Kent, and Pembroke, gave banquets and balls. It was not till these nuisances had lasted through a whole generation, and till much had been written about them, that the inhabitants applied to Parliament for permission to put up rails, and to plant trees.

profound darkness. Thieves and robbers plied their trade with impunity: yet they were hardly so terrible to peaceable citizens as another class of ruffians. It was a favourite amusement of dissolute young gentlemen to swagger by night about the town, breaking windows, upsetting sedans, beating quiet men, and offering rude caresses to pretty women. Several dynasties of these tyrants had, since the Restoration, domineered over the streets. The Muns and Tityre Tus had given place to the Hectors, and the Hectors had been recently succeeded by the Scourers. At a later period rose the Nicker, the Hawcubite, and the yet more dreaded name of Mohawk. The machinery for keeping the peace was utterly contemptible. There was an act of Common Council which provided that more than a thousand watchmen should be constantly on the alert in the city, from sunset to sunrise, and that every inhabitant should take his turn of duty. But this Act was negligently executed. Few of those who were summoned left their homes; and those few generally found it more agreeable to tipple in alehouses than to pace the streets.

When such was the state of the region inhabited by the most luxurious portion of society, we may easily believe that the great body of the population suffered what would now be considered as insupportable grievances. The pavement was detestable; all foreigners cried shame upon it. The drainage was so bad that in rainy weather the gutters soon became torrents. Several facetious poets have commemorated the fury with which these black rivulets roared down Snow Hill and Ludgate Hill, bearing to Fleet Ditch a vast tribute of animal and vegetable filth from the stalls of butchers and greengrocers. This flood was profusely thrown to right and left by coaches and carts. To keep as far from the carriage road as possible was therefore the wish of every pedestrian. The mild and timid gave the wall. The bold and athletic took it. If two roisterers met, they cocked their hats in each other's faces, and pushed each other about till the weaker was THE LONDON COFFEE HOUSES. shoved towards the kennel.11 If he was a mere bully he sneaked off, muttering that he should find a time. If he was pugnacious, the encounter probably ended in a duel behind Montague House.12

TER III

FROM CHAP

The coffee house must not be dismissed with a cursory mention. It might indeed at that time have been not improperly called a most The houses were not numbered. There would important political institution. No Parliament indeed have been little advantage in number- had sat for years. The municipal council of ing them; for of the coachmen, chairmen,13 por- the City had ceased to speak the sense of the ters, and errand boys of London, a very small citizens. Public meetings, harangues, resoluproportion could read. It was necessary to use tions, and the rest of the modern machinery of marks which the most ignorant could under- | agitation had not yet come into fashion. Nothstand. The shops were therefore distinguished ing resembling the modern newspaper existed. by painted or sculptured signs, which gave a In such circumstances the coffee houses were gay and grotesque aspect to the streets. The the chief organs through which the public walk from Charing Cross to Whitechapel lay opinion of the metropolis vented itself. through an endless succession of Saracens ' Heads, Royal Oaks, Blue Bears, and Golden Lambs, which disappeared when they were no longer required for the direction of the common people.

When the evening closed in, the difficulty and danger of walking about London became serious indeed. The garret windows were opened, and pails were emptied, with little regard to those who were passing below. Falls, bruises, and broken bones were of constant occurrence. For, till the last year of the reign of Charles the Second, most of the streets were left in 11 gutter

The first of these establishments had been set up, in the time of the Commonwealth, by a Turkey merchant, who had acquired among the Mahometans a taste for their favourite beverage. The convenience of being able to make appointments in any part of the town, and of being able to pass evenings socially at a very small charge, was so great that the fashion spread fast. Every man of the upper or middle class went daily to his coffee house to learn the news and to discuss it. Every coffee house had one or more orators to whose eloquence the crowd listened with admiration, and who soon became, what the journalists of our own time

