al work, but
in a volume entitled _Tales of the Century; or Sketches of the Romance
of History between the years 1746 and 1846_, published at Edinburgh in
1847. But although this book might pass as a work of imagination, and
could, therefore, scarcely be impugned as a historical document, there
is every reason for supposing that, while not officially claiming to
reveal the existence of an heir of the Stuarts, it was deliberately
intended to convey information to that effect; and as such, an anonymous
writer (either Lockhart or Dennistoun) made short work of it in the
_Quarterly Review_ for June 1847, from which I have derived the greater
part of my knowledge of this curious "romance of history."

Nay, the _Tales of the Century_ were undoubtedly intended to insinuate a
further remarkable fact: not merely that there still existed heirs of
Stuarts in the direct male line, but that these heirs of the Stuarts were
no others but the joint authors of the book. The two brothers styling
themselves on the title-page John Sobieski Stuart and Charles Edward
Stuart, but whose legal names were respectively John Hay Allan and
Charles Stuart Allan, had been known for some years in the Highlands as
persons enveloped in a degree of romantic mystery, and claiming to be
something much more illustrious than what they were officially supposed
to be, the grandsons of an admiral in the service of George III.
According to the information collected by Baron von Reumont, the joint
authors of the _Tales of the Century_ had made themselves conspicuous by
their affectation of the Stuart tartan, to which, as Hay Allans, they
could have no right; by a certain Stuart make-up (by the help of a
Charles I. wig which was once found and mistaken for a bird's-nest by an
irreverent Highlander) on the part of the elder, and by a habit of
bowing to his brother whenever the King's health was drunk on the part
of the younger. Moreover the family circumstances of these gentlemen's
father coincided exactly with those of the hero of this book, of the
supposed son of Charles Edward Stuart and Louise of Stolberg. Their
father, Thomas Hay Allan, once a lieutenant in the navy, was known
before the law as the younger son of a certain Admiral Carter Allan, who
laid claims to the earldom of Errol; and the Jolair Dhearg (for such was
the Keltic appellation of the hero of the _Tales of the Century_) was
the reputed son of a certain Admiral O'Haloran, who laid claim to the
Ea