account of the Highlands, one were to give no stories but
those that go without contradiction, and none that touch on deeds of
violence, the result would make a volume that might well be advertised
as suitable for the waistcoat pocket.

I had not the slightest intention of doing injustice to this once much
abused clan, and in proof thereof am half-inclined to propitiate them
with the dearest sacrifice a kindly Scot can offer. In those bad old
times, forbears of my own were living in the Macgregor country, as to
whose intromissions there perhaps the less said the better. It is
unlikely that those sons of Eve did not mix their blood with the
MacHeths and other clans among which they would be in the way of
exchanging vows both soft and stern. I myself feel at times stirred to a
right Macgregor scowl, when I see Sassenach knaves advertising their bad
whisky, tea, or what not as the “best.” When in future any black deed be
associated with their name, let the sons of Alpin blame it on a taint of
Moncrieff blood, and hold every true Macgregor incapable of murdering a
mouse; then I shall not be at pains to contradict this view. The plain
truth is that most Highlanders of those misty legends--not to speak of
Lowlanders--appear to have been a fierce and bloody-minded brood--always
excepting members of the U.F. Church--and none of us can uphold our kin
as any better than their fellows. Having thus, I hope, made peace with
the sons of Gregor, I am free to turn dirk and claymore against the
Menzies historian who, before heaven and earth, has not scrupled to
guess at the Moncrieffs as originally vassals or dependents of his clan,
as to which I will only call back how a curse has been laid upon it,
that no Sassenach can pronounce its uncouth name aright.

Honestly, I don’t think I have been unfair to the Macgregors, who
managed to earn among their neighbours an ill-fame, which they have
redeemed by indomitable loyalty to their name. But for any slip of
respect towards this clan, one can best make amends by telling its story
at more length, with the help of Miss Murray Macgregor’s goodly quartos
and other _mémoires pour servir_ that are not much in the way of the
general reader. Such a story may need a good deal of boiling down to
make porridge for that hasty reader’s taste. At the best, it must be a
story too much coloured by the vivid red and black chequers of the clan
tartan; and if any Macgregor look dark at what I have to tell, let me
repeat what I said in the former sketch, that this name seems to have
been more unlucky but not more guilty than others that wear their stains
and glories in a less striking pattern. The great author, to whose
sympathy they owe most renown, goes a little farther in commentating on
their history--“The tricks of a bear that is constantly baited can
neither be expected to be innocent nor entertaining.”

It has been already pointed out in _Bonnie Scotland_ how this clan
clearly stood as models for the Vich Alpines of Scott’s _Lady of the
Lake_. They claim to be sons of Alpin, as descended from King Girig,
Gregor, or Gregory, the heir of Kenneth MacAlpin, though his sonship
seems a disputed point. At a very early period is found widely settled
in the heart of Scotland a race claiming to be united by royal blood,
their traditional descent not at first stereotyped in name. As yet, the
Highlanders’ surnames sat as loosely as their garments: a man’s
Christian name was supplemented rather by the name of his father, or by
some agname taken from personal appearance or position. This clan shot
out branches that might come to be known by other patronymics, the
Macnabs, “sons of the Abbot”; the Grants, said to be descended from one
Gregor _graund_, that is “the ill-favoured”; the Griersons, whose name
suggests such descent; and the same origin is ascribed to the Mackays,
the Mackinnons, and others, who may perhaps claim for themselves some
still bluer blood of Adam. Of course there would be a good deal of
miscegenation through the accidents of love and war; a small broken
stock might be adopted into a more powerful one, with or without a
change of name, and a Highland heiress might bring for her dowry not
only cows but a tail of kinsmen to be adopted into her husband’s clan;
then even mere Lowlanders have no doubt been absorbed as captives,
runaways, or masters of useful arts. The Comanche Indians, it is said,
have as much adulterated white as red blood in them; the Creeks and
Seminoles were recruited by negro slaves; and the Tuscaroras were
admitted bodily into the Iroquois League. A Highland clan of old days
was in much the same social state as a Red Indian tribe. Often also a
family interlaced itself with congenial neighbours by the exchange of
foster-children, to be brought up in bonds that were sometimes drawn as
close as those of blood.

As the Hurons in Ontario and the Iroquois in New York, the main stock of
this clan seem to have been originally most at home in what came to be
known as the Macgregor country--Glenorchy, Glendochart and Glenlyon--on
the western side of Perthshire. Early in the twelfth century, its chief
was Malcolm of Glenorchy, renowned for such strength of body as then
made the surest title to rank and fame. Of him it is told that when the
king’s life was in danger from a boar, or other savage beast, the
doughty chief plucked up an oak by the roots and with this gigantic club
made mincemeat of the monster. As reward, the grateful king ennobled his
preserver, giving him as cognisance an oak-tree eradicate, now displayed
by the clan, whose older emblem appears to have been a pine-tree, “Clan
Alpine’s pine in banner brave.” This chief married a lady of royal
blood, and was known as “Lord of the Castles,” by reason of several
strongholds said to have been built by him from Kilchurn to Taymouth;
but here tradition may be confusing him with a supplanting Campbell who
had the same renown.

In the next century another Macgregor figures among the partisans of
Bruce, delivering him from his enemy, Lorn, harbouring him in a cave,
fighting by his side at Bannockburn, and elsewhere. But it seems that
all the clan did not stand together, some siding with Baliol and thus
exposing themselves to forfeiture, when his rival became settled on the
throne. And even before this the sons of the mountain glens must have
begun to feel the pressure of the feudal system, imposing duties and
obligations, as well as conferring coats of arms and titles, along with
charters of lordship that did not always take into account the rights of
inheritance.

Swarms of Saxon and Norman adventurers hived themselves in Scotland,
winning favour at court and grants of land from which the occupants had
to be ousted by force, where they were not found willing to remain as
vassals of the new lords. A proud and uncomplying race like the
Macgregors was bound to come off ill in such a scramble; whose history,
indeed, all through the Stuart period, is one of gradual intrusion into
their country by strangers, notably the pushful Campbells, who at last
drove them out of their fair glens to outlawed seclusion in fastnesses
from which they looked with an angry eye on their old birthright.

    Where dwell we now? See rudely swell
    Crag over crag, and fell o’er fell.
    Ask we this savage hill we tread
    For fattened steer or household bread;
    Ask we for flocks those shingles dry,
    And well the mountain might reply--
    “To you, as to your sires of yore,
    Belong the target and claymore:
    I give you shelter in my breast,
    Your own good blades must win the rest!

Not all at once would this displacement take place, but fitfully, by
waves that sometimes flowed in a spate of aggression, then again ebbed
before some outbreak of determined resistance. The process may have been
somewhat like what went on in Australia when “selectors” were empowered
to “pick the eyes” of a squatter’s holding, here and there putting him
to ransom in the name of law. Like Hengist and Horsa, the intruders
might make good their settlement by taking sides in the local feuds, or
by handling the arrows of Cupid as well as the sword of Mars. The
Campbells were noted for being as ready with kisses for their foemen’s
daughters as with cold steel for their sons. The Macgregors made
alliances as well as _creaghs_ among the newcomers. Some of their hacked
and stripped branches shot out to take root in distant quarters, perhaps
repeating there the violence that had driven them from their own ancient
seats. Under the James kings, such branches appear at Braemar and the
Gordon country; and there are hints of a Macgregor leader playing
Roderick Dhu as far south as the English border, in company with his
supposed cousins, the Griersons of Lag. But the main stock remained
scattered over their native heath, from which a remnant of them was
never thoroughly extirpated. Their headquarters shifted to be about
Balquhidder, a knot of wild glens to the north of Loch Katrine, where a
stone called the _puderach_ was a palladium of the clan, the lifting of
which made a test of strength for young men, and it gave a byname to the
Macgregors of that branch. As far south as the Nun’s Island,
Inchcailliach, on Loch Lomond, they had a burying-place; and their
strongholds reached as far north as Loch Rannoch, where the chartered
Menzies had more difficulty in ousting them than had the Campbells in
Breadalbane, who there are well described as ploughing through the
centre of the Macgregor country.

On this much-disputed ground, the sons of Alpin were in touch with many
neighbours, more or less hostile, their relations with whom are darkly
commemorated in such traditional tales of bloodshed, ravage, and
treachery as too much stain the rags of Highland history. Some of these
tales we have already come upon in passing through Breadalbane. For a
time, the Macgregors seem to have shared Balquhidder with other clans,
notably the Maclarens, an older stock of occupants, who claimed the
right of being first to enter the parish church. This right of
precedence is said to have been given up in return for the help of the
Macgregors in a hot combat with a neighbour clan, that still darkens a
pool of the Leny as “Linn of the dead”; but afterwards the pretension,
again raised, led to a fray in the very church, when the priest, a
Maclaren, was killed. In the end the Macgregors evicted their rivals,
who mainly took refuge among the Appin Stewarts; yet so late as Rob
Roy’s time, we shall see a Maclaren fall victim at Balquhidder to that
ancient feud, to show how inveterately those clansmen clung to the soil
beset by enemies, as well as to hereditary hatreds rooted among them for
centuries.

Among so many memories of hate, one tradition stands in relief as
illustrating the guest-right owned by Roderick Dhu. In a casual quarrel
the Macgregor’s son had been slain by a young Lamont, who fled hotly
chased through the night, and by dawn sought refuge at a house he knew
not as the home of his victim. To the chief he confessed that he had
slain an unnamed man, and was taken into sanctuary. Quick on his heels
came the pursuers, their news filling the house with cries of rage and
woe. But the weeping father would not let the guest suffer harm: “He has
Macgregor’s word.” With an armed band he even escorted the slayer of his
son to Inveraray, and there took leave of him with the warning: “No
longer can I, or will I, protect you: keep out of the way of my clan.”
As edifying sequel it is stated that when Macgregor came to be
proscribed and hunted for his life, he in turn found asylum with the man
whose life he had saved. In Spain, the same tale is told of Moorish and
Christian foemen, as no doubt similar stories came to be passed round
Arab camp-fires.

This incident, indeed, belongs to a later period of clan history, which
we take up at the time when the Macgregors are seen forced apart into
two main bodies in the north and south of western Perthshire, while not
entirely uprooted from the central glens. Under James III., a chief
known as Gregor Mhor flourished so well as to recover part of the clan
territory from its oppressors, and to raise its head in the world. A
younger son of his, Duncan, surnamed the Hero, also gained renown and
such social advantage as went with a Campbell bride; but he fatally fell
out with the head of the Breadalbane family. More than one chief of this
period might have answered to Roderick Dhu’s reputation. We read of
James IV. making a hunting expedition to Balquhidder; and on another
occasion it is said that this king rode alone from Stirling to Perth by
the wild borders he

[Illustration: LOCH ACHRAY]

congratulated himself on having pacified for a time. James V. also, in
historic record as well as in romance, trusted himself on hunting trips
into the Perthshire Highlands, when the troubles that had gathered head
during his minority made such visits more truly adventurous. At this
time one Duncan Macgregor, surnamed Laideus, who seems a prototype of
Rob Roy in a ruder time, became for half a century the bugbear of the
central Highlands, sometimes driven into far Lochaber, but returning to
work havoc and slaughter, till at last he was caught and executed by the
Campbells.

By fits and starts, the later Jameses were able to bring a rough
machinery of repression to bear upon the disorders of the Highlands. The
Macgregors were not worse than a dozen other clans; but they were within
shorter reach than those western and Hebridean stocks, who yet proved
not beyond the arm of law as put in force on James V.’s voyage to what
had long been the quasi-independent domains of the Lords of the Isles.
Then the sons of Alpin had the misfortune to play the reiver too near
the half-settled Highland line, where the noise of their exploits echoed
in Perth and Stirling; and the king could not follow his sport through
“lone Glenartney’s hazel shade” without a chance of perilous encounter.
Their most powerful foes, moreover, were close at hand to carry out the
rough justice of the border. Once and again we hear of the Macgregors
being “put to the horn” and of “letters of fire and sword” granted
against them, usually to the Campbells, who, adapting themselves better
to new conditions, extended their possessions and influence at the
expense of less prudent neighbours. To be at odds with the law is in
itself demoralising; and the harassed clan grew but more reckless and
insolent in the persecutions brought on them by their repeated offences.
All through the sixteenth century they appear drawing towards that doom
that left them landless and nameless.