12 In Whitehall, the region of the Government have been called, a fourth Estate of the realm. offices.

13 sedan-chair bearers

The court had long seen with uneasiness the

growth of this new power in the state. An at- was a faction for Perrault and the moderns,

tempt had been made, during Danby 's1 administration, to close the coffee houses. But men of all parties missed their usual places of resort so much that there was an universal outery. The government did not venture, in opposition to a feeling so strong and general, to enforce a regulation of which the legality might well be questioned. Since that time ten years had elapsed, and during those years the number and influence of the coffee houses had been constantly increasing. Foreigners remarked that the coffee house was that which especially distinguished London from all other cities; that the coffee house was the Londoner's home, and that those who wished to find a gentleman commonly asked, not whether he lived in Fleet Street or Chancery Lane, but whether he frequented the Grecian or the Rainbow. Nobody was excluded from these places who laid down his penny at the bar. Yet every rank and profession, and every shade of religious and political opinion, had its own headquarters. There were houses near Saint James's Park where fops congregated, their heads and shoulders covered with black or flaxen wigs, not less ample than those which are now worn by the Chancellor and by the Speaker of the House of Commons. The wig came from Paris; and so did the rest of the fine gentleman's ornaments, his embroidered coat, his fringed gloves, and the tassel which upheld his pantaloons. The conversation was in that dialect which, long after it had ceased to be spoken in fashionable circles, continued, in the mouth of Lord Foppington,2 to excite the mirth of theatres. The atmosphere was like that of a perfumer's shop. Tobacco in any other form than that of richly scented snuff was held in abomination. If any clown, ignorant of the usages of the house, called for a pipe, the sneers of the whole assembly and the short answers of the waiters soon convinced him that he had better go somewhere else. Nor, indeed, would he have had far to go. For, in general, the coffee rooms reeked with tobacco like a guard-room; and strangers sometimes expressed their surprise that so many people should leave their own firesides to sit in the midst of eternal fog and stench. Nowhere was the smoking more constant than at Will's. That celebrated house, situated between Covent Garden and Bow Street, was sacred to polite letters. There the talk was about poetical justice and the unities of place and time. There

1 Thomas Osborn, Lord Treasurer under Charles II. 2 A character in Vanbrugh's The Relapse. As an example of the dialect Macaulay gives the word Lord, pronounced Lard.

5

a faction for Boileau and the ancients.3 One group debated whether Paradise Lost ought not to have been in rhyme. To another an envious poetaster demonstrated that Venice Preserved+ ought to have been hooted from the stage. Under no roof was a greater variety of figures to be seen. There were Earls in stars and garters, clergymen in cassocks and bands, pert Templars, sheepish lads from the Universities, translators and index makers in ragged coats of frieze. The great press was to get near the chair where John Dryden sat. In winter that chair was always in the warmest nook by the fire; in summer it stood in the balcony. To bow to the Laureate, and to hear his opinion of Racine's last tragedy or of Bossu's treatise on epic poetry, was thought a privilege. A pinch from his snuff-box was an honour sufficient to turn the head of a young enthusiast. There were coffee houses where the first medical men might be consulted. Doctor John Radcliffe, who, in the year 1685, rose to the largest prac tice in London, came daily, at the hour when the Exchange was full, from his house in Bow Street, then a fashionable part of the capital, to Garraway's, and was to be found, sur rounded by surgeons and apothecaries, at a particular table. There were Puritan coffee houses where no oath was heard, and where lank-haired men discussed election and reprobation through their noses; Jew coffee houses where dark eyed money changers from Venice and from Amsterdam greeted each other; and Popish coffee houses where, as good Protestants believed, Jesuits planned, over their cups, an other great fire, and cast silver bullets to shoot the King.

These gregarious habits had no small share in forming the character of the Londoner of that age. He was, indeed, a different being from the rustic Englishman. There was no then the intercourse which now exists between the two classes. Only very great men were in the habit of dividing the year between town and country. Few esquires came to the capita thrice in their lives. Nor was it yet the prac tice of all citizens in easy circumstances t breathe the fresh air of the fields and wood during some weeks of every summer. A cock ney, in a rural village, was stared at as muel as if he had intruded into a Kraal of Hotten

3 Between Perrault and Boileau, two members the French Academy, arose about 1687 famous quarrel over the respective merits modern and ancient literature.

