such rapidity, that the pike was very soon
thrown aside in his army, and exchanged for fire-arms. A circumstance
which necessarily accompanied this change, as well as the establishment
of standing armies, whereby war became a trade, was the introduction of
a laborious and complicated system of discipline, combining a variety
of words of command with corresponding operations and manoeuvres, the
neglect of any one of which was sure to throw the whole into confusion.
War therefore, as practised among most nations of Europe, had assumed
much more than formerly the character of a profession or mystery, to
which previous practice and experience were indispensable requisites.
Such was the natural consequence of standing armies, which had almost
everywhere, and particularly in the long German wars, superseded what
may be called the natural discipline of the feudal militia.

The Scottish Lowland militia, therefore, laboured under a double
disadvantage when opposed to Highlanders. They were divested of the
spear, a weapon which, in the hands of their ancestors, had so often
repelled the impetuous assaults of the mountaineer; and they were
subjected to a new and complicated species of discipline, well adapted,
perhaps, to the use of regular troops, who could be rendered completely
masters of it, but tending only to confuse the ranks of citizen
soldiers, by whom it was rarely practised, and imperfectly understood.
So much has been done in our own time in bringing back tactics to their
first principles, and in getting rid of the pedantry of war, that it
is easy for us to estimate the disadvantages under which a half-trained
militia laboured, who were taught to consider success as depending upon
their exercising with precision a system of tactics, which they probably
only so far comprehended as to find out when they were wrong, but
without the power of getting right again. Neither can it be denied,
that, in the material points of military habits and warlike spirit,
the Lowlanders of the seventeenth century had sunk far beneath their
Highland countrymen.

From the earliest period down to the union of the crowns, the whole
kingdom of Scotland, Lowlands as well as Highlands, had been the
constant scene of war, foreign and domestic; and there was probably
scarce one of its hardy inhabitants, between the age of sixteen and
sixty, who was not as willing in point of fact as he was literally bound
in law, to assume arms at the first call o