ything, and those of their followers nothing.
The ideas of the morality of property are in most men the creatures of
their interests and sympathies. Of this there cannot be a doubt,
however: the chiefs would not have had the land at all, could the
clansmen have foreseen the present state of the Highlands--their
children in mournful groups going into exile--the faggot of legal
myrmidons in the thatch of the feal cabin--the hearths of their loves
and their lives the green sheep-walks of the stranger.

'Sad it is, that it is seemingly the will of our constituencies that
our laws shall prefer the few to the many. Most mournful will it be,
should the clansmen of the Highlands have been cleared away, ejected,
exiled, in deference to a political, a moral, a social, and an
economical mistake,--a suggestion not of philosophy, but of mammon,--a
system in which the demon of sordidness assumed the shape of the angel
of civilisation and of light.'

_September 4, 1844._

-----

{1} _The Rosses of Glencalvie_, by John Robertson, Esq. (article
in the Glasgow _National_, August 1844).--ED.

THE POET MONTGOMERY.

The reader will find in our columns a report, as ample as our limits
have allowed, of the public breakfast given in Edinburgh on Wednesday
last{1} to our distinguished countryman James Montgomery, and his
friend the missionary Latrobe. We have rarely shared in a more
agreeable entertainment, and have never listened to a more pleasing or
better-toned address than that in which the poet ran over some of the
more striking incidents of his early life. It was in itself a poem,
and a very fine one. An old and venerable man returning to his native
country after an absence of sixty years--after two whole generations
had passed away, and the grave had closed over almost all his
contemporaries--would be of itself a matter of poetical interest, even
were the aged visitor a person of but the ordinary cast of thought and
depth of feeling. How striking the contrast between the sunny,
dream-like recollections of childhood to such an individual, and the
surrounding realities--between the scenes and figures on this side the
wide gulf of sixty years, and the scenes and figures on that: yonder,
the fair locks of infancy, its bright, joyous eyes, and its speaking
smiles; here, the grey hairs and careworn wrinkles of rigid old age,
tottering painfully on the extreme verge of life! But if there
attaches thus a poetic interest to