4 By Thomas Otway, a contemporary dramatist. 5 Students or lawyers residing in the Temple.

tots. On the other hand, when the Lord of a broke forth again more violently than before. Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared in Since the splendour of the House of Argyle1 Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished had been eclipsed, no Gaelic chief could vie in from the resident population as a Turk or a power with the Marquess of Athol. The disLascar. His dress, his gait, his accent, the trict from which he took his title, and of which manner in which he stared at the shops, stum- he might almost be called. the sovereign, was in bled into the gutters, ran against the porters, extent larger than an ordinary county, and was and stood under the water spouts, marked him more fertile, more diligently cultivated, and out as an excellent subject for the operations more thickly peopled than the greater part of of swindlers and banterers. Bullies jostled him the Highlands. The men who followed his into the kennel. Hackney coachmen splashed banner were supposed to be not less numerous him from head to foot. Thieves explored than all the Macdonalds and Macleans united, with perfect security the huge pockets of and were, in strength and courage, inferior to his horseman's coat, while he stood enno tribe in the mountains. But the clan had tranced by the splendour of the Lord Mayor's been made insignificant by the insignificance of show. Moneydroppers, sore from the cart's the chief. The Marquess was the falsest, the tail, introduced themselves to him, and appeared most fickle, the most pusillanimous, of mankind. to him the most honest, friendly gentlemen that Already, in the short space of six months, he he had ever seen. Painted women, the refuse had been several times a Jacobite, and several of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed times a Williamite. Both Jacobites and Willthemselves on him for countesses and maids of iamites regarded him with contempt and dishonour. If he asked his way to Saint James's,8 trust, which respect for his immense power his informants sent him to Mile End.9 If he prevented them from fully expressing. After went into a shop, he was instantly discerned to repeatedly vowing fidelity to both parties, and be a fit purchaser of everything that nobody repeatedly betraying both, he began to think else would buy, of secondhand embroidery, cop- that he should best provide for his safety by per rings, and watches that would not go. If abdicating the functions both of a peer and of he rambled into any fashionable coffee house, a chieftain, by absenting himself both from he became a mark for the insolent derision of the Parliament House at Edinburgh and from fops and the grave waggery of Templars. En-his castle in the mountains, and by quitting raged and mortified, he soon returned to his the country to which he was bound by every mansion, and there, in the homage of his tenants, and the conversation of his boon companions, found consolation for the vexations and humiliations which he had undergone. There he was once more a great man, and saw nothing above himself except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench near the Judge, or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the Lord Lieutenant.

THE BATTLE OF KILLIECRANKIE.

TER XIII*

tie of duty and honour at the very crisis of her fate. While all Scotland was waiting with impatience and anxiety to see in which army his numerous retainers would be arrayed, he stole away to England, settled himself at Bath, and pretended to drink the waters. His prin- . cipality, left without a head, was divided against itself. The general leaning of the Athol men was towards King James. For they had been employed by him, only four years before, as the ministers of his vengeance against FROM CHAP- the House of Argyle. They had garrisoned Inverary: they had ravaged Lorn: they had demolished houses, cut down fruit trees, burned fishing boats, broken millstones, hanged Campbells, and were therefore not likely to be pleased by the prospect of MacCallum More 's2 restoration. One word from the Marquess

While these things were passing in the Par[liament House, the civil war in the Highlands, [having been during a few weeks suspended,

& Confidence men who
drop
money and
pretend to find it
for purposes of
fraud.

7 Offenders were tied to

the end of a cart

and whipped
through the streets.

8 In West London.
9 In East London.

*The events here described took place in July, 1689, during the English Revolution. James the Second had lately been deposed, but the success of the party of William was still in doubt. In Scotland, William was supported by the parliament at Edinburgh and had a body of troops commanded by General Mackay. On the other hand, John Graham of Claver

1 The Campbells. The last Earl of Argyle had been executed for participating in Monmouth's rising against James.

2 A name given to the Dukes and Earls of Argyle. 3 broadswords

house, Viscount Dundee, had gathered about him his own Lowland adherents and a considerable force of Highland clansmen who supported James. Compare Scott's poem, Bonny Dundee, p. 448.