The troubles of the Reformation relaxed the process of turning a proud
clan into broken men; and Queen Mary seems to have had a soft place in
her heart for the much-abused Macgregors. But when James VI. got well
settled upon his uneasy throne, his horror of violence dictated a policy
of repression which was steadily carried out in the latter half of his
reign. In 1586, “letters of horning” were recorded at Perth against over
a hundred Macgregors and their abetters. Soon after this even the
feelings of a callous generation were shocked by one deed charged upon
the Macgregors, the barbarous slaughter of John Drummond-Ernoch, a
descendant of that fugitive to Ireland who figured in the burning of
Monzievaird kirk. This man, employed as the king’s forester in
Glenartney, was procuring venison for the marriage festivities of James
and his Danish bride, when a band of outlaws fell upon him, as related
by Scott in the introduction to the _Legend of Montrose_. “They
surprised and slew Drummond-Ernoch, cut off his head, and carried it
with them, wrapt in the corner of one of their plaids. In the full
exultation of vengeance, they stopped at the house of Ardvoirlich and
demanded refreshment, which the lady, a sister of the murdered
Drummond-Ernoch (her husband being absent), was afraid or unwilling to
refuse. She caused bread and cheese to be placed before them, and gave
directions for more substantial refreshments to be prepared. While she
was absent with this hospitable intention, the barbarians placed the
head of her brother on the table, filling the mouth with bread and
cheese, and bidding him eat, for many a merry meal he had eaten in that
house. The poor woman returning, and beholding this dreadful sight,
shrieked aloud, and fled into the woods, where, as described in the
romance, she roamed a raving maniac.”

It is but natural that Miss Murray Macgregor would fain believe this
crime “to have been perpetrated by men of another name.” She brings
forward a tradition in the clan that it was really the work of MacIans
of Glencoe, a name which has lived in the breath of historic sympathy.
Two young lads of this race, we are told, had been caught poaching in
Glenartney, as a punishment for which the forester clipped their ears.
Insulted kinsmen vowed revenge for that injury; and the picturesque
circumstance is added that their first step was the employment of a
local witch, who threw such a spell over Drummond that the MacIans were
invisible to him as they approached on their cruel errand. The Macgregor
chief’s only part in the matter, we should believe, was harbouring those
“Children of the Mist”; or, for some reason or other, it is admitted, he
may be understood to have taken the responsibility of the crime upon
himself. What came to be believed at the time was that the murderers
carried Drummond’s head--his _hand_ in another story--to the Macgregor
chief, who, assembling his clan at the church of Balquhidder, made them
lay their hands upon the gory trophy, and swear to defend the authors
of the deed, as done by their common determination. Sir Alexander
Boswell, son of Johnson’s acolyte, has told the story in _Clan Alpine’s
Vow_, a poem that reads like an attempt to catch the wind of the _Lady
of the Lake’s_ popularity.

The Privy Council made no doubt of the real culprits. Proclamation went
forth against the “wicked Clan Gregor, continuing in blood, slaughters,
hership, manifest reifts and storths committed upon His Highness’
peaceable and good subjects.” A Commission was issued to several
noblemen and gentlemen, empowering them for three years to hunt down the
Macgregor chief and a long list of his followers as specified by name.
One account tells of thirty-seven Macgregors slain by a party which the
murdered man’s brother had raised under this commission; another makes
seventeen of the clan hanged upon one tree at Balquhidder, as a round
dozen are said to have been at the end of Loch Earn. Against these
statements their faithful historian can bring no more satisfactory
disproof than depositions of old men in the early part of last century,
who had the story in a form more favourable to the Macgregors, and
thought it unlikely that such wholesale executions could have taken
place without figuring in their traditions. Miss Murray Macgregor makes
a stronger point by showing how, when little more than a year had
passed, her ancestor the chief and his followers were formally pardoned
for whatever share they may have had in Drummond’s murder. It was not
always convenient, indeed, to hold on foot the volunteer police of the
border line, where the King’s deputies often proved apter to look to the
grinding of their own axes than to keeping keen the sword of justice.

In 1596 Macgregor appeared at court, like Roderick Dhu at Holyrood, to
give pledges and promises for the good behaviour of his hornet hive. But
a few years later came an outbreak that seemed to fill the cup of their
offences. There was an old smouldering feud between them and their
neighbours, the Colquhouns of Loch Lomond, which flared up into open war
just before James succeeded to the English crown. In _The Highlands and
Islands_, I gave the traditional version of the Glenfruin fight. Miss
Murray Macgregor points out that there were two fights at a few weeks’
interval, one in Glenfinlas, the other in Glenfruin. It was after the
first affair, described as a “raid,” that the procession of widows
carrying the bloody shirts of the slain stirred James into commissioning
Colquhoun of Luss to repress the Macgregors.

Then followed the famous battle in that “Glen of Sorrow,” which the
Macgregor historian shows to have been fairly fought and won by the
courage and strategy of the Macgregors and their allies, who had taken
the initiative against a hostile force advancing to attack them. As for
the legend of the slaughtered scholars, she justly insists that this
story does not enter into the legal charges formulated against her clan,
from which such an atrocity would hardly fail to be omitted if it could
be brought home to them. She quotes another tradition as to this crime
being the work of a monster or madman of uncertain name; and she is able
to show that a few years later a highlander of Glencoe was accused
before the Privy Council of having “with his own hand murdered without
pity the number of forty poor persons who were naked and without
armour,” probably those scholars or other sightseers who had come out
from Dumbarton to see the battle, and whom the Macgregor annals
represent the chief as placing in a church out of harm’s way; he is also
said to have expressed the utmost horror at their unhappy fate.
Furthermore, the Macgregors’ plea includes a charge, founded on the
dying declaration of their resentful chief, that sly Argyll had a hand
in the whole quarrel, who, while professing to keep the peace of the
Highlands, was not above secretly setting two hostile clans by the ears
that they might destroy one another like Kilkenny cats, at the same
time, perhaps, throwing into relief the need for the services of a
powerful lord-lieutenant on the Highland border. For myself, I will only
say that in the whole affair there appears no evidence to call a blush
to the cheek of modern Macgregors; and that I regret having hurt any
clan feeling by my slight account of this battle long ago. The
Colquhouns’ story has been set forth by Sir William Fraser; and that
clan counts among its daughters a distinguished author who might draw
the pen against the Macgregor historian, if so disposed. As for the
Argyll family of to-day, they are all authors, so I leave it to them to
controvert the many hard things that have been said against their
forbears.

Glenfinlas and Glenfruin, in one or both of which fights Dumbarton
citizens were involved, raised such a noise in the Lowlands that, for
the moment, anything would be believed against the Macgregors. James’s
parting legacy to them was a persecution that aimed at exterminating
the “viperous clan,” as a Campbell styles them in a letter to the king.
Their very name was prohibited. They were forbidden to carry any arms
but a pointless knife for eating their victuals. Not more than four of
them might be suffered to show themselves together. Other offenders were
offered pardon on condition of quelling Macgregors, whose heads, in one
instance at least, were put to a price like wolves’. Within a year after
Glenfruin, more than thirty of them had been executed at Stirling alone.
The chief was hanged at Edinburgh; after one daring escape from
treacherous arrest, he had fallen into the hands of Argyll, who is said
to have promised to send him to England, a promise kept to the letter by
taking the captive over the Border, but at once bringing him back to his
doom. Hostile clans were set to hunt down the sons of Alpin, as Uncle
Sam has employed Cheyenne scouts against the Sioux. As with runaway
slaves, bloodhounds were employed in the chase of the proscribed rebels,
some of whom took refuge on an island of Loch Katrine, no doubt the same
as figures in the _Lady of the Lake_. Severe penalties were denounced
against “resetters” of those outlaws, and all holding friendly
intercourse with them. They did not want for sympathisers as well as
persecutors. It had to be expressly forbidden to ferry any of the
fugitives across the lochs to the south of their country, where they
might else seek refuge in the wilds of Dumbarton and Argyll.

Under this proscription the Macgregors became broken men. Bands of them,
“wolves and thieves,” wandered here and there on dark errands of
violence and vengeance. But many let themselves be crushed into
submission, changed their names, found “caution” for quiet behaviour,
or put themselves under protection of other lords and chiefs. The ruined
state of the clan is shown, ten years after Glenfruin, by the Laird of
Lawers having on his hands three or four score Macgregor “bairns,” their
fathers slain or outlawed, as to whom he was urgent with the authorities
that other landlords should at least contribute to the expense of such a
troublesome charge, not ten of them above the age of five. What to do
with this nursery was a question of some difficulty. It was proposed to
apprentice them in the Lowlands, like that uncongenial pupil of Simon
Glover; also to distribute them among families who should be answerable
for their safe keeping. Any child venturing to run away was liable to be
scourged and burned on the cheek, and to be hanged if he tried it again;
but over the age of fourteen, a youth risked hanging for the first
attempt. Even in face of such penalties, Macgregor bairns must have been
hard to hold or to bind on their native heath; and it is likely that
some of them gave their keepers the slip. A few years later, His
Majesty’s Council in England were made aware of emboldened outlaws, who,
after lurking quietly for a time, had again “broken loose, and have
associated unto them a number of the young brood of that clan who are
now risen up, and with them they go in troops and companies athwart the
country, armed with bows, darlochs, hackbuts, pistols, and other armour,
committing a number of insolencies upon His Majesty’s good subjects in
all parts where they may be masters.” As the Sahara to-day is haunted by
veiled Touareg caterans, even so we can imagine how civilescent Murrays
and

[Illustration: THE HEAD OF LOCH LOMOND]

Menzies would be fain to keep a sharp lookout in crossing the wild moor
of Rannoch.

    The moon’s on the lake, and the mist’s on the brae,
    And the clan has a name that is nameless by day.

Like other dubious characters, the sons of Alpin are now found passing
under _aliases_. Fresh outrages charged on them provoked an Act of
Charles I., 1633, confirming the former proscription, and specially
enjoining, on pain of deprivation, that ministers of the Highland or
bordering counties should baptize no child by the name of Gregor, and
that no clerk or notary should draw any deed in this forbidden
patronymic. So late as 1745, when Prince Charlie’s army was at hand, the
conscientious minister of Drymen refused to give it to a child offered
for baptism as Gregor. It was the real name of that Gilderoy, “the red
lad,” precursor of Rob Roy, who came to a more untimely end, as told in
his sweetheart’s lament--

    If Gilderoy had done amiss,
    He might have banished been.
    Ah! what fair cruelty is this,
    To hang such handsome men!

This bandit was hanged at Edinburgh, 1636. Among the charges against him
was one of taking part in a feud in the Grant country, where the Forbes
and the Gordons were concerned; we hear of those Ishmaelites as having a
hand in various quarrels as well as those of their own country. The
fellest foes of the Macgregors could seldom accuse them of not being
ready to fight, unless, as at Sheriffmuir, when distracted by plunder.
James VI. had offered Elizabeth a levy of Highlandmen, including fifty
Macgregors, to put down her Irish rebels. Sundry members of the
bellicose stock were let out of prison to make recruits for Gustavus
Adolphus in Germany. The Earl of Moray enlisted three hundred
Highlanders from Menteith and Balquhidder to overawe the Clan Chattan in
the north: these auxiliaries are believed to have been Macgregors, and
they are reported not to have taken kindly to this police service, so
that their employer dismissed them; while another story makes some of
them refuse to be dismissed, settling down on the Deeside lands, whither
they had been rashly called in as bailiffs.

In their own fastnesses the Children of the Mist still held out
stubbornly. When Montrose set the heather on fire he was followed by
part of the proscribed clan, coming boldly forth from the islands and
the wild nooks in which they had taken sanctuary; and we may be sure
their tartans were made welcome for the nonce. That blaze extinguished,
again they rallied to Charles II.’s standard set up by Glencairn at
Killin, which soon went down before Cromwell’s soldiery; then when their
Argyll enemies were out of favour, the King’s gratitude for fruitless
loyalty availed them in the repeal of the act of proscription. Their
forfeited lands, however, were not restored, as Montrose had promised in
his master’s name; and for the most part they had to content themselves
with becoming tenants or dependents of more thriving names.

Here and there, indeed, we find Macgregors, helped by other lawless
bands, making bold to drive off the occupants of farms from which they
had been themselves evicted; now and then emerges a record of “the good
old rule, the simple plan,” leading one of them to the gallows; but at
this date their historian can also quote a number of marriage contracts,
wadsetts, sasines, bonds, and such-like deeds of Scots law going to show
how the clan, on its outskirts at least, began more or less willingly to
adapt itself to the conditions of modern life. In 1691, that old enemy
Colquhoun of Luss comes forward to testify to the Laird of Macgregor as
“a law-abiding man, regularly paying mail and duty,” while other members
of the clan are still denounced as lawless loons, “who have little
property or inheritance to be a pledge for them.”

