ould end in the restoration of the banished king, [317]

While Montgomery was labouring to form out of various materials a party
which might, when the Convention should reassemble, be powerful enough
to dictate to the throne, an enemy still more formidable than Montgomery
had set up the standard of civil war in a region about which the
politicians of Westminster, 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 a day from his
club in St. James's Street to his shooting box among the Grampians, and
who finds in his shooting box all the comforts and luxuries of his
club, to believe that, in the time of his greatgrandfathers, St. James's
Street had as little connection with the Grampians as with the Andes.
Yet so it was. In the south of our island scarcely any thing was known
about the Celtic part of Scotland; and what was known excited no feeling
but contempt and loathing. The crags and the glens, the woods and the
waters, were indeed the same that now swarm every autumn with admiring
gazers and stretchers. The Trosachs wound as now between gigantic walls
of rock tapestried with broom and wild roses: Foyers came headlong down
through the birchwood with the same leap and the same roar with which
he still rushes to Loch Ness; and, in defiance of the sun of June, the
snowy scalp of Ben Cruachan rose, as it still rises, over the willowy
islets of Loch Awe. Yet none of these sights had power, till a recent
period, to attract a single poet or painter from more opulent and more
tranquil regions. Indeed, law and police, trade and industry, have done
far more than people of romantic dispositions will readily admit,
to develope in our minds a sense of the wilder beauties of nature.
A traveller must be freed from all apprehension of being murdered or
starved before he can be charmed by the bold outlines and rich tints
of the hills. He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the
abruptness of a precipice from which he is in imminent danger of falling
two thousand feet perpendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent which
suddenly whirls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life; by
the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders
have just stripped and mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose
next meal may probably be on his own eyes. About the year 1730, Captain
Burt, one of the first Engli