would have sent two thousand claymoress to the ❘ of Wilson, the fantastic peaks bathed, at sunJacobite side. But that word he would not rise and sunset, with light rich as that which speak; and the consequence was, that the con- glows on the canvass of Claude,7 suggested to duct of his followers was as irresolute and in- our ancestors thoughts of murderous ambusconsistent as his own. cades and of bodies stripped, gashed, and abanWhile they were waiting for some indica-doned to the birds of prey. The only path was tion of his wishes, they were called to arms at narrow and rugged: a horse could with diffionce by two leaders, either of whom might, culty be led up: two men could hardly walk with some show of reason, claim to be con- abreast; and, in some places, the way ran so sidered as the representative of the absent close by the precipice that the traveller had chief. Lord Murray, the Marquess's eldest son, great need of a steady eye and foot. Many who was married to a daughter of the Duke years later, the first Duke of Athol constructed of Hamilton, declared for King William. a road up which it was just possible to drag his Stewart of Ballenach, the Marquess's confiden- coach. But even that road was so steep and so tial agent, declared for King James. The strait that a handful of resolute men might people knew not which summons to obey. He have defended it against an army; nor did whose authority would have been held in profound reverence, had plighted faith to both sides, and had then run away for fear of being under the necessity of joining either; nor was it very easy to say whether the place which he had left vacant belonged to his steward or to his heir apparent.

The most important military post in Athol was Blair Castle. The house which now bears that name is not distinguished by any striking peculiarity from other country seats of the aristocracy. The old building was a lofty tower of rude architecture which commanded a vale watered by the Garry. The walls would have offered very little resistance to a battering train, but were quite strong enough to keep the herdsmen of the Grampians in awe. About five miles south of this stronghold, the valley of the Garry contracts itself into the celebrated glen of Killiecrankie. At present a highway as smooth as any road in Middlesex ascends gently from the low country to the summit of the defile. White villas peep from the birch forest; and, on a fine summer day, there is scarcely a turn of the pass at which may not be seen some angler casting his fly on the foam of the river, some artist sketching a pinnacle of rock, or some party of pleasure banqueting on the turf in the fretwork of shade and sunshine. But, in the days of William the Third, Killiecrankie was mentioned with horror by the peaceful and industrious inhabitants of the Perthshire lowlands. It was deemed the most perilous of all those dark ravines through which the marauders of the hills were wont to sally forth. The sound, so musical to modern ears, of the river brawling round the mossy rocks and among the smooth pebbles, the masses of grey crag and verdure worthy of the pencil

4 A mountain system in Scotland.

any Saxons consider a visit to Killiecrankie as a pleasure, till experience had taught the English Government that the weapons by which the Celtic clans could be most effectually subdued were the pickaxe and the spade.

The country which lay just above this pass was now the theatre of a war such as the Highlands had not often witnessed. Men wearing the same tartan, and attached to the same lord, were arrayed against each other. The name of the absent chief was used, with some show of reason, on both sides. Ballenach, at the head of a body of vassals who considered him as the representative of the Marquess, occupied Blair Castle. Murray, with twelve hundred followers, appeared before the walls and demanded to be admitted into the mansion of his family, the mansion which would one day be his own. The garrison refused to open the gates. Messages were sent off by the besiegers to Edinburgh, and by the besieged to Lochaber.9 In both places the tidings produced great agitation. Mackay and Dundee agreed in thinking that the crisis required prompt and strenuous exertion. On the fate of Blair Castle probably depended the fate of all Athol. On the fate of Athol might depend the fate of Scotland. Mackay hastened northward, and ordered his troops to assemble in the low country of Perthshire. Some of them were quartered at such a distance that they did not arrive in time. He soon, however, had with him the three Scotch regiments which had served in Holland, and which bore the names of their Colonels, Mackay himself, Balfour, and Ramsay. There was also a gallant regiment of infantry from England, then called Hastings's,

6 Richard Wilson, English landscape painter.
7 Claude Lorrain, French landscape painter.
8 An Englishman or Lowlander, as opposed to the
Highlanders, who are Celts.

