and defeat, instead of capacity, prudence, discipline, and victory, for their companions. The two Grahams, Montrose, and Dundee, possessed talents for war; but those talents were displayed on a small scale: and in what they did, their countrymen have little cause to glory. The man who assassinated Dorislaus, who offered to assassinate Argyle, and who in the name of a King styling himself Defender of the Christian Faith, was guilty of atrocities at which humanity shudders; and he who hunted down his innocent and defenceless fellow-creatures, as if they had been wild beasts, deserve to go down together to the execration of posterity. And yet the Scots, as a nation, possessed, and still possess, great physical as well as moral capabilities for war. By the constitution of their bodies, patient of toil and watching, of hunger and thirst, of heat and cold; by that of their minds, at once ardent and persevering, bold and wary, they possessed not a few of the more admirable qualities, which Sallust has ascribed to Catiline. With a Catiline or a Cæsar to lead them, such mén might have conquered the world. With the leaders whom they had, the brainless and besotted barbarians of barons,-or the as brainless and besotted knight-errant kings-they fled before a boy or a woman. Possessing a great aptitude for the endurance of privation and suffering, admirable habits of order, industry and perseverance; it might be expected that the Scottish nation would have made greater and more rapid strides towards civilization, towards wealth, knowledge, and refinement, than it has done. Perhaps we may be able to point out one or two of the causes of this retardation. The curse-the heavy curse of Scotland-has been its Aristocracy. Men talk and write much of the grievances, which England suffers from hers; but those grievances are as mere dust in the balance when compared to those inflicted upon Scotland by her own dear porcelain clay. Compared to those of Scotland, the nobles of England were meek, humble, humane, enlightened, wise, temperate, slow to anger, affable, generous, nay just. The nobles of England have always been kept in some check. The Scottish nobles from the time their country was a country, had been so many uncontrolled and irresponsible despots. In England the case was different. On two occasions, at two distinct and distant periods of her history, kings came in by conquest, or if the phrase be preferred, they acquired their kingdom by the event of a successful battle in which Englishmen fought on both sides. The power of William the I., vulgarly and far from accurately called the Conqueror, and that of his more im mediate successors, was sufficient to keep the barons in complete check, even without calling in the aid of the tiers état, or commons. The balance, however, was beginning to incline more in favour of the nobles, when the accession of Henry VII. restored the crown to its former power. In Scotland, on the contrary, even successful warlike operations, as in the case of Robert Bruce, do not appear to have given the king much power over his barons; as is proved by that famous answer of the barons to Robert when he was proceeding to question the titles of some of them to their possessions. "By these" they exclaimed, drawing their swords, "we have won, and with these we will preserve them." There is little doubt that the poverty and barbarism of the country, while it prevented the lower orders from bettering their own condition, also prevented the king from making use of their assistance to keep his haughty, insolent, and tyrannical nobles in check. The nobles seem to have been fully aware of this. The following is one of many examples of their efforts to prevent their country from partaking of the advantages of commerce. It may be proper to remark that by the states of the realm, are designated the nobility and the higher clergy, there being in Scotland, then literally, and long after virtually, no tiers état or commons. Among these strangers, there arrived in a great body, the richest of the Lombard merchants, and offered to build royal settlements in various parts of the country, especially upon the mount above Queensbury, and on an island near Cramond, provided the king would grant them certain spiritual immunities. Unfortunately, the proposal of these rich industrious men, for what cause we cannot tell, proved displeasing to the States of the Realm, and was dismissed; but from an expression of the historian, we may gather that the king himself, (Alexander III.) was desirous to encourage them, and that favourable terms for a settlement would have been granted, unless death had stepped in, and put an end to the negotiation.'-Tytler, Vol. i.—p. 61. We shall further illustrate this subject by an extract, from Mr. Tytler's Historical Enquiry into the ancient State and Manners of Scotland,' which fills the latter half of the second volume of his history, and as a composition is highly honourable to his judgment and research. The motives for the care and protection extended to such infant villages are easily discoverable, if we recollect the description already given of the condition of a great portion of the lower orders of the people, out of which class the manufacturers and traders arose. They were slaves; their children, their wealth, and the profits of their industry, exclusively belonged to their lords; so that a settlement of wealthy manufacturers, or a community of successful and enterprising artizans, under the walls of a royal castle, or rich abbey, or within the territory of a feudal noble, was just so much money added to the revenue of the king, the baron, or the abbot. As wealth increased with security and industry, the inhabitants of these communities began gradually to purchase their liberty from their lords, and to form themselves into insulated associations; which, from their opulence, were able to bribe the sovereign to grant them peculiar privileges. Into these bodies, freedom and the feeling of property soon infused an additional spirit of enterprise, and transformed their members from petty artizans into opulent merchants, whose transactions embraced, as we have seen, a respectable commercial intercourse with foreign countries. 'It was soon discovered by the monarchs of Scotland, that these opulent communities of merchants, formed so many different points, from which civilization and improvement gradually extended through the country; and the consequence of this discovery was, their transformation, by the favour of the sovereign, into chartered corporations of merchants, endowed with particular privileges, and living under the especial protection and superintendence of the king. 6 In this manner at a very early period royal burghs arose in Scotland. The various steps of this progress were, in all probability, nearly the same as those which are pretty clearly seen in the diplomatic collections and ancient muniments of different European kingdoms; the hamlet growing into the village, the village into the petty town; this last into the privileged and opulent borough; and it is evident that our kings soon found that the rise of these mercantile communities, which looked up to the crown for protection, and repaid it by their wealth and their loyalty, formed a useful check upon the arrogance and independence of the greater nobles. It is probably on this account, that the rise of the boroughs was viewed with great jealousy in France; and that their introduction into that kingdom is described, by a contemporary author, as an execrable invention, by which slaves were encouraged to become free; and to forget their allegiance to their master!"