4

HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

CHAP.

XIII.

liiSS.

neighbour, an equal, a competitor. They could far more easilybear the preeminence of a distinguished stranger. Yet even tosuch a stranger they would allow only a very limited and a veryprecarious authority. To bring a chief before a court martial,to shoot him, to cashier him, to degrade him, to reprimandhim publicly, was impossible. Macdonald of Keppoch or Mac-lean of Duart would have struck dead any officer who haddemanded his sword, and told him to consider himself as underarrest; and hundreds of claymores ivould instantly have beendrawn to protect the murderer. All that was left to the com-mander under whom these potentates condescended to servewas to argue with them, to supplicate them, to flatter them, tobribe them; and it was only during a short time that any humanskill could preserve harmony by these means. For every chiefthought himself entitled to peculiar observance; and it wastherefore impossible to pay marked court to any one withoutdisobliging the rest. The general found himself merely thepresident of a congress of petty kings. He was perpetuallycalled upon to hear and to compose disputes about pedigrees,about precedence, about the division of spoil. Ilis decision,be it what it might, must offend somebody. At any moment hemight hear that his right wing had fired on his centre in pur-suance of some quarrel two hundred years old, or that a wholebattalion had marched back to its native glen, because anotherbattalion had been put in the post of honour. A Highland bardmight easily have found in the history of the year 1GS9 subjectsvery similar to those with which the war of Troy furnished thegreat poets of antiquity. One day Achilles is sullen, keepshis tent, and announces his intention to depart with all his men.The next day Ajax is storming about the camp, and threateningto cut the throat of Ulysses.

Hence it was that, though the Highlanders achieved somegreat exploits in the civil wars of the seventeenth century, those