5 An English county which then included a great 9 Mackay was at Edinburgh, Dundee in the district part of the metropolis of London.

of Lochaber.

but now known as the thirteenth of the line. | Castle, important events had taken place there. With these old troops were joined two regi- Murray's adherents soon began to waver in ments newly levied in the Lowlands. One of their fidelity to him. They had an old antipathy them was commanded by Lord Kenmore; the to Whigs; for they considered the name of other, which had been raised on the Border, and Whig as synonymous with the name of Campwhich is still styled the King's Own Borderers, bell. They saw arrayed against them a large by Lord Leven. Two troops of horse, Lord number of their kinsmen, commanded by a genAnnandale's and Lord Belhaven 's, probably | tleman who was supposed to possess the confimade up the army to the number of above three thousand men. Belhaven rode at the head of his troop: but Annandale, the most factious of all Montgomery's followers, preferred the Club and the Parliament House to the field.*

Dundee, meanwhile, had summoned al the clans which acknowledged his commission to assemble for an expedition into Athol. His exertions were strenuously seconded by Lochiel.10 The fiery crosses11 were sent again in all haste through Appin and Ardnamurchan, up Glenmore, and along Loch Leven. But the call was so unexpected, and the time allowed was so short, that the muster was not a very full one. The whole number of broadswords seems to have been under three thousand. With this force, such as it was, Dundee set forth. On his march he was joined by succours which had just arrived from Ulster. They consisted of little more than three hundred Irish foot, ill armed, ill clothed, and ill disciplined. Their commander was an officer named Cannon, who had seen service in the Netherlands, and who might perhaps have acquitted himself well in a subordinate post and in a regular army, but who | was altogether unequal to the part now assigned him. He had already loitered among the Hebrides so long that some ships which had been sent with him, and which were laden with stores, had been taken by English cruisers. He and his soldiers had with difficulty escaped the same fate. Incompetent as he was, he bore a commission which gave him military rank in Scotland next to Dundee.

dence of the Marquess.

The besieging army therefore melted rapidly away. Many returned home on the plea that, as their neighbourhood was about to be the seat of war, they must place their families and eattle in security. Others more ingenuously declared that they would not fight in such a quarrel. One large body went to a brook, filled their bonnets with water, drank a health to King James, and then dispersed. Their zeal for King James, however did not induce them to join the standard of his general. They lurked among the rocks and thickets which overhang the Garry, in the hope that there would soon be a battle, and that, whatever might be the event, there would be fugitives and corpses to plunder.

Murray was in a strait. His force had dwindled to three or four hundred men: even in those men he could put little trust; and the Macdonalds and Camerons were advancing fast. He therefore raised the siege of Blair Castle, and retired with a few followers into the defile of Killiecrankie. There he was soon joined by a detachment of two hundred fusileers whom Mackay had sent forward to secure the pass. The main body of the Lowland army speedily followed.

Early in the morning of Saturday the twentyseventh of July, Dundee arrived at Blair Castle. There he learned that Mackay's troops were already in the ravine of Killiecrankie. It was necessary to come to a prompt decision. A council of war was held. The Saxon officers were generally against hazarding a battle. The Celtic chiefs were of a different opinion. Glengarry12 and Lochiel were now both of a mind.

The disappointment was severe. In truth James would have done better to withhold all assistance from the Highlanders than to mock"Fight, my Lord," said Lochiel with his usual them by sending them, instead of the well appointed army which they had asked and expected, a rabble contemptible in numbers and appearance. It was now evident that whatever was done for his cause in Scotland must be done by Scottish hands.

While Mackay from one side, and Dundee from the other, were advancing towards Blair

10 Sir Ewan Cameron 11 The signal for a gath-
of Lochiel.
ering.

Sir James Montgomery, a malcontent scheming
for office, had formed a club at Edinburgh to
concert plans of secret opposition to the king.

energy; "fight immediately: fight, if you have only one to three. Our men are in heart. Their only fear is that the enemy should escape. Give them their way; and be assured that they will either perish or gain a complete victory. But if you restrain them, if you force them to remain on the defensive, I answer for nothing. If we do not fight, we had better break up and retire to our mountains."