an abundant manner to the audience whatever delectation might arise from an intensely bloody struggle. But, on the other hand, to expect the Highlanders to be fools enough to accept this sort of symbolical extinction of their quarrel was too preposterous a deduction for any practical statesman. They had no notion of leaving important issues to the event of single combat, or any of the other preposterous rules of chivalry, but slew their enemies where they could, and preferred doing so secretly, and without risk to themselves, when that was practicable. As we read on the history of the two countries, France and Scotland, we shall find the national friendship which had arisen in their common adversity gradually and almost insensibly changing its character. The strong current of migration from Scotland which had set in during the latter period of the hundred years’ war stopped almost abruptly. Scotsmen were still hired as soldiers—sometimes got other appointments—and, generally speaking, were received with hospitality; but in Louis XI.’s reign, the time had passed when they were accepted in the mass as a valuable contribution to the aristocracy of France, and forthwith invested with titles and domains. The families that had thus settled down remembered the traditions of their origin, but had no concern with Scotland, and were thoroughly French, nationally and socially. France, too, was aggregating into a compact nationality, to which her sons could attach themselves with some thrill of patriotic pride. She made a great stride onward both in nationality and prosperity during the reign of that hard, greedy, penurious, crafty, superstitious hypocrite, Louis XI. By a sort of slow corroding process he ate out, bit by bit, the powers and tyrannies that lay between his own and the people. Blood, even the nearest, was to him nowise thicker than water, so he did not, like his predecessors, let royal relations pick up what territorial feudatories dropped; he took all to himself, and, taking it to himself, it became that French empire which was to be inherited by Francis I., Louis XIV., and even the Napoleons; for he seems to have had the principal hand in jointing and fitting in the subordinate machinery of that centralisation which proved compact enough in its details to be put together again after the smash of the Revolution, and which has proved itself as yet the only system under which France can flourish.