itions of his cruelty were still current, and are not yet wholly
extinct. In a vaulted chamber of the house in which he lived, on the
English road some three miles south of Dumfries, is still shown an iron
hook from which he is said to have hung his Covenanting prisoners; and
a hill in the neighbourhood is still pointed out as that down which he
used, for his amusement, to send the poor wretches rolling in a barrel
filled with knife-blades and iron spikes,--an ingenious form of torture,
commonly supposed to have been invented by the Carthaginians two
thousand years ago for the particular benefit of a Roman Consul. The
dark and mysterious legend of Sir Robert Redgauntlet, with which
Wandering Willie beguiled the way to Brokenburn-foot, was a popular
tradition of Sir Robert Grierson, or Lag (as, in the familiar style of
the day he was more commonly called) in Scott's own lifetime: the fatal
horseshoe, the birth-mark of all the Redgauntlet line, was believed to
be conspicuous on the foreheads of every true Grierson in moments of
anger; and it was a grandson of old Lag himself who sat to Scott for the
portrait of the elder Redgauntlet, the rugged and dangerous Herries of
Birrenswark. Within the last fifty years it was a custom of Halloween in
many of the houses in Dumfriesshire and Galloway to celebrate by a rude
theatrical performance the evil memory of the Laird of Lag.[17]

Born of a family which had held lands in Dumfriesshire since the
fifteenth century, and had figured at various times on the troubled
stage of Scottish history, Lag was undoubtedly a man of some parts and
capacity for public affairs, but coarse, cruel and brutal beyond even
the license of those times. The Covenanting historians charge him with
vices such as even they shrank from attributing to Claverhouse; and,
careful as it is always necessary to be in taking the evidence of such
witnesses, it is abundantly clear that even these ingenious romancists
would have been hard put to it to stain the memory of Lag. Later
historians have been sometimes less careful in distinguishing between
the two men. At least in one striking instance, the misdeeds of this
ruffian have been circumstantially charged to the account of his more
famous and important colleague.

It will be remembered that in the picture Macaulay has drawn of
Claverhouse the soldiers under his command, and by implication
Claverhouse himself, figure as relieving their sterner duties by a
curious f