A stumbling-block to those hereditary warriors in their new course was
the campaign of Killiecrankie. However much set against the law, the
Macgregors had always been ready to stand for the king when bloodshed
and plunder were in question; and now a body of them, though not the
chief, followed Dundee to his fatal victory. This defiance of the Whig
Government, and the general disturbed state of the Highlands, prompted a
renewal of the clan’s proscription. Perhaps at the instigation of
Breadalbane, the special penal act against it was re-enacted early in
William’s reign; then the Macgregors’ conduct in 1715 and 1745 did not
invite its repeal.

For nearly a century now it was illegal to use the name of Macgregor.
That had been a matter of less importance when every Highlander was
known as the son of his father and of his own deeds; but now that even
Macgregors had occasion to put their hands to documents and to be
specified in records, it behoved them to answer to some convenient
surname, while secretly cherishing their own proscribed patronymic. Some
disguised it as Gregory, Gregorson, Grierson, and so forth. Some, since
better might not be, took the names of neighbours or of the lords on
whom they were now more or less dependent. Dr. Johnson understood that
David Malloch, the poet, was a Macgregor by birth, that “beggarly
Scotchman” who softened his assumed name to Mallet for London ears. Most
of the clan seem to have submitted to adoption as Campbells, Drummonds,
Grahams, and Murrays, names borrowed from the ducal houses, that,
originally besetting the Macgregor country, had gradually squeezed
themselves over it, where room was left by such encroachers as the
Menzies and the Campbells of Breadalbane. Near the Trossachs country Rob
Roy had to do with both Atholl and Montrose, as landlords and superiors;
but, when on his good behaviour, he chose to call himself Campbell as
recognising Argyll for his special patron. A good deal later, it was not
uncommon to find Perthshire men who knew themselves as Macgregors, but
passed before the world by other names. In the middle of last century,
Professor Macdougall could tell how one of his Edinburgh students gave
his name as Macgregor, then being asked to spell it, unconsciously did
so as C-a-m-p-b-e-l-l.

Rob Roy’s life I propose to treat apart; and then something may be said
of his clan’s part in the rising of 1715. In 1745 also, it can be taken
as a matter of course that the Macgregors did not hold aloof from such a
congenial chance of bestirring themselves, and in the _débâcle_ after
Culloden, their contingent was the last to disband, after boldly
marching through the Highlands to Balquhidder. Two separate bodies of
them had joined Prince Charlie’s army, as Scott states; but they seem to
have run together in the heat of Prestonpans; then there arose a certain
jealousy as to which chief had the best right to be colonel. For the
clan, as well as the country, was distracted by a pretender, and by more
than one. A dispute as to headship seems almost essential to the dignity
of a Highland stock; and the troubled life led by the sons of Alpin for
two or three centuries had helped specially to tangle the line of
succession into knots which Miss Murray Macgregor is at much pains to
unravel, her history being twisted, not to say encumbered, by such
contentions. She is naturally concerned to exalt her own family, the
Macgregors of Glenstray, above rival branches that during a confused
time had usurped precedence in a name legally extinct.

The law of proscription, indeed, had now become a dead letter, the
Macgregors being practically free to bear their own name if they
pleased, though for a time not to wear their own or any tartan, unless
along with the king’s coat. If some sons of the race went into exile
after Culloden, some to the gallows, and some are already found seeking
fortune across the Atlantic, others gained scope for their warlike
energy in the new Highland regiments that did such good service to the
Georges. Half-way between the two Jacobite risings, negotiations had
been set on foot by the kindred clans Gregor and Grant for taking either
Grant or Macalpine as their common name. This proposal wrecked on the
question of which clan should supply the chief; but some gentlemen of
both appear to have then dubbed themselves Macalpine. Half a century
later, the name of Macgregor was no longer in disgrace, its loyalty so
well proved that the Government could be called on to redress what made
now a mere sentimental grievance.

“Gregor Macgregor, Cacique of Poyais,” whom I mentioned in _Bonnie
Scotland_ as no great credit to the clan, was grandson of Gregor,
bynamed “Boyac” (the beautiful), who under the _nom de guerre_ of
Drummond enlisted in the Black Watch, was presented to George II., won a
commission, and came to be adjutant of the West Middlesex Militia. He
has the credit of drawing up a petition for the repeal of the laws
against his clan, as was granted in 1774 by an act evoking warm
professions of gratitude and loyalty from the now fully pardoned
Macgregors. At the end of the century these sentiments were made good by
the raising of a Clan Alpine regiment that, with a brother of its chief
for colonel, fought abroad as bravely as at Glenfruin.

The dynastic question had then been settled in a deed signed by over 800
of the name, recognising as their true prince one long fain to lurk
under the disguise of a Murray, as to whose essential Macgregorship I
allowed myself to speak so lightly. The chief thus elected as
representing the main line, was son of Evan Murray or Macgregor, who had
been content to end his days as lieutenant of invalids at Jersey, far
from the ancestral Glenstray; and the fortunes of the family seem to
have been restored by that modern enterprise known as “shaking the
pagoda tree.” His granddaughter duly informs me that “high appointments
in India prevented Sir John Macgregor Murray, the first baronet, from
fully resuming his own patronymic, although he came under obligations to
his clan that his only son should do so at his death.” So the last four
generations of Red Macgregors have been free to look the whole world in
the face without _alias_ or _alibi_, and flaunt their tartans up to the
banks of Jordan, no man daring to make them afraid, an undertaking that
seems always to have been beyond the power of most men.




VII

ROB ROY AND HIS SONS


The name of Macgregor now basks in all respectability and renown both at
home and far from its native heath. A Buddhist monk, of British origin,
who lately undertook to convert us Occidentals, dubbed himself
Macgregor, a name that has little suggestion of Nirvana, but seems to
accentuate apostasy from the Shorter Catechism. On the other hand
Evangelical Christianity and philanthropy of no dreamy sort found a
staunch upholder in a “Rob Roy” Macgregor of the last generation, who
paddled that byname into fresh note. At South coast resorts, a few years
ago, a portly personage attracted much attention by going decked in
Macgregor kilt or hose; but scandal gave him out a mere Sassenach, of
quite undistinguished name and prosaic occupation, who had the strange
fad of posing as a belated chieftain in his holidays, and to intensify
that effect donned the most flaring of all tartans, which Rob Roy must
have been too canny to wear when his business brought him near excitable
bulls. John Bull rather admires the Macgregor tartan, as the most easy
to recognise. His sympathies can readily be called out for

[Illustration: SILVER STRAND, LOCH KATRINE]

“Wee Magregors” and such-like, once looked on as wolf cubs to be caged
or exterminated. And much of this favour and familiarity comes through
the figure cut by Rob Roy, to make famous a name he himself durst not
bear, unless by stealth, when his foot stood firm on his native heath.

As to the popular hero of her clan, Miss Murray Macgregor has not so
much to say as might be expected; she seems even inclined to belittle
his reputation, and to denounce his freebooting exploits as
discreditable anachronism in a day of “changing moral sense.” She would
have us know that he was by no means the chief of the clan, as has been
lightly said, but only uncle and tutor to the young chieftain of
Glengyle, a junior branch rooted at the head of Loch Katrine. But he is
by far the most widely celebrated son of Gregor; and we need turn to no
more recondite source than Scott for fact and fiction to illustrate a
career that in its own day made copy for a London hack writer. Sir
Walter, by the way, regrets that rare tract, _The Highland Rogue_, not
having fallen to be written by Defoe; but there now seems reason to
believe that this catchpenny piece was Defoe’s work. Better informed
biographies of Rob Roy have been written in our time, one decked out in
trappings of fiction by the novelist James Grant; but he is still best
known from the novel that bears his name, or from Wordsworth’s
humorously idealising verses. Not to swell out the following sketch of
his life with vain repetitions of such qualifying phrases as “it is
said,” “he is believed,” the reader will please understand that a writer
has here to pick out what seems most likely to be the fact from a mass
of deficient and sometimes contradictory materials more easily handled
by fiction than by history. Our critical generation has gleaned very
little to round off the presentment of his hero by a romancer who in
youth had opportunities to gather what passed for truth about the scenes
of Rob’s exploits.

Scott had spoken to men who knew the renowned freebooter, and could
describe him as hairy and strong like a Highland bull--not tall, but
remarkable for the breadth of his shoulders and the length of his arms,
so that he could untie his garters without stooping. It was his red hair
or complexion, of course, that gave him the well-known byname. He is
supposed to have been born early in Charles II.’s reign, a descendant of
Ciar Mhor, the “great mouse-coloured man,” whom tradition accused of the
murder of those scholars at Glenfruin. He would hardly have been out of
his teens when the Revolution gave him an opportunity of apprenticeship
to scenes of violence. He may have fought at Killiecrankie. His first
recorded exploit was the Hership of Kippen in 1691, when he swooped down
into the Lennox to carry off a herd of cows belonging to Lord
Livingstone, and while he was about it plundered the village of Kippen,
whose inhabitants had presumed to oppose him with such clumsy weapons as
they had at hand.

The young leader of this raid was no homeless outlaw. He had a farm of
his own at Inversnaid on Loch Lomond, the accommodation of which he may
now and then have exchanged for what is shown on the lakeside as Rob
Roy’s Cave, said to have given shelter to Robert Bruce also in his day.
When the country had settled down after the Revolution, Rob is heard of
as taking grazing lands in Balquhidder, and as acquiring further
property or holdings at Craig Royston, farther down Loch Lomond, where
again an arched cavern is called “Rob Roy’s Prison,” and rival “Rob
Roy’s Wells” are pointed out in this tourist-haunted vicinity. Now or
afterwards he combined the apparently incongruous professions of
cattle-robber and blackmailer or captain of a border “Watch.” In 1695 he
appears to have fallen into the hands of the Philistines, for there is a
record of his being ordered for exile to Flanders; but somehow he must
have escaped this sentence, perhaps owing to the protection of the Duke
of Montrose. It is of course possible that he may here be confused with
some other member of the clan, in which the agname Roy was not uncommon.

To this nobleman, his neighbour on Loch Lomond, he for a time attached
himself, receiving not only protection but loans of money with which to
carry on business as a drover. Another way of telling it is that the
duke became practically a partner with his enterprising client. For now,
putting his pride into his pocket, Rob took to dealing in cattle at the
Lowland markets, a trade, as Scott tells us, not altogether peaceful in
its incidents.

     The cattle, which were the staple commodity of the mountains, were
     escorted down to fairs, on the borders of the Lowlands, by a party
     of Highlanders, with their arms rattling around them; and who
     dealt, however, in all honour and good faith with their Southern
     customers. A fray, indeed, would sometimes arise, when the Lowland
     men, chiefly Borderers, who had to supply the English market, used
     to dip their bonnets in the next brook, and wrapping them round
     their hands, oppose their cudgels to the naked broadswords, which
     had not always the superiority. I have heard from aged persons, who
     had been engaged in such affrays, that the Highlanders used
     remarkably fair play, never using the point of the sword, far less
     their pistols or daggers; so that--

    With many a thwack, and many a bang,
    Hard crabtree and cold iron rang.

     A slash or two or a broken head was easily accommodated, and as the
     trade was of benefit to both parties, trifling skirmishes were not
     allowed to interrupt its harmony.

The area of such operations was extended by the Union allowing Highland
cattle to be driven over the Border; and for a time our hero seems to
have done a profitable business. By and by, however, it went ill with
him in overstocked markets. His losses are also blamed on the rascality
of a partner who absconded in 1712, when Rob himself had to keep out of
the way of a charge that he had treacherously made off with money
entrusted to him by several nobleman and gentlemen for buying cows. Such
an embarrassed state of his affairs he faced by withdrawing himself
deeper into the Highland wilds. The Duke of Montrose pressed for payment
of his advances; then his agents are said to have insulted Rob’s wife,
in distraining upon their home in the master’s absence. This outrage is
charged against Graham of Killearn, the Duke’s chamberlain, upon whom
Rob afterwards took stinted revenge by seizing him while collecting
rents, laying hands on the money, and carrying off the man of business
to an island on Loch Katrine, from which, however, he was released,
robbed but unharmed, after a few days’ imprisonment.

