have frequently made them the living tombs of those whom the rapacity, or the malignant passions of others, have doomed to imprisonment. Yet, