Read Ebook: The Heart of Scotland by Moncrieff A R Hope Ascott Robert Hope Palmer Sutton Illustrator

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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.

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."

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.

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,-- 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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 stand highest among names that nowadays seem to fit tartans, then Campbells and Macdonalds are equal , 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 , Smith a good second , and Stewart third , while Robertson has fallen to 330. Campbell takes a rather higher place than in Edinburgh; Macdonalds and Macgregors , 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.

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.

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