About this time Rob Roy’s refuge appears to have been in the Breadalbane
country. Now, at all events, he made up a feud with the Campbells, that
had been chronic or intermittent in earlier days, when he ducked one
laird of that name in the pool of Strath Fillan. His quarrel with
Montrose drove him into a new alliance, and he is presently found
attaching himself to the Duke of Argyll, for the sake of a clandestine
protection extended to clients of the rival magnates. With the Campbell
country to fall back on, he made guerrilla raids against the Grahams, by
way of settling accounts which this unsuccessful cattle-dealer
maintained to be in his favour. His mother is said to have been a
Campbell, as also his wife, though another account makes her a Macgregor
by birth, who may have passed under the Campbell name.

That private war was interrupted by the rising of 1715. Rob would hardly
have been a Macgregor had he not “gone out” at such a time; but most
accounts of the campaign represent him as fighting or foraying too much
for his own hand. He took the field as guardian of his young nephew, the
chieftain of Glengyle, bynamed _Ghlune Dhu_, “Black Knee,” from a mole
shown below his kilt; then to this scion of the house Rob seems to have
set no chivalrous example. The battle of Sheriffmuir proved an
indecisive one mainly through his refusing to lead the Macgregors to the
charge; and his best part in the fight was plundering the baggage and
the dead. He would not be the only Highlander in those wars who fought
“not for King Shordy nor King Hamish, but for king _Spulzie_.”
Balhaldie, head of another branch of the Macgregors, distinguished
himself more at this battle fought close to his home.

The attitude of “sitting on the fence” which Rob kept in this Jacobite
rising, is thought to have been inspired by his connection with Argyll,
the leader of the Hanoverian party in Scotland. But he was active enough
on _creaghs_, pushed as far as Falkland Palace in Fife. His own country,
at the outset, had been beaten up by the enemy. The Macgregors’ first
act of war was to seize the boats on Loch Lomond. To recover them, a
force of Dumbarton and Paisley volunteers with a band of Colquhoun
Highlanders marched to Inversnaid, waked the mountain echoes with a
great din of drumming and shooting, by which they boasted to have “cowed
and frighted away” the Macgregors, whose captain, indeed, appears seldom
forward to fight unless where something was to be got by it.

It was about this time that Rob paid a visit to Aberdeen, sent by Mar,
it is supposed, to raise part of his clan settled in that region. Here
he was guest of an imperfectly congenial kinsman, Dr. James Gregory, a
Macgregor who had changed his name and his nature to become a professor
of medicine at the University, one of a line of men of science and
healers who by “Gregory’s powder” and other remedies did much to stanch
their ancestors’ blood-letting. That alarming cousin from the hills, in
return for the hospitality shown him, offered to take to the Highlands
one of the professor’s sons with the view of making a man of him. It was
difficult to explain to him how this course of education seemed no
favour; he is said to have threatened to carry off the boy by force
from the unworthy fate of becoming a bookworm, and the father was fain
to temporise with such pressing kindness by a promise to talk of the
matter later on, when his son had grown stronger. In the end young
Gregory was allowed to follow his destiny to medicine; but Rob did visit
the family once more, when his stay was cut short by hearing the drums
beat in the barracks. “If these lads are turning out, I must be off,”
quoth the prudent outlaw, and took sudden leave of his host. The story
of his leaping the water at Culter and shaking his fist in the face of
his pursuers seems to be a mere fancy piece, like the statue that
commemorates it. Rob Roy’s authentic exploits were far from Deeside.

After the dispersal of the Jacobite army, Rob could not prevent his own
country being raided by the soldiers. Two houses of his were burned and
plundered, one of them before the angry eyes of the outlaw, who could
only fire a few shots at the Swiss mercenaries brought from their own
Alps to do such work in Highland glens. It seems to have been at an
earlier date that he seized the fort building at his Inversnaid home.
About this time fell some of the incidents used in Scott’s _Rob Roy_.
The lurking hero became a prisoner to Montrose, but escaped by cutting
the girth of his horse, as told in this novel. Again he was captured by
Atholl and sent to jail at Logierait, but before he could be handed over
to the military, he had given his keepers the slip after making them
drunk with _aqua vitæ_, which now begins to play a potent part in
Highland frays.[1] For the moment these noblemen were hunting him in
company, united by jealousy of Argyll, all three made dukes about the
same time. Wonderful stories are told of the pranks he played with
soldiers, for whom he was as hard to catch as an eel or a hedgehog. At
Tyndrum, for instance, he is said to have joined a detachment in the
disguise of a jovial beggar, who undertook to betray himself as Menteith
betrayed Wallace, but so managed the matter that on entering the house
where they were to find Rob Roy, the redcoats found themselves seized in
the dark, each file pinioned and gagged in turn, to be set free in the
morning with a good breakfast, but without their arms.

 [1] The first mention of _usquebaugh_ which I know in English books,
 is Lord Hervey’s statement as to this strong Scotch spirit being
 tried as cordial for the dying Queen Caroline. In _The Highlands and
 Islands_ were given reasons for taking whisky to be not of immemorial
 antiquity on the heather.

One slight glimpse of Rob we have as enjoying himself at home not very
long after Sheriffmuir. In 1804 there died a great-nephew of his,
Alexander Graham, who believed himself to have reached the age of a
hundred and five. Before registration days, indeed, the years of those
oldest inhabitants were apt to be loosely calculated; and perhaps this
patriarch’s recollection should be dated a little later. He related to
the minister of Aberfoyle how when about eighteen he tramped up to
Balquhidder on a visit to his granduncle, whose house was near the
church of that parish. On the way, oppressed by heat, the lad stopped to
bathe in every lake and stream. Having reached Balquhidder, and no doubt
having found warm hospitality, he was still so feverish that several
times through the night he got up to cool himself in Loch Voil. Next
day, as he remembered, he felt too unwell “to bear the merriment that
was going on

[Illustration: THE RIVER TEITH]

in his uncle’s house,” so he set out homewards, still continuing his
hydropathic treatment, till at Inversnaid he broke down with what turned
out to be an attack of smallpox. Had he remained with his roistering
relatives, he might have had the same experience as that other young man
Scott tells of on the authority of the Macnab, who, carried off by
caterans on his bridal day to a cave on Schiehallion, took the smallpox
before his ransom was paid, and got through it so well in this good air
that he always looked on the robbers as having saved his life.

After 1715, Rob submitted to the Government _de facto_; but in the
feeble rising of 1719, that was quickly stamped out at Glenshiel, he
again headed a band of Macgregors for King James; and again there is a
hint of his not being very serviceable. More of an outlaw than ever, he
then renewed his attacks upon Montrose, to whom he went the length of
addressing a challenge, which Scott looks on as an impudent joke. But
that embittered feud came to be made up. Argyll, now no longer trusted
by the Government, was reconciled to his ducal neighbour, and got Rob
Roy also to make peace with the Grahams. Then the chieftain sent in his
celebrated letter of submission to General Wade, in which he makes
unworthy excuses for his part in an “unnatural rebellion,” and accuses
himself of having all along played the spy for Argyll, while taking care
not to do much harm to the redcoats. In further proof of his character
as a law-abiding citizen, he asserts that his debt to Montrose is paid
“to the uttermost farthing.” Macgregors jealous of his fair fame must
rule out this document, as the “Casket Letters” are barred by Queen
Mary’s champions. It is signed _Robert Campbell_, whereas his nephew
used the name of Graham.

Rob would now be more free to settle down at Balquhidder under the ægis
of those two dukes. Still, there was on hand a feud with Atholl, who
once more laid snares for him, and again he gave captivity the slip. It
has been supposed that he spent the rest of his life quietly, or without
more adventure than went with his blackmailing enterprises. But Dr.
Doran unearthed from an old newspaper a statement that in 1727 the
redoubtable Rob Roy was brought prisoner to Newgate, and sent to
Gravesend, handcuffed with Lord Ogilvie, in a convoy of prisoners for
transportation to the West Indies; then they came to be pardoned at the
last moment. Fancy poor Rob pining among the “redshanks” of Barbados,
that had been sadly stocked with political exiles! His fame already
reached as far as London, for the _Highland Rogue_ came out in 1723.
George II. is said at this time to have had the rebel brought to his
notice as a fine specimen of a Highlander; but here may be a confusion
with the story of Gregor Boyac which I have already mentioned.

Having made such a narrow escape from transportation, Rob went home to
end his days in comparative peace. He turned Roman Catholic in his old
age, not having been hitherto much exercised by religious
considerations. When a notorious judge of our time astonished or amused
the public by taking the same step, a kinsman of his remarked to me,
“Old Harry” (his lordship’s nickname in the family) “likes that sort of
thing done for him.” This may have been the case of the Red Macgregor.
Yet Scott has a story to show a deeper strain of feeling in him. When
towards the end of his life he expressed contrition for some acts in it,
and his wife would have laughed away those scruples, he rebuked her
with, “You have put strife between me and the best men of the country;
and now you would put enmity between me and my God.” The incident would
at least fit Scott’s conception of the haughty virago whom he names
Helen, while her real name is given as Mary, and her character has been
represented in another light. As to Rob’s religious impressions in
earlier days, an English traveller, two generations after his death,
reports, on the authority of an unnamed witness, a story of his cheating
a poor widow out of her only cow, then being moved by a sermon against
dishonesty to give it back, promising the minister to amend his ways of
business.

The Old Adam came out in Rob when in his last years he had a quarrel
with the Appin Stewarts, a branch of whom were his neighbours in
Glenfinlas. This was settled honourably by a little blood-letting in a
broadsword duel between him and Stewart of Invernahyle, whose adventures
in the ’45 were to give Scott more than one hint for _Waverley_. On his
death-bed, a visit being announced from one of those hereditary enemies,
the Maclarens, “Throw my plaid round me,” he desired, “and bring me my
claymore, dirk, and pistols--it shall never be said that a foeman saw
Rob Roy Macgregor defenceless and unarmed!” To this story is tacked on
the somewhat hackneyed incident of a priest labouring to extract from
the dying man some expression of forgiveness, to which he consented,
with a plain hint for his son standing by: “I forgive my enemies; but
see you to them, Rob.” We shall see presently how young Robin carried
out such an injunction. The _Caledonian Mercury_ announces the “Highland
partisan’s” death at the end of 1734.

The renown of this popular hero, even in his lifetime, loomed out
through a misty halo of such exploits as were attributed to Robin Hood,
and such tricks as were more in the style of Jack Sheppard. Estimates of
his character range from Doran’s “contemptible rascal” to the picture of
a noble champion cherished in Highland memories, and set forth most
elaborately in Mr. A. H. Millar’s life of him. Even his personal courage
has been doubted by cavilling Lowlanders, who find cause to see in him
more of a bully than a fire-eater; and instances are related of his
allowing himself to be crowed down for all his cock-of-the-walk airs.
The belief that he spoiled the rich and was good to the poor goes far to
account for his contemporary popularity. A certain humorous shiftiness
went to carry off his very dubious political conduct. With more craft
than becomes a hero, there seems to be a general consent that he was not
given to wanton cruelty, nor over-thirsty for revenge. Perhaps it may be
said of him as of Brutus, “nec bene fecit, nec male fecit, sed
_inter_fecit,” a judgment translated into Andrew Fairservice’s homely
language, and delicately expressed by some Highlander who called this
chequered hero “a man of incoherent transactions.” But for good or evil,
he bears in song and story the name of having been

    A hedge about his friends,
    A heckle to his foes.

Rob Roy’s attitude of aloofness towards law would not make for the
bringing-up of his family in “decency and order.” He left five sons, of
whom the eldest was happy enough to have no history; but the others
proved themselves chips of the old block to the point of making a noise
in criminal records. The youngest, known as Robin Oig, was first to get
into trouble. A Maclaren had ventured to settle on what the family held
to be their land. At the instigation, it is said, of his mother, Robin
Oig, a lad in his teens, shot this intruder at the plough, with a gun
belonging to his father which came into Sir Walter Scott’s possession,
while Rob Roy’s claymore has emigrated into the hands of an American
historical society; and the Edinburgh Museum of Antiquities contains the
curious sporan clasp, set with concealed pistols, which is spoken of in
the novel. But, indeed, too many of Rob’s weapons have been put upon the
market.

The precocious murderer absconded, after a herd of Maclaren cattle had
been barbarously mutilated by the help of his friends or his brothers.
Two of the latter were tried as his accomplices, along with a rustic
pretender to surgery called in to the wounded man, who had refused to
give him the benefit of his reputed skill on the plea of not knowing
with what shot the gun was loaded. An _alibi_ was set up for the
brothers, and the charge of being art and part in the murder was found
“not proven,” but the two Macgregors had to give “caution” for good
behaviour as “habit and repute thieves.”

