hey were able to lead armies composed of Highland clans. Had
Montrose been chief of the Camerons, the Macdonalds would never have
submitted to his authority. Had Dundee been chief of Clanronald, he
would never have been obeyed by Glengarry. Haughty and punctilious men,
who scarcely acknowledged the king to be their superior, would not have
endured the superiority of a neighbour, an equal, a competitor. They
could far more easily bear the preeminence of a distinguished stranger,
yet even to such a stranger they would allow only a very limited and a
very precarious authority. To bring a chief before a court martial, to
shoot him, to cashier him, to degrade him, to reprimand him publicly,
was impossible. Macdonald of Keppoch or Maclean of Duart would have
struck dead any officer who had demanded his sword, and told him to
consider himself as under arrest; and hundreds of claymores would
instantly have been drawn to protect the murderer. All that was left to
the commander under whom these potentates condescended to serve was to
argue with them, to supplicate them, to flatter them, to bribe them;
and it was only during a short time that any human skill could preserve
harmony by these means. For every chief thought himself entitled to
peculiar observance; and it was therefore impossible to pay marked
court to any one without disobliging the rest. The general found himself
merely the president of a congress of petty kings. He was perpetually
called upon to hear and to compose disputes about pedigrees, about
precedence, about the division of spoil. His decision, be it what it
might, must offend somebody. At any moment he might hear that his right
wing had fired on his centre in pursuance of some quarrel two hundred
years old, or that a whole battalion had marched back to its native
glen, because another battalion had been put in the post of honour. A
Highland bard might easily have found in the history of the year 1689
subjects very similar to those with which the war of Troy furnished the
great poets of antiquity. One day Achilles is sullen, keeps his tent,
and announces his intention to depart with all his men. The next day
Ajax is storming about the camp, and threatening to cut the throat of
Ulysses.

Hence it was that, though the Highlanders achieved some great exploits
in the civil wars of the seventeenth century, those exploits left no
trace which could be discerned after the lapse of a few weeks. Victories
of strange and