6

PREFATORY LETTER.

offence of omission, in leaving out inferences which he himself would have drawn from the same facts, and which he seems to think are too obvious not to be discerned, and too stubborn to be refuted. It is, on the contrary, my opinion, and has been ever since I came to years of understanding, that in many of these points his conclusions are liable to direct challenge, and in others to much modification. I must not, therefore, leave it to be supposed that I have deserted my banners, because I have not at this time and place thought it necessary to unfurl them.

But I could not introduce political discussions into any elementary work designed to inspire a love of study. In more mature years, the juvenile reader will have an opportunity of forming his own judgment upon the points of controversy which have disturbed our history; and I think he will probably find that the spirit of party faction, far from making demi-gods of the one side, and fiends or fools of the other, is itself the blot and stain of our annals-has produced under one shape or other its most tragic events-has blighted the characters of its best and wisest statesmen, and perhaps reserves for Britain at a future day, a repetition of the evils with which it has already afflicted our fathers.

That you, my dear child, and your contemporaries, may escape so great an infliction, is the sincere hope and prayer of your affectionate GRANDFATHER.

ABBOTSFORD, 1st December, 1829.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER.

Third Series.

CHAPTER I.

Mutual Dislike between the Scots and English-Divided feeling in England in regard to the Union— Universal Discontent with the Union in ScotlandDisposition among all parties to restore the Stewart Family-Education and Character of the Chevalier de St. George-Promise of Louis XIV. to support the claims of the Family of James II.-Intrigues of the Jacobite Emissaries perplexing to the French King, who resolves to ascertain the temper of the country by an Agent of his own.

We are now, my dear child, approaching a period more resembling our own than those through which I have hitherto conducted you. In England, and in the Lowlands of Scotland, men used the same language, possessed in a considerable degree the same habits of society, and lived under the same forms of government, which have existed in Britain down to the present day. The Highlanders, indeed, retained their ancient manners; and although, from the establishment of forts and garrisons in their country, the laws had much more power over them than formerly, so that they could no longer break out into the same excesses, they still remained, in their dress, customs, manners, and language, much more like the original Scots in the reign of Malcolm Canmore, than the Lowlanders of the same period resembled their ancestors of the seventeenth century.

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MUTUAL DISLIKE BETWEEN

But though the English and Lowland Scots exhibited little distinction in their manners and habits, excepting that those of the latter people indicated less wealth or refinement of luxury, there was no sympathy of feeling between them, and the recent measure of the Union had only an effect resembling that of putting two quarrelsome dogs in the same couples, or two sullen horses in the same yoke. Habit may in course of time teach them to accommodate themselves to each other; but the first consequence of the compulsory tie which unites them is the feeling of aggravated hostility.

The predominant prejudices of the English represented the Scots, in the language of the celebrated Dean Swift, as a poor, ferocious, and haughty people, detesting their English neighbours, and looking upon them as a species of Egyptians, whom it was not only lawful but commendable to plunder, whether by open robbery or secret address. The poverty of the North Britons, and the humble and patient labour by which individuals were frequently observed to emerge from it, made them the objects of contempt to the English; while, on the other hand, the irascible and turbulent spirit of the nation, and an habitual use of arms, exposed them to aversion and hatred. This peculiar characteristic was, at the time of the Union, very general in Scotland. The Highlanders, you must remember, always carried weapons, and if thought of at all by their southern neighbours, they must have been considered as absolute and irreclaimable savages. The Lowlanders were also used to arms at this period, for almost the whole Scottish nation had been trained under the Act of Security; the population was distributed into regiments, and kept ready for action; and, in the gloomy and irritated state of mind in which the Scots had been placed by the management of the Union treaty, they spoke of nothing more loudly and willingly than of a war with England. The English had their especial reasons for disliking the Union. They did not, in general, feel flattered by the intimate confederacy and identification of their own rich country and civilized in

THE SCOTS AND ENGLISH.

9

habitants with the boreal region of the North, and its rude and savage tribes. They were afraid that the craft, and patient endurance of labour of the Scots, would give them more than their share of the colonial trade which they had hitherto monopolized to themselves.

Yet, though such was the opinion held by the English in general, the more enlightened part of the nation, remembering the bloody wars which had so long desolated Britain in its divided state, dated from the Union an era of peace and happiness to both countries; and, looking far into futurity, foresaw a time when the national prejudices, which for the present ran so high, would die out, or be eradicated, like the weeds which deface the labours of the agriculturist, and give place to plenty and to peace. It was owing to the prevalence of such feelings, that the Duke of Queensbury, the principal negotiator of the treaty of Union, when he left Scotland for London after the measure was perfected, was received with the greatest distinction in the English towns through which he passed. And when he approached the neighbourhood of London, many of the members of the two Houses came to meet and congratulate a statesman, who, but for the guards that surrounded him, would, during the progress of the treaty, have been destroyed by his countrymen in the streets of Edinburgh!

In England, therefore, the Union had its friends and partisans. In Scotland it was regarded with an almost universal feeling of discontent and dishonour. The Jacobite party, who had entertained great hopes of eluding the act for settling the kingdom upon the family of Hanover, beheld them entirely blighted; the Whigs, or Presbyterians, found themselves forming part of a nation in which Prelacy was an institution of the state; the Country party, who had nourished a vain but honourable idea of maintaining the independence of Scotland, now saw it, with all its symbols of ancient sovereignty, sunk and merged under the government of England. All the different professions and classes of men saw each some

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UNIVERSAL DISCONTENT WITH THE

thing in the obnoxious treaty, which affected their own. interest.

The nobles of an ancient and proud land, which they were wont to manage at their pleasure, were now stripped of their legislative privilege, unless in as far as exercised, like the rights of a petty corporation, by a handful of delegates; the smaller barons and gentry shared their humiliation, their little band of representatives being too few, and their voices too feeble, to produce any weight in the British House of Commons, to which a small portion was admitted.

The clergy's apprehension for their own system of church discipline was sensitively awakened, and their frequent warnings from the pulpit kept the terror of innovation before their congregations.

The Scottish lawyers had equal reason for alarm. They witnessed what they considered as the degradation of their profession, and of the laws, to the exposition of which they had been bred up. They saw their supreme civil court, which had spurned at the idea of having their decrees reviewed even in the Parliament, now subjected to appeal to the British House of Peers; a body who could be expected to know little of law at all, and in which the Chancellor, who presided, was trained in the jurisprudence of another country. Besides, when the sceptre departed from Scotland, and the lawgiver no longer sat at her feet, it was likely that her municipal regulations should be gradually assimilated to those of England, and that her lawyers should by degrees be laid aside and rendered useless, by the introduction of the institutions of a foreign country which were strange to their studies.

The merchants and trading portion of Scotland also found grievances in the Union peculiar to themselves. The privileges which admitted the Scots into the colonial trade of England, only represented the apples of Tantalus, so long as local prejudices, want of stock, and all the difficulties incident to forcing capital into a new channel, or line of business, obstructed their benefiting by them.