Robin Oig appears to have fled abroad; then later he enlisted in King
George’s Black Watch, and served at Fontenoy, where he was taken
prisoner. After the ’45, he ventured home to Scotland, and in 1750
became concerned in another outrage, that seems as if thrown back into
the Middle Ages, Being now a widower, he proposed a forcible marriage
with a young widow named Jean Key, whose fortune of a few hundred pounds
bulked large enough to balance the risk of abduction. In older days it
had been not so uncommon for a Highlander, upon Sabine and savage
precedent, to carry off a bride whose heart might not refuse to follow
the violent possession of her hand, as in Red Indian story a white squaw
has been found so strongly wedded to the wigwam that she would refuse to
be rescued by her old kin. Only a generation earlier, the notorious
Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, had played a prank of the same kind in high
life with peculiar brutality that yet gained its end. But now the
Macgregors committed themselves not only to a crime but to a blunder, in
forgetting how times had changed.

The third brother, known from his stature as James Mhor, who seems to
have been the most active spirit of the family, was the ringleader in
this enterprise. Robin, who went to the gallows for it, reading a book,
may have been acquainted with Allan Ramsay’s song--

    The widow can bake, and the widow can brew,
    The widow can shape and the widow can sew,
    And mony braw things the widow can do;
    Then have at the widow, my laddie!
    Wi’ courage attack her baith early and late,
    To kiss her and clap her ye mauna be blate:
    Speak weel and do better; for that’s the best gate
    To win a young widow, my laddie.

At the trial it came to be asserted rather than proved that Robin had
begun with speaking and other approved forms of courtship, and that he
had been encouraged to hope for success with this widow of a few weeks’
standing. In any case, he hastened to _voies de fait_.

She was living with her mother and other friends at her house in the
Stirlingshire parish of Baldron, when, one December night of 1750, they
found it beset by four of the brothers and other confederates, who broke
in, terrified the inmates with a display of weapons, and by threats of
murder and burning forced the mother to bring her daughter out of a
closet where she had hidden herself. Poor Jean, wooed in such rough
style, vainly besought at least a few hours for consideration of the
proposal thus pressed upon her. Dragged from her mother’s arms, she was
thrown over a horse, tied painfully with ropes, and carried off in spite
of her screams and struggles. On their way to Loch Lomond, a distance of
two or three hours’ walk, the abductors stopped at more than one house,
and seem hardly to have cared to conceal their proceedings, but no one
durst interfere with them. Professor William Richardson of Glasgow, then
a seven-year-old boy at the manse of Aberfoyle, could afterwards
“describe as a terrible dream their violent and noisy entry into the
house. The Highlanders filled the little kitchen, brandishing their
arms, demanding what they pleased, and receiving whatever they demanded.
James Mhor, he said, was a tall, stern, and soldierlike man. Robin Oig
looked more gentle; dark, but yet ruddy in complexion--a good-looking
young savage. Their victim was so dishevelled in her dress, and forlorn
in her appearance and demeanour that he could hardly tell whether she
was alive or dead.”

Scott’s story is that at Rowardennan a priest was called in to perform a
marriage ceremony in face of the bride’s protests; and that she was
afterwards brought to the church of Balquhidder, where the husband
affirmed the marriage while the wife kept terrified silence. She seems
now to have been cowed into some sort of submission; as it came out on
the trial that she had seen the sheriff-substitute, and refused his
offer of assistance in escaping from her strange plight. It is said that
old women were employed to administer drugs to her by way of love
philtres; and by threats and entreaties she was made to sign papers
declaring herself to have been carried off by her own consent. For now
the high-handed husband found how he lived in a new age. The wife’s
relatives appealed to the law, undeterred by threats of vengeful feud in
good old Highland fashion. Soldiers were sent to back up warrants; and
what made a more effectual hitch in the brothers’ scheme, the Court of
Session sequestrated the woman’s property, _teterrima causa_ of the
crime.

When she had been carried about the Macgregor country for some weeks, to
evade the hue-and-cry that now could be pushed into the Highlands in
place of the Fiery Cross, the Glengyle chieftain interfered in her
favour. The brothers consented to let her go back to her friends, and
under James Mhor’s care she was taken to Edinburgh, at first kept shut
up there as a prisoner. But again the Court of Session stretched out its
arm to place her in safety in the house of a

[Illustration: THE CRAGS OF BEN VENUE]

connection, guarded by sentinels against the Macgregors’ interference.
The unfortunate woman appears to have been so broken down that her own
mother hardly knew her; and her mind was shaken so that she could with
difficulty be brought to relate the tale of her wrongs. The future Lord
Kames, who had a professional interview with her, at first judged his
client disposed to condone the violent marriage; then withdrew from the
case because she gave it a different aspect at another time. Other
accounts represent her as oppressed by an oath she had been forced to
take when in the hands of the Macgregors. She did, however, make an
affidavit as to what had happened, which formed a main piece of evidence
after her death.

Within the year she died at Glasgow, from smallpox, by popular account;
what she had gone through might well have made her an easy victim to any
illness. She had refused to see her husband again; and when, on the way
to Glasgow, one of her escort remarked that a lonely stretch on the road
was just the place for the wild Macgregors to appear, “God forbid!” she
exclaimed, “the very sight of them would kill me.” Her experience had
clearly not been that of the bride as to whose case an old lady warmly
assured Scott: “My mither never saw my father till the night that he
carried her awa’ wi’ ten head o’ black cattle, and there wasna a happier
couple in a’ the Highlands.”

For a year or two the brothers eluded justice. James was the first to be
caught and brought to trial on a charge of abduction and of what in
Scotland is the capital crime of _hame-sucken_, using violence to a
person in his own house. The evidence was contradictory, and the
verdict turned out rather vague, the jury recognising the abduction but
inclining to look on the subsequent proceedings as condoned by consent.
While the Court still sat discussing the effect of this verdict, James
Mhor made a bold escape from Edinburgh Castle, to which he had been
transferred from the Tolbooth for greater security. Here his daughter
visited him, smuggling in a disguise turned to account as told in the
_Scots’ Magazine_ of November 1752:--

     He dressed himself in an old tattered big coat put over his own
     clothes, an old night-cap, an old leather apron, and old dirty
     shoes and stockings so as to personate a cobbler. When he was thus
     equipped, his daughter, a maid servant who assisted, and who was
     the only person in the room, except two of his young children,
     scolded the cobbler for having done his work carelessly, and this
     with such an audible voice as to be heard by the sentinels without
     the room door. About seven o’clock, while she was scolding, the
     pretended cobbler opened the room door, and went out with a pair of
     old shoes in his hand, muttering his discontent for the harsh usage
     he had received. He passed the guards unsuspected, but was soon
     missed and a strict search made in the Castle, and also in the
     City, the gates of which were shut, but all in vain.

The same authority tells us how two subalterns commanding the guard that
night were cashiered, the sergeant who had the key of the prisoner’s
room was reduced to the ranks, and the porter was whipped, to enforce
greater vigilance for the future. The story is best known to our
generation by its dubious hero’s luck to get a _vates sacer_ in R. L.
Stevenson.

James having made good his escape to France, his brother Duncan was
tried and acquitted of the same charge, finding a jury ready to believe
it not proven that he had intended to take part in a crime. Another
brother, Ronald, managed to keep out of the way. But in 1753 Robin Oig
himself was at last brought to justice. For him it was pleaded that the
kidnapped woman’s distress moved him to relenting, overborne by the
harder-hearted masterfulness of his brother James. All that could be
said, however, did not save Robin’s neck. He died with edifying
firmness, confessing his offence, and attributing it to going astray
from the Roman Church, to which he now adhered. The body, carried off by
friends to Balquhidder, was met at Linlithgow by a band of Macgregors,
who conveyed it onwards with the coronach and other signs of Highland
mourning.

James Mhor was mixed in other ugly affairs that bring him into
Stevenson’s _Kidnapped_ and _Catriona_, in connection with Alan Breck
Stewart, suspected of the murder of a Campbell factor for which James
Stewart appears to have been unjustly condemned by a Campbell jury. It
is more than suspected that Rob Roy’s shifty son sought to make his
peace with the Government by betraying Alan Breck and by playing the spy
on Jacobite exiles. In any case his character seems beyond whitewashing;
and we may pass over those obscure intrigues as taking us too far from
the heart of Scotland. He died at Paris, 1754, in miserable poverty, his
death-bed redeemed from contempt by a touching message to the
fellow-exile whom he owned as chief, begging the loan of bagpipes on
which to comfort his last hours by “some melancholy tunes,” that might
wake memories of the loch and the heather.

James Mhor, who at least fought like a man at Prestonpans, died thus far
from his kin. Rob Roy is understood to be buried at the Kirkton of
Balquhidder, his grave marked by a timeworn stone, sculptured in some
more hoary age. There are tombs in better case ascribed to his wife and
to one of his sons. Another ancient slab is said to commemorate the
first Christian missionary of these glens that were so slowly lit by the
spirit of the new faith, where the most binding oath was on the dirk,
yet a man feared to break vows made on the tomb of this shadowy St
Angus. A more pretentious monument recalls the Maclarens, those older
lords of Roderick Dhu’s country, where yet a Gaelic rhyme boasted that
“the hills, the waters and the sons of Alpin were the three oldest
things in Alban.”

The stage of such stirring lives has become a favourite tourist scene of
Scotland, visited not only by bailies from the Saltmarket, but by
stockbrokers from Capel Court, and by bosses from the United States, who
have nothing to be afraid of but the chance of not finding room in the
trains, coaches, and places of entertainment that now open up this land
of lovely lakes and streams. If any of Rob Roy’s descendants be alive
to-day, they are like to present hotel bills instead of sword points to
the Osbaldistones and Captain Thorntons of our generation. Some of them
may be thanking Sassenach sportsmen for tips; and some, with more
fidelity than the Dougal cratur, may be tramping the streets of Glasgow
as policemen. Times are indeed changed. We no longer carry off our
neighbour’s cattle, nor his wife, nor his widow, nor anything that can
be protected by the police. We harry him only under forms of law; we get
the best of him in the market; we cheat him by tricks of trade; we
peacefully poison him with quack drugs and adulterated drink; then we
can complacently give thanks that we are not as those bare-shanked
publicans who made blood flow into Highland waters almost as freely as
lying advertisements stain the columns of our newspapers.

As yet “glad innocence” has never reigned among sons of Eve nursed upon
the “Braes of Balquhidder,” any more than about the banks of Cheapside.
But a time may come when our customary misdoings as well as Rob Roy’s
will seem--

    Monstrous, uncouth horrors of the past,
    That blot the blue of heaven and shame the earth
    As would the saurians of the age of slime.




VIII

MENTEITH


There might now be looked for a chapter on the Trossachs district that
makes the most famous corner of Perthshire; but indeed we have been in
it for some time back. This was the chief arena of Rob Roy’s exploits.
At Inversnaid, where the stones of the English fort, finished in spite
of him, have gone to build farmhouses and bothies, he had his early
home. Many a time he must have driven a herd, honestly or otherwise come
by, over Ben Venue by the pass of Beal-nam-bo.

    The dell upon the mountain’s crest
    Yawned like a gash on warrior’s breast.

The Goblin Cave here seems to have been made too much of in Scott’s
imagination, like John Ridd’s Doone houses and the Water-slide on
Exmoor; but the whole region is dotted with hiding-holes that sometimes
bear Rob’s name. Ellen’s Isle, that shrine of pilgrims, may often have
served him as a refuge. Many a time must he have tramped by this chain
of lovely lakes, in no more appreciative humour than a certain drover
who, being admonished on his way back from Stirling market that in
London he could have sold his beasts for twelve pounds a head, sullenly
replied that if he could take Loch Lomond to an unmentionable region it
would fetch “a pound a tot.”

The gracious name of Loch Katrine is in some spellings degraded into
Loch Cateran, as lair of robbers; but different derivations have been
suggested, for one, a root found in other Highland names, _Urrin_, which
denotes a Celtic hell. That was the native idea of a rough and bristly
country through which cattle-driving made awkward work, with the owners
of a stolen herd close at the heels of the spoilers. The Highlandmen
were slow to understand what strangers could admire in this country,
visited by occasional pilgrims of the picturesque, even before Scott
gave it such fame that Dr. Graham can record how twenty-two carriages
had stopped in one day at the chief inn of Callander, and how a London
artist had “actually” spent a whole winter working among those wild
mountains. This minister of Aberfoyle wrote an early guide-book,
entitled _Sketches of Perthshire_; but he hardly gets farther into the
Highlands than the southern edge, widely advertised by the _Lady of the
Lake’s_ popularity, when _Waverley_ and _Rob Roy_ were still in the womb
of time.

