on that their importance deserves;
and that your honour, your essential interest, the preservation of the
royal cause, and the bleeding state of your suffering friends, require
of you. Let me beg of your Royal Highness, in the most humble and
earnest manner, to reflect that your reputation must suffer in the
opinion of all mankind, if there should be room to suppose that you had
slighted or neglected any possible means of retrieving your affairs."

These remonstrances were at last so far effectual, that Charles returned
to Paris, and was only again removed from that capital by force.

The spirit of Lochiel was meantime broken by the mournful tidings which
reached him of the death of friends on the scaffold, the cruelties
enacted in Scotland, and, more than all, of the Act which took effect
in August 1747, disarming the Highlanders and restraining the use of the
Highland garb. By this statute it was made penal to wear the national
costume: a first offence was punished with six months' imprisonment; a
second, with transportation for seven years. Such were the efforts made
to break the union of a fiery but faithful people, and such the attempt
to produce a complete revolution in the national habits!

Many were the projects which amused the exiled Jacobites into hopes that
ended in bitter disappointment, and many the fleeting visions of a
restoration of the Stuarts. During one of these brief chimeras, Lochiel
and Clunie visited Charles at a retreat on the Upper Rhine, whither he
had retired after the perfidious imprisonment at the Castle of
Vincennes. They found the Prince sunk in the lassitude which succeeds a
long course of exciting events, and of smothered but not subdued misery.
The visit yielded to neither party satisfaction. Charles was deaf to the
remonstrances of Lochiel, and Lochiel beheld his Prince wholly devoted
to Miss Walkinshaw and her daughter, afterwards Countess of Albany, and
completely under the influence of his mistress, who was regarded by
Lochiel and Clunie as a spy of Hanover.

Lochiel left the Prince, and they never met again. The health of the
chief began to decline; his malady was a mental one, and admitted of no
cure but a return to those vassals who had been so faithful and so much
attached to him, and to friends with whose misfortunes he seems to have
blamed himself. Of the affection of the clansmen he received frequent
proofs. "The estates of Lochiel," says Mrs. Grant, "were forfeited like