-Vol. ii. pp. 295-6. 66 The remark of Gibbon with respect to the Venetian Aristocracy," that it reduced the doge to a pageant, and the people to a cypher," may be applied with additional force to the Scottish. But the Venetian differed from the Scottish Oligarchy as much as a more civilized might be expected to differ from a less civilized, or one less removed from the absolute brute state. The Venetian oligarchy reduced their doge to a pageant, and the people to a cypher, and slaughtered the one and the other when it seemed good to their high and mighty wisdom; but they did so at least by a form of law. The Scottish Oligarchy not only reduced the king to a pageant and the people to a cypher; but they poniarded, poisoned, and starved to death their kings, and ground down their fellow-subjects to the very dust, without bringing forward even the shadow of a law. But in some things they shewed high respect and obeisance unto their rupavvol. With a truly characteristic morality they prostituted to his highness their wives and daughters -counting it no disgrace, but rather an honour for a female even of high birth to act as concubine to our lord the king. Which lofty and aristocratic morality they instilled into the minds of their vassals, who were taught that it was a dignity highly to be courted for any female to become in any way the paramour of his honour the Laird. They were unable to maintain the wise union of the Venetian tyrants. Although they robbed and plundered alike with success their king, his enemies, and their fellow subjects, they quarrelled about the division of the spoil, like bloody and ferocious beasts of prey, or equally bloody and ferocious barbarians. We can readily furnish examples of some of these worse than brutal quarrels-worse than brutal, for starving to death was a refinement above the brutes. That we may not be suspected of any unfair dealing towards those worthy gentlemen, we shall give them in the very words of a writer, who has done -probably without intending it, but by the mere splendor which his genius has cast upon things in themselves worse than worthless, and which, but for that Promethean ray, would have slept for ever in oblivion's shadow-more than any writer of modern times, to make chivalry and its heroes a subject of unmeaning admiration to the weak and ignorant. 'In the same spring Sir Alexander Ramsay, of Dalwolsey, added to his long list of services, the important acquisition of the castle of Roxburgh; which, according to the desperate fashion of the times, he took by escalade. 'Unhappily, the mode which the young and inexperienced king took to reward this gallant action, proved fatal to the brave knight by whom it was achieved. David conferred on Ramsay the sheriffdom of Roxburgh, as a fitting distinction to one who had taken the principal fortress of the country. The knight of Liddesdale, who had large possessions in Roxburghshire, and pretensions, by his services, to the sheriffdom, was deeply offended by the preference given to Ramsay. From being Sir Alexander's friend and companion in arms, he became his mortal enemy, and nothing less than his death would appease the rancour of his hatred. He came upon Sir Alexander Ramsay, accompanied with an armed force, while he was exercising justice at Hawick, dispersed his few attendants, wounded him while on the bench of justice, threw him on a horse, and through many a wild bog and mountain path, carried him to his solitary and desolate castle of the Hermitage, where he cast him into the dungeon of that lonely and VOL. XIII.-Westminster Review. X darksome fortress. The noble captive was left with his rankling wounds to struggle with thirst and hunger, supporting for some time a miserable existence, by means of grain which fell from a granary above, until death relieved him from suffering. The most disgraceful part of this hideous story remains to be told. David, whose favour, imprudently evinced, had caused the murder of the noble Ramsay, saw himself obliged, by the weakness of his government and the pressure of the disorderly times, not only to pardon the inhuman assassin, but to grace him with the keeping of the castle of Roxburgh, which the valour of his murdered victim had won from the enemy, and the sheriffdom of the county, which was rendered vacant by his murder.'-Sir Walter Scott, Vol. i. pp. 192-3. Sir Walter Scott, after bearing this honourable testimony as to the real and true state of, as he justly calls them, those wretched times, expresses an equally honourable disapprobation of them. "It is scarce possible," he adds, "to give a more deplorable instance of those wretched times, in which the great stood above all law, human and divine, and indulged their furious passions, not only with impunity, but with an enlarged scope to their ambition. Neither was the act of cruelty attended with any blot upon his fame, since the knight of Liddesdale, who, before Ramsay's murder, had been distinguished by the splendid title of the Flower of Chivalry, continued to retain it after that atrocious transaction.' It may not be irrelevant here to observe, that it is chiefly owing to his undiscriminating admirers and weak and unskilful imitators, that Sir Walter Scott has been made accessory to the introduction of high-flown and erroneous ideas respecting the ages of chivalry. Any one who examines attentively his works of imagination connected with those ages, will find that the characters there introduced are invariably monsters of atrocity according to our more civilized ideas of humanity, with only the exception of the hero and heroine, who, in order to make the work at all interesting to a civilized community, are generally represented as amiable young persons, according to the existing ideas upon that subject. Sir Walter Scott was too well acquainted both with human nature generally, and with the times of which he was writing in particular, to represent his characters otherwise than he has done. Other writers of both sexes, equally ignorant of human nature and human history, have thought fit, in their knowledge and wisdom, to pursue a different course. It was not to be expected that such men would make a very obstinate, or even an honest stand at all, in defence of the liberties of their country, against a foreign invader. It mattered little to them, provided they could go on in their old way, who |