Cold-hearted Southrons may look with curious or complimentary eyes upon
this half-Highland region, which to its natives was peopled not only
with carnal but with ghostly enemies, albeit of more romantic form and
quickened by warmer fancy than in the case of those exhaled from flatter
claylands. The most familiar spirits of the Highlands were the “Men of
Peace” or “Good People” who lived underground in green hillocks, which
by spectacled archæologists have been connected with the conical huts of
a race of pigmy aborigines, whose shy prowlings in flesh and blood came
to pass for fairy tales. The abductions and other tricks ascribed to
them in later days may well have been the doings of caterans, walking in
the darkness of superstition. Like the Eumenides, the Highland fairies
were to be spoken of by good names, in dread of their turn for impish
mischief. They had a favourite trick of carrying off mortals to their
underground dwellings, and held special power over unbaptised children,
who must be guarded against them night and day. Traditions of their
pranks are common all over Scotland, from the leading cases of True
Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin, whose body and soul stood in sore
jeopardy among them.

    Once in every seven years
    They pay the teind to hell,
    And I’m so fair and fu’ o’ flesh,
    I fear ’twill be mysel’.

In Menteith the “Men of Peace” seem to have been particularly active.
One of Dr. Graham’s predecessors as minister of Aberfoyle, the Rev.
Robert Kirke, not only wrote a book testifying his belief in them so
late as the Reformation period, but was understood to have fallen under
their power. His tombstone may be seen by the church, but the story went
that he lived on in fairyland after an ineffectual appearance to a
kinsman, who neglected to follow his instructions for disenchanting him.
When the fairies could deal so masterfully with the very minister, it
may be supposed what their power was over thoughtless young folk, now
and then drawn into unhallowed love affairs with this uncanny race. A
rash mortal who sought their acquaintance had only on Hallow Eve to walk
nine times _widershins_ round one of the conical green hillocks so
common in this district; then a door would open for the adventurer,
henceforth lost to parents, harsh master, or cruel sweetheart. Dr.
Graham relates one legend that had a homelier end.

     A young man roaming one day through the forest observed a number of
     persons all dressed in green, issuing from one of those round
     eminences which are commonly accounted fairy hills. Each of them in
     succession called upon a person by name _to fetch his horse_. A
     caparisoned steed instantly appeared; they all mounted and sallied
     forth into the regions of air. The young man, like Ali Baba in the
     _Arabian Nights_, ventured to pronounce the same name, and called
     for his horse. The steed immediately appeared; he mounted, and was
     soon joined to the fairy choir. He remained with them for a year,
     going about with them to fairs and weddings, and feasting, though
     unseen by mortal eyes, on the victuals that were exhibited on those
     occasions. They had one day gone to a wedding where the cheer was
     abundant. During the feast, the bridegroom _sneezed_. The young
     man, according to the usual custom, said “God bless you!” The
     fairies were offended at the pronunciation of the sacred name, and
     assured him that if he dared to repeat it, he would be punished.
     The bridegroom sneezed a second time. He repeated his blessing;
     they threatened more tremendous vengeance. He sneezed a third time;
     he blessed him as before. The fairies were enraged; they tumbled
     him from a precipice; but he found himself unhurt, and was restored
     to the society of mortals.

Green was the favourite colour of the fairies, understood to be jealous
of its being worn by men. In some parts this colour was held unlucky,
while its use in so many tartans may have led the wearers “to mourn
fifteen renewed in forty-five.”

    Who may dare on wold to wear
    The fairies’ fatal green?

Among the Grahams, who yet have adopted a chequer of green and blue, the
former colour was avoided, since Dundee had on a green coat at
Killiecrankie, and thus, as the Highlanders whispered, made himself
target for a silver bullet. At the other end of the Highlands, the
Sinclairs have not forgotten how in a green uniform they set out for the
carnage of Flodden. The suit of Lincoln green worn by the Knight of
Snowdon might be supposed to blame for the ill-luck of his chase; but as
matter of fact it is on record how King James got a suit of tartan made
for his Highland excursions.

An uglier and more perilous brood of spirits were the _Urisks_ who
haunted the misty mountains, with Ben Venue for their Brocken. Then
every lake had its malignant _kelpie_, that in the Highlands usually
takes the form of a water-bull, or horse, to be avoided like any loathly
dragon. I have mentioned such a monster on the Tay; and Loch Vennachar
has its own legend of the same kind, how on its banks a horse appeared
among a band of children, so pretty, and to all seeming so gentle, that
one of them ventured to mount it, then another and another, the creature
drawing out its back like a telescope till the whole laughing party were
astride, when it plunged into the water, carrying down all but the one
who, in such stories, is bound to escape for telling the tale.

I fancy that kelpies, banshees, brownies, and the like uncanny creatures
are not so well-known in Perthshire to-day as in the Western Highlands;
but here, too, old folks, rather than young ones, may go warily by
certain spots after dark. In the middle of last century a young lad whom
a German tourist took as guide from Callander was able to cheer the way
by eerie stories, one of a whisky smuggler accepting the invitation of
an unearthly spirit to dance with her for an hour or so, as it seemed,
then on reaching home he found his wife turned grey and his young
children grown up. Even yet, upon the Highland line, you may find the
Scottish character not all one grey shepherd’s plaid of stern theology
and hard-headed shrewdness.

Ben Ledi, “the sacred mount,” was an ancient scene of pagan rites such
as those which Roderick Dhu’s weird chaplain mingled with the ordinances
of Christianity. I shall never forget a day I spent at its foot, that
black Twelfth of August, through which a prolonged thunderstorm raged
over Scotland, striking down members of more than one shooting party, on
moors overcast by so awful darkness that Benjamin Franklin himself might
have heard the voice of offended mountain spirits. Has the reader ever
come in for a thunderstorm in the Highlands? Here is the late Mr. A. I.
Shand’s account of such an experience as often gives a certain zest of
danger to a sportsman’s beat.

     You hear the muttering growl of distant thunder; you see the
     storm-clouds gathering ominously over the lowering head of the Boar
     of Badenoch or the Sow of Athol: the storm bursts, the rain comes
     down in torrents, and, before you have been well soaked to the
     skin, each stream and tiny burn is in foaming spate. Many a torrent
     has to be breasted waist-deep, or maybe shoulder-high, before you
     get into dry garments at the shooting-lodge. Still more perilous it
     is if you are belated and without a knowledgeable guide in the mist
     that envelops you in its fleecy folds, either thickening insensibly
     into palpable darkness, or coming down in a rush with appalling
     suddenness. Coming with a rush, I say, and I speak by book. I
     remember one bright afternoon, below the Tap o’ Noth, on an
     Aberdeenshire moor, and when walking up to a point, we had little
     time to look up at the phenomenon of a sudden sun-eclipse. What we
     did see was a dense wall of vapour descending on the dogs, who were
     drawing on a point, some twenty yards ahead. It was a race against
     time. I got forward to score a right and left. One of the birds we
     did pick up, the other was lost beyond groping for in a darkness
     that might be felt. Of course experiences like these are
     comparatively rare and I do not pretend there is real danger on the
     moors; I only say there is an inspiring suspicion of it. There is
     undeniable romance, more enjoyable in the recollection than in the
     reality, when you feel you are abroad as to the points of the
     compass; when you are “turned round,” like the lost sportsman on
     the American prairies; when the whistle of the curlew, the crow of
     the grouse, the bellowing of the amorous harts in the rutting
     season, sound strangely uncanny out of the watery cloud. You can
     understand how the fervid imagination of the Celt, nursed on
     superstitions in a savage solitude, peopled the gloomy wilderness
     with brownies and spectres, and heard the wings and weird shrieks
     of witches in the air, when the skein of wild geese was flying
     inland.

When Ben Ledi’s top be not veiled in clouds, one has hence a noble
prospect over “the varied realms of fair Menteith,” another of those
domain provinces whose names in Scotland are older than its shires. Dr.
Graham defines this as the country between the Forth and the Teith,
rising in the lakes of the Trossachs region, to unite a little above
Stirling. Its old bounds appear to have been rather wider, taking in
Perthshire up to Strathearn, and Stirlingshire down to the basin of the
Clyde. It was, in fact, the upper part of Strathmore, enclosed between
the Grampians to the north and the southern Campsie Fells or Lennox
Hills, which, curving to the west beyond Stirling, continue the line of
the Ochils and the Sidlaws. Through this finely broken valley of
heights, meadows, and moors flow the streams of the Forth, that seem to
have drained away the importance of the old heart of Scotland to
Stirling and Edinburgh. In our day these abundant waters have been
artificially led off to Glasgow, where Bailie Nicol Jarvie little
thought how Loch Katrine would be laid on to make toddy in the
Saltmarket. For centuries this half-Lowland strath has been a channel
through which the civilisation of the South flowed up into the
Highlands, long stemmed at the mountain gates of the Trossachs country.

The farmers who settled here under the shadow of the Grampians had to
lay their account with being exposed to attacks from their mountain
neighbours. On the west of Perthshire the clans were shut in by bens and
glens as rugged as their own, defended by warriors of the same race;
what feuds raged on that side have at all events left slighter marks in
history. On the east, the walls of Perth and the castles of the Tay and
Earn, each with its pit and gallows, would avail to keep raiders in
check. On the north, it was a far cry to the rich plains of Moray, which
yet suffered sorely from invasion through Badenoch. But, southwards, a
day’s march brought Roderick Dhus and Rob Roys down to a tempting
prospect of “Lowland field and fold,” opened from their “savage hills.”

Time was when the Lowlanders could better guard their own against
frequent foes; but a day came in which they would be more at home in
markets than on battlefields, while the mountaineer still kept the use
and the habit of arms. That was the flourishing period of a man like Rob
Roy, who had a head for business as well as a hand for violence upon
occasion. Both he and his son, Robin Oig--probably confused with each
other--left a dubious name in Menteith, over which the father is said to
have pushed his _creaghs_ so far as to come to encounter with Macgregor
of Balhaldie, the Sheriffmuir laird who by some was recognised as chief
of the clan. For the like of them, such raids were honourable
occupation: a Highland gentleman, who would scorn to be the thief of a
single cow, might be proud of playing the robber on a drove of cattle,
yet also with a good conscience he could act as policeman, for a
consideration.

My sketch of Rob did not dwell on his dealings in the blackmail
business, because I cannot clearly make out at what period or periods of
his life it was that, when not harrying or spoiling the Grahams and
other ill-wishers, he turned to this comparatively honest means of
livelihood. The word _blackmail_, which has now taken on a darker shade,
then answered to an institution marking a certain advance in peace and
order. As Bailie Nicol Jarvie calculated, there were far more men in the
Highlands than could find honest work, even had they wanted it. The
loose fringe of unemployed, when no more glorious warfare was stirred,
sought an outlet for their energies in foraging upon their neighbours’
cattle; and such enterprises naturally found lines of least resistance
in richer Lowland straths like Menteith and the Lennox. While civil
authority was too weak to guard “herds and harvests reared in vain”
within swoop of the Highland line, an urgent demand called forth a
supply of redress by means of more calculating adventurers, who
undertook for a fixed payment to guarantee their peaceful clients
against serious loss. The line between caterans and blackmailers would
not be very clearly drawn. As the Jonathan Wilds and Vidocqs of a more
organised police played alternately the part of thief and thief-taker;
and as

              He who _silence_ hoots
    Is apt to make the hubbub he imputes--

so the professed guardians might also take a turn at robbery, if only by
way of impressing the need of insurance on should-be clients. Even the
commissioned Watch companies, who were the nucleus of our famous
Highland regiments, had the repute of being somewhat discriminating in
their protective service. But a “high-toned” blackmailer like Rob Roy
made it a point of honour to carry out his contract with subscribers, if
sometimes he turned aside to give non-subscribers a plain hint of what
they might gain by employing him. They had nothing but his honour to
depend upon, a contract of blackmail being strictly illegal--indeed, by
an act of the sixteenth century, declared a capital crime in the case of
both parties. The necessity of the time, however, let the law wink at
the effect of its own shortcomings; and prudent border landlords were
fain to insure movable property with men who made it their business and
pleasure to take hard knocks and rough excursions.

