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HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

CHAP.

XIII.

Warbreaksout in theHigh-lands.

Slate ofthe High-lands.

position to William.’ 1 ' The great body of Jacobites meanwhilestood aloof, saw with delight the enemies of the House of Stuartdivided against one another, and indulged the hope that theconfusion w r ould end in the restoration of the banished king.* **

While Montgomery was labouring to form out of variousmaterials a party which might, when the Convention shouldreassemble, be powerful enough to dictate to the throne, anenemy still more formidable than Montgomery had set up thestandard of civil war in a region about which the politicians ofWestminster, and indeed most of the politicians of Edinburgh,knew no more than about Abyssinia or Japan.

It is not easy for a modern Englishman, who can pass in aday from his club in St. James’s Street to his shooting boxamong the Grampians, and who finds in his shooting box allthe comforts and luxuries of his club, to believe.that, in thetime of his greatgrandfathers, St. James’s Street had as littleconnection with the Grampians as with the Andes. Yet so itwas. In the south of our island scarcely any thing was knownabout the Celtic part of Scotland; and what was known excitedno feeling but contempt and loathing. The crags and the glens,the woods and the waters, were indeed the same that nowswarm every autumn with admiring gazers and sketchers. TheTrosachswound as nowbetween gigantic walls of rock tapestriedwithbroom and wild roses: Eoyers came headlongdowm throughthe birchwood with the same leap and the same roar with ■whichhe still rushes to Loch Ness; and, in defiance of the sun ofJune, the snowy scalp of Ben Cruachan rose, as it still rises,over the willowy islets of Loch Awe. Yet none of these sightshad power, till a recent period, to attract a single poet orpainter from more opulent and more tranquil regions. Indeed,

* Dalrymple says, in a letter of the 5th of June 41 All the mallgnants,for fear, are come into the Club; and they all vote alike.”

** Balcarras.