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HISTORY OF ENGYAiro.

CnAP.

XIII.

11189 .

the right. Their practice, their calling, had been to disobeyand to defy him. Some of them had actually been proscribedby sound of horn for the crime of withstanding his lawful com-mands , and would have tom to pieces without scruple any ofhis officers who had dared to venture beyond the passes for thepurpose of executing his warrant. The English Whigs w’ereaccused by their opponents of holding doctrines dangerouslylax touching the obedience due to the chief magistrate. Yetno respectable English Whig ever defended rebellion, except asa rare and extreme remedy for rare and extreme evils. Butamong those Celtic chiefs whose loyalty has been the theme ofso much warm eulogy were some whose whole existence fromboyhood upwards had been one long rebellion. Such men,it is evident, were not likely to see the Revolution in the lightin which it appeared to an Oxonian nonjuror. On the otherhand they were not, like the aboriginal Irish, urged to takearms by impatience of Saxon domination. To such dominationthe Scottish Celt had never been subjected. He occupied hisown wild and sterile region, and followed his own nationalusages. In his dealings with the Saxons, he was rather theoppressor than the oppressed. He exacted black mail fromthem: he drove away their flocks and herds; and they seldomdared to pursue him to his native wilderness. They had neverportioned out among themselves his dreary region of moor andshingle. He had never seen the tower of his hereditarychieftains occupied by an usurper who could not speak Gaelic,and who looked on all who spoke it as brutes and slaves; norhad his national and religious feelings ever been outraged bythe power and splendour of a church which he regarded as atonce foreign and heretical.

The real explanation of the readiness with which a largepart of the population of the Highlands, twice in the seven-teenth century, drew the sword for the Stuarts is to be found in