Later on, the authorities saw well to recognise what had become a
regular practice. Rob Roy’s nephew, Glengyle, who appears to have borne
a more respectable character than the uncle, entered into formal
contracts to recover stolen cattle, or make good the loss, at the rate
of five per cent on the rent of a holding; and in the end he was
employed and subsidised by Government as Captain of a Watch, the
makeshift police of the border line. More distinguished chiefs were not
ashamed to carry on the same business. Scott asserts that one of the
last to practise it was Macdonald of Barrisdale--a hero rubbed rather
threadbare by Mr. A. Lang--who adorned his claymore with a Virgilian
inscription--

    Hae tibi erunt artes--pacisque imponere morem,
    Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.

Rob Roy’s blackmailing had to be carried on more or less _sub rosa_, but
may have been quite as efficient for the protection of those who made
terms with him. Such a Highland Robin Hood would have no difficulty in
keeping about him a gang of followers like the Dougal cratur and his own
sturdy brood. His proceedings in a case of robbery within his
jurisdiction are described by Scott from the mouth of an old man in the
Lennox, who, scores of years afterwards, told him the tale of this
exciting experience. As a herd-lad of fifteen, he had been working with
his father on an estate from which some dozen head of cattle were
carried off one autumn

[Illustration: STIRLING CASTLE]

night. Rob Roy was called in, and came with seven or eight men armed as
instruments of his function. Having gravely inquired into the symptoms,
he soon diagnosed the cause, and set about the remedy with professional
promptness, only requiring that two herds should accompany him to
identify the cattle and to drive them back when recovered, a duty not to
be expected of gentlemen like those who figured in his tail. If Scott’s
stories be skimmed nowadays, his notes and introductions are apt to be
skipped; so I make bold to borrow freely from one who has so much to
lend.

     My informant and his father were dispatched on the expedition. They
     had no goodwill to the journey; nevertheless, provided with a
     little food, and with a dog to help them to manage the cattle, they
     set off with Macgregor. They travelled a long day’s journey in the
     direction of the mountain Benvoirlich, and slept for the night in a
     ruinous hut or bothy. The next morning they resumed their journey
     among the hills, Rob Roy directing their course by signs and marks
     on the heath, which my informant did not understand. About noon Rob
     commanded the armed party to halt and to lie crouched in the
     heather where it was thickest. “Do you and your son,” he said to
     the oldest Lowlander, “go boldly over the hill;--you will see
     beneath you, in a glen on the other side, your master’s cattle
     feeding, it may be, with others; gather your own together, taking
     care to disturb no one else, and drive them to this place. If
     anyone speak to, or threaten you, tell them that I am here, at the
     head of twenty men.” “But what if they abuse us, or kill us?” said
     the Lowland peasant, by no means delighted at finding the embassy
     imposed on him and his son. “If they do you any wrong,” said Rob,
     “I will never forgive them as long as I live.” The Lowlander was by
     no means content with this security, but did not think it safe to
     dispute Rob’s injunctions. He and his son climbed the hill,
     therefore, found a deep valley, where there grazed, as Rob had
     predicted, a large herd of cattle. They cautiously selected those
     which their master had lost, and took measures to drive them over
     the hill. As soon as they began to remove them, they were surprised
     by hearing cries and screams, and looking around in fear and
     trembling, they saw a woman, seeming to have started out of the
     earth, who _flyted_ at them, that is, scolded them, in Gaelic. When
     they contrived, however, in the best Gaelic they could muster, to
     deliver the message Rob Roy told them, she became silent, and
     disappeared without offering them any further annoyance. The chief
     heard their story on their return, and spoke with great complacency
     of the art which he possessed of putting such things to rights
     without any unpleasant bustle.

On the way back the herd-boy gained a recollection to last him for life,
and to suggest an incident in _Waverley_. At nightfall they bivouacked
on one of those bare moors that so much appalled Andrew Fairservice,
swept by a frosty wind which did not much trouble the hardy escort.

     The Highlanders, sheltered by their plaids, lay down in the heath
     comfortably enough, but the Lowlanders had no protection whatever.
     Rob Roy, observing this, directed one of his followers to afford
     the old man a portion of his plaid; “for the callant (boy), he
     may,” said the freebooter, “keep himself warm by walking about and
     watching the cattle.” My informant heard this sentence with no
     small distress; and as the frost wind grew more and more cutting,
     it seemed to freeze the very blood in his young veins. He had been
     exposed to weather all his life, he said, but never could forget
     the cold of that night; in so much that, in the bitterness of his
     heart, he cursed the bright moon for giving no heat with so much
     light. At length the sense of cold and weariness became so
     intolerable that he resolved to desert his watch to seek some
     repose and shelter. With that purpose he couched himself down
     behind one of the most bulky of the Highlanders, who acted as
     Lieutenant to the party. Not satisfied with having secured the
     shelter of the man’s large person, he coveted a share of his plaid,
     and by imperceptible degrees drew a corner of it round him. He was
     now comparatively in paradise, and slept sound till daybreak, when
     he awoke and was terribly afraid on observing that his nocturnal
     operations had altogether uncovered the dhuiniewassell’s neck and
     shoulders, which, lacking the plaid which should have protected
     them, were covered with _cranreuch_ (_i.e._ hoar frost). The lad
     rose in great dread of a beating, at least, when it should be found
     how luxuriously he had been accommodated at the expense of a
     principal person of the party. Good Mr. Lieutenant, however, got up
     and shook himself, rubbing off the hoar frost with his plaid, and
     muttering something of a _cauld neight_.

After Culloden, for a time, Menteith farmers might sit in a worse plight
than before. While the blackmail insurance was no longer to be depended
on, a banditti of broken rebels ensconced themselves above the lakeland
passes in fastnesses like the crags of Ben Venue, from which they
sallied forth on depredations now unchecked by any spirit of clan
loyalty, or neighbourly alliances. Their reign of robbery was overthrown
mainly through the exertions of Mr. Nicol Graham of Gartmore, whose
descendant in our time has not always been hot on the side of law and
order, while a forbear of theirs had shown the family spirit in refusing
to pay tribute to Rob Roy. This gentleman stirred up the Government to
military battues, which, guided by his experience and knowledge of the
country, had more success than Captain Thornton’s expedition, till the
robbers were rooted out of their lairs, scattered, banished, or
executed. Mr. Graham accumulated in his library a curious collection of
documents which he called “thief-papers,” illustrating the condition of
the border country in this troubled time. These papers are understood to
have been put into the hands of the romancer who turned them to such
famous use, hence, for instance, being taken Mr. Nicol Jarvie’s account
of the population and resources of the clans behind the Highland line;
and the “change-houses,” like that of Lucky Macalpine at Aberfoyle, are
here pointed out as stills of demoralisation.

Even after peace had been won for the villages and farms of the strath,
the law was long a little shy of trusting itself among the mountains.
Lockhart tells us that Scott’s first acquaintance with the braes of
Balquhidder was as a writer’s apprentice, when he accompanied a process
server who had to be escorted to the scene of his duty by a party of
soldiers, where now a policeman is a rare sight, and few crimes are
known to justice but drunkenness with its _sequelae_. Till a good deal
later there were parts on the Welsh borders in much the same state of
home rule. An old gentleman not long deceased told me how in the
Llanthony Valley, where the late Father Ignatius secluded himself,
disputes were settled by a sort of rough lynch law; and in the next
valley, within living memory, the only murder known had been that of a
bailiff who attempted to serve a writ. In some parts of the United
States, if all tales be true, life and property are less safe to-day
than they were a century ago in the Highlands--where officers of the law
were the last travellers to feel how they carried their lives in their
hands.

Scott compares the mountain clans to Afghan tribes, of whom he seems to
have been reading some account. A more familiar resemblance is with the
Red Indians of the backwoods, so well known to us through Catholic and
Puritan adventurers on their borders. There was the same fierce pride,
tempered by traits of generosity and scruples of honour; the same
hardihood, along with impatience of regular work; in some cases the same
veneer of Christian ritual; always the same restless turbulence of young
warriors eager to prove their manhood, held more or less in check by the
cooler heads of chiefs and counsellors. The moving narratives of the
frontier settlers of New York and Pennsylvania give us some idea of what
perils Menteith farmers had long to be familiar with, though indeed the
wild Highlandmen seldom showed such cruel temper as was religiously
cultivated in the Red Indian.

There appears this other difference in the Highlands and the backwoods
border feuds, that in the former, the jarring elements were brought into
much closer relations, so that love played its part as well as hatred.
The inveterate enemies of the wide New World would be separated from
each other by great stretches of forest and prairie, through which war
parties travelled for days and weeks, by stealthy paths and silent
waterways, to fall at advantage upon their unguarded foe. The pale-face
settlers could not feel themselves safe from vengeful redskins whose
camp-fires were a hundred miles away. It is said that the Indian summer,
that serene truce of nature, got its name through the red warriors
taking then a last chance of a raid in force upon the frontier, before
the snows held them back; yet even in the depth of winter bands of human
wolves might come prowling about the lonely blockhouses, to drag away
unwary or unlucky victims to a carnival of torture among their distant
wigwams. No band of cultivators would care to fix themselves within a
dozen miles of a tribe that was being slowly pushed out of its
hunting-grounds. But in Menteith and behind its mountain walls,
hereditary enemies were so closely packed together that it is hard to
understand how they got on without mutual extermination.

We hear, indeed, of occasional raids into this district from so far off
as Appin and Lochaber. But also the tale quoted above from Scott shows
how near to their prey were caterans, who, in the _Lady of the Lake’s_
time, could push their devastations as far as the Devon valley of the
Ochils. We have seen how the Macgregors and the Maclarens
ill-neighboured each other in Balquhidder, the latter clan gradually
ousted and taking refuge among the Stewarts, who filled the adjacent
wilds of Glenfinlas. To the south lay the Buchanans, the Colquhouns, and
the “wild Macfarlanes.” To the north were the Macnabs and advanced
parties of Murrays. The name of the Dreadnought Hotel at Callander tells
us how it was first built by the Laird of Macnab, whose concerns
straggled so far from their root on Loch Tay. And all those smaller
bodies were pushed upon from opposite sides by the Grahams and the
Campbells, powerful enemies whom the older inhabitants would sometimes
be able to play off against each other, while sometimes the medley of
quarrel seems to have tended to such an awkward shape as that
triangular duel in _Midshipman Easy_.

What the Campbells were in Argyll and Breadalbane, the Grahams were in
Menteith, intruders and agents of civilisation, who had to hang their
heads for long through a series of miscalculations and misfortunes. The
house of Menteith was an unlucky one ever since one of its sons betrayed
Wallace; nor did it prosper by the earldom of Strathearn, through which
it claimed to inherit the purest strain of royal blood. It sank into
misery and extinction, having passed from Menteiths and Stewarts to the
Grahams, on whom also a curse seemed to come through the murder of James
I. Other branches of this family gained futile distinction, in the
meteoric career of Montrose and the dark fame of Claverhouse, who to an
uncovenanting generation looks now not so black as he was once painted.
The mysterious murder of Lord Menteith’s heir by an intimate friend has
been told in _The Legend of Montrose_. In the next century the empty
title was claimed by one who literally died a beggar on the roadside.

The _jeune premier_, though not the hero, in the _Lady of the Lake_, was
a Graham who appears no further unfortunate than by having a double
allowance of powerful rivals, to hinder his course of true love for the
daughter of a once greater house that then lay under heavy clouds of
royal disfavour. This heroine, we remember, was Ellen Douglas,
conveniently exiled to a nook rather out of the way of Douglas power and
pride. Did it ever occur to a careless reader to ask why here she had
been brought up by an aunt, taking the place of a mother? Looking away
from the Grahams a moment, I should like to quote a piece of commentary
which my friend Mr. H. R. Allport believes himself to have made for the
first time, in a privately-printed volume.

     The heroines of the Waverley Novels, with a single prominent
     exception, are all of them motherless. They had mothers presumably,
     but their mothers filled untimely graves. The one prominent
     exception, of course, is Lucy Ashton, whose mother, Lady Ashton, is
     an important personage in the story. In _Waverley_ there are two
     heroines, Flora M’Ivor and Rose Bradwardine, who are both
     motherless. In _Guy Mannering_ there are also two heroines, Julia
     Mannering and Lucy Bertram, who are both motherless. In _Rob Roy_
     the heroine is Die Vernon, who is motherless. In _Old Mortality_
     the heroine is Edith Bellenden, who is motherless. In _The Heart of
     Midlothian_ the heroine is Jeanie Deans, who is motherless. In
     _Ivanhoe_ there are again two heroines, Rebecca and Rowena, who are
     both motherless. In _Kenilworth_ the heroine is Amy Robsart, who is
     motherless. In _The Pirate_ the heroines are Minna and Brenda
     Troil, who are motherless. In _The Fortunes of Nigel_ the heroine
     is Margaret Ramsay, who is motherless. In _Quentin Durward_ the
     heroine is Isabelle, Countess of Croye, who is motherless. In
     _Woodstock_ the heroine is Alice Lee, who is motherless. In _The
     Fair Maid of Perth_ the heroine is Catherine Glover, who is
     motherless. I need not go through the entire list. I believe that
     Lucy Ashton is the only exception of note.

     It would be interesting to know Scott’s reason for what can hardly
     be the result of accident. He may possibly have thought that a girl
     deprived of a mother’s care and control was likely to grow up a
     more unconventional, and therefore a more picturesque, personage
     than one more happily circumstanced. But this is a mere guess.

I can think of another guess. It is known how Scott was disappointed in
early love, and how he married a lady of French extraction, who makes a
very shadowy appearance in biographies of him. Now that his children’s
children are dead, there can be no harm in hinting that his wife was
accused of a weakness which went to diminish the respect if not the
affection of her family. An old friend of my father, still alive, heard
the matter put very plainly by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, who told him
how he himself had given up dining with the Scotts, because of the state
in which he frequently found the lady of the house. That bit of
hushed-up scandal would explain why the husband shrank from describing a
mother’s influence, as touching a sore point in his own family life. His
letters and diaries also dwell far more upon his children than upon
their mother.

From this whispered aside, let us turn back to the Grahams of Menteith.
At last the race began to flourish steadily in the new dukedom seated on
Loch Lomond, forgetting its feuds with Argyll and overcoming its
guerrilla neighbours, Macgregors and such-like. The Grahams may now look
on themselves as a great clan that has absorbed the sentiment of the
heather and the forest among which they made clearings. But they surely
came from the south, one sept of them seen by Scott at home in the
Debatable Land on the English border. The very name has a hint of darkly
dubious origin. One ancient warrior of the race is said to have broken
through the Roman wall, which, in memory of that exploit, became known
as Graham’s Dyke. But the name Graham’s Dyke turns up in other distant
parts of Britain--as, for instance, on Harrow Weald by the house of that
dealer in modern “magic and spells,” Mr. W. S. Gilbert, where it is
more plausibly interpreted as Grim’s Dyke, a name given in awe by rude
Saxons to what seemed the work of supernatural hands, such as near
Brighton, with a flourish of legend, has been bluntly christened the
Devil’s Dyke. The Grahams had best look out for another forefather.
_Quelle généalogie!_ as a Czar of Russia exclaimed in amazement, when he
had interpreted to him at the Mansion House that an unknown uniform
denoted _un frère aîné de la Trinité_.

We know how more than one “Dyke” was run across the country as a barrier
against naked hosts of the North. But this part of the Highland line had
a natural boundary in the Forth, of which the saying was that it
“bridled the wild Highlandman.” Swimming is an accomplishment given by
Scott to Malcolm Graeme and other of his heroes; but it was not common
among Highlanders of the last generation; and I am doubtful how far a
poet had authority for the statement--

        We _swam_ ower to fause English ground
    And danced ourselves dry to the pibroch’s sound.

The young Forth, known in its cradle as the _Avon Dhu_, soon gathers
strength as it drains the flats of Flanders Moss, which is taken to be
the dregs of a forest cut down by Roman soldiery; and its only safe
passage, even that impracticable in spate weather, was by the Fords of
Frew, where Rob Roy made his bold escape from Montrose’s horsemen. This
point proved so important as to be guarded by a fortalice, when there
was no wale of bridges on the Highland line. Scott confesses to an
anachronism in accommodating Aberfoyle with a bridge in Rob Roy’s day.
The first bridge was at Stirling, one of great antiquity, as shown by
the part it played in Wallace’s victory over the English knights
heedlessly divided on the crossing. A public-spirited tradesman of
Stirling, Robert Spittall, “Tailor to King James IV.” built a bridge
over the Teith at Doune, as an inscription upon it records. Once across
this, an invading army from the North had still to pass the Forth, its
bridge guarded by Stirling Castle.

The value of this double line of defence for the Lowlands was well shown
in 1715. When Mar lay so long idle at Perth with the largest Jacobite
army ever mustered could he have held it together, his inactivity was
caused not only by want of skill and decision, but by the fact of the
Forth fords being swollen by a wet winter, while Argyll had broken down
the Teith Bridge at Doune. Mar found it easier to ship a detachment
across the Firth of Forth than to get over the river near its source, an
enterprise in which sly Rob Roy seems to have been in vain expected to
guide him. When he did advance on Stirling it was by Allan Water, above
which he met Argyll on Sheriffmuir, for that strange battle in which
both sides were half-losers, half-winners.

Argyll’s moral victory appears to have been partly due to the Ochil
boglands being frozen so as to bear the heavy regular dragoons. A little
later and the frost would have been hard enough to make the unbridged
rivers passable, as the Highland army could retreat from Perth across
the ice-bound Tay. When Charles Edward advanced upon the Lowlands it was
in a dry September that let him easily over the Forth, to march on in
bravado within cannon-shot of Stirling Castle. To hinder his retreat he
found Stirling Bridge broken down, which was repaired in haste for
Cumberland’s march to the north.

Sheriffmuir, if we may trust historians like Blind Harry, was arena of
an older and a bloodier battle, when Wallace is said to have
exterminated an English army ten thousand strong; and scattered standing
stones here are taken by the country-folk as memorials of that victory.
The little town of Dunblane, with its restored Cathedral and its
monuments of nobility, was well known to armies marching north and south
on the road up Strathallan into Strathearn. Prince Charlie and Butcher
Cumberland were lodged here in turn; and local legend makes the latter
narrowly escape an end worse than that of Pyrrhus. A servant lass whose
heart had been won by the Prince’s graciousness when she cleaned his
boots, undertook to souse the Duke with boiling oil thrown from a window
as he rode out of Dunblane; but the scalding douche lighted on his
horse’s haunch, so that he got off with being flung into the mud.

Doune Castle guarded another road into the Highlands by way of
Callander. In the ’45, as Captain Waverley found, it was held by the
Jacobites to secure their passage of the Teith, and seems to have been
the only spot in which they heard the mouse squeak rather than the lark
sing. For a time it had for commander that “Black Knee” nephew of Rob
Roy, who earned golden opinions in the neighbourhood by the considerate
way in which he exercised his authority, not allowing dubious
auxiliaries like Donald Bean Lean to have their will of the poor
country-folk’s cattle and chickens. Even then it was in no case to
stand a hot siege; and Scott found it “a noble ruin, dear to my
recollections from associations which have been long and painfully
broken.” It once made a stronghold for royal blood, the Dukes of Albany
and the “bonnie Earls of Moray,” none of them so well remembered as the
boy who came to dream among their memorials, and to retrace on pony-back
the ways of audacious caterans and adventurous knights.

Well-known was all this country to young Walter Scott, when he spent
long holidays at Cambusmore and other friendly mansions hereabout, his
hosts as little thinking as himself how this idle callant was one day to
increase the value of property in Menteith. Indeed, it is extraordinary
how much at home he shows himself in most parts of Perthshire, so far
from his native eyry. Through that heart of Scotland as we wandered
together, the tales by which I have tried to cheer the reader’s way are
mostly to be found transfused into his romances or tacked on them as
illustrations in his lively introductions and notes. If I have forborne
to repeat hackneyed epithets about the scenery of this region, it is
because I take for granted that its features are familiar in Scott’s
verse, which, let certain critics shut their ears as they will, still
plays to general admiration the drum and trumpet part in the orchestra
of British poets, not without interludes of sweeter strain that will be
remembered long after more elaborate compositions have been whistled
down the winds of fame.

We all know where to look for descriptions of Perthshire scenery; and I
am the less bound to labour on word-painting, since in my case it may be
hoped, after the words of another poet, that “the pictures for the page
atone.” The artist here has done his part for both of us. The author
modestly presents himself, rather, as a gossiping companion to the
guide-book, which, in its up-to-date form, dwells more on details of
useful information, and has less room for giving strangers some notion
what life was in this region before its flush of romance had died away
like an Alpine glow.

But soon now we are out of Perthshire, crossing the Forth into Stirling,
whose citadel, “the bulwark of the North,” has been our beacon as we
gossiped our way down the green Menteith Mesopotamia. The “Sons of the
Rock” may receive me with a frown, declaring their county and not mine
to be the true heart of Scotland, which I admit to have been for a time
its central ganglion, whence the nerves of civilisation thrilled out
through Highlands and Lowlands. We can both agree that the fat Lothians
and the smoky Clyde were mere excrescences, which made a narrow escape
of becoming no better than English borderlands. Stirling cannot at least
complain that I failed to do it due honour in _Bonnie Scotland_. Now
once more let us mount its castled rock to look back on such a prospect
of Perthshire that nowhere could one have a nobler standpoint for
bidding--

    Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow!
    Farewell to the straths and green valleys below!
    Farewell to the forest and wild-hanging woods!
    Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods!


_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.

[Illustration: MAP ACCOMPANYING ‘THE HEART OF SCOTLAND,’ BY SUTTON
PALMER AND A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF. (A. AND C. BLACK, LONDON.)]

                   *       *       *       *       *

                   _OTHER BEAUTIFUL SCOTTISH BOOKS_


                            BONNIE SCOTLAND

                       PAINTED BY SUTTON PALMER

                   DESCRIBED BY A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF

           Containing 75 Full-Page Illustrations in Colour.

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                            PRESS OPINIONS

“The illustrations are a most attractive and valuable feature of the
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cases remarkably successful.... The letterpress deserves praise more
unqualified.... it is racy of the soil and not merely entertaining but
edifying to the indweller as well as the visitor of ‘Bonnie
Scotland.’”--_Scotsman._

“Is an admirable book, both in letterpress and illustration.... Artist
and author are alike to be congratulated on their excellent
conjunction.”--_Academy and Literature._

“A charming combination of the exquisite in art and the elegant in
literature.”--_Dumfries Standard._


                 THE HIGHLANDS AND ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND

                    PAINTED BY WILLIAM SMITH, JUNR.

                   DESCRIBED BY A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF

           Containing 40 Full-Page Illustrations in Colour.

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“It is amazingly cheap at ten shillings net, for it contains an album of
coloured pictures, by the aid of which we can realise the grandest
scenery of the outer isles. Mr. Smith has done his work admirably, and
has included the best-loved and loneliest places.”--_British Weekly._

“It is not merely as a Scot, but as one whose heart is in the Highlands,
that he [the author] describes the beauties of loch and glen, of
frowning hills and rugged coast. Nor is it merely with the outward and
physical aspect of the Western Highlands and Islands that he is
familiar. He has imbibed their very spirit. He knows their romantic
history and their still more romantic legends. He understands the
Highland folk and their ways. He is full of anecdotes and reminiscences
which illustrate their peculiarities and prejudices.... Altogether, his
book is charming.”--_Glasgow Herald._

                A. & C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.

                   *       *       *       *       *

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                               EDINBURGH

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                     DESCRIBED BY ROSALINE MASSON

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“A brilliant presentment of the salient features of the city’s
architecture and of the city’s history and romance.”--_Scotsman._

“The pictures are exceedingly beautiful, Mr. Fulleylove’s work being
reproduced by the three-colour process in an exceedingly fine way. The
letterpress, written by the daughter of Dr. David Masson, provides full
and interesting reading, in which everyone will delight.”--_Edinburgh
Evening News._


                              ABBOTSFORD

                    PAINTED BY WILLIAM SMITH, JUNR.

                      DESCRIBED BY W. S. CROCKETT

            Containing 20 Full-Page Illustrations in Colour

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“Whether judged by its charming coloured illustrations or by the
extraordinary interest of its letterpress, it is worthy of its theme,
and one of the most desirable mementoes we have of Sir Walter.... The
illustrations are excellent, and the colouring is bright and effective
without being tawdry.”--_British Weekly._

“Mr. W. S. Crockett tells the story of Abbotsford excellently well in a
series of very readable chapters.... Mr. Smith’s twenty clever
water-colours not only give many aspects of Scott’s home and its
immediate surroundings, but include also some very charming pictures of
Melrose Abbey and other famous spots in the district. Letterpress and
illustrations together make an extremely pleasant book.”--_Literary
World._


                      SCOTTISH LIFE AND CHARACTER

               PAINTED BY H. J. DOBSON, R.S.W.

                  DESCRIBED BY WM. SANDERSON

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striking.”--_St. Andrew._

                A. & C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.










End of Project Gutenberg's The Heart of Scotland, by A. R. Hope Moncrieff