SOS

HISTOEY OE ENQIASD.

CHAP.

XIII.

1689 .

This contemptuous loathing lasted till the year 1745, andwas then for a moment succeeded by intense fear and rage.England, thoroughly alarmed, put forth her whole strength.The Highlands were subjugated rapidly, completely, and forever. During a short time the English nation, still heated bythe recent conflict, breathed nothing but vengeance. Theslaughter on the field of battle and on the scaffold was notsufficient to slake the public thirst for blood. The sight of thetartan inflamed the populace of London with hatred, whichshowed itself by unmanly outrages to defenceless captives. Apolitical and social revolution took place through the wholeCeltic region. The power of the chiefs was destroyed: thepeople were disarmed: the use of the old national garb wasinterdicted: the old predatory habits were effectually broken;and scarcely had this change been accomplished when a strangereflux of public feeling began. Pity succeeded to aversion.The nation execrated the cruelties which had been committedon the Highlanders, and forgot that for those cruelties it wasitself answerable. Those very Londoners, who, while thememory of the march to Derby was still fresh, had thronged tohoot and pelt the rebel prisoners, now fastened on the princewho had put down the rebellion the nickname of Butcher.Those barbarous institutions and usages, which, while theywere in full foroe, no Saxon had thought worthy of seriousexamination, or had mentioned except with contempt, had nosooner ceased to exist than they became objects of curiosity, ofinterest, even of admiration. Scarcely had the chiefs beenturned into mere landlords, when it became the fashion todraw invidious comparisons between the rapacity of the land-lord and the indulgence of the chief. Men seemed to have

of Scotland are a sort of wretches that have no other consideration of ho-nour, friendship, obedience, or government, than as, by any alteration ofaffairs or revolution in the government, they can improve to themselves anopportunity of robbing or plundering their bordering neighbours. 1 ’