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

“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 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.

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

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 interfecit,” 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

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—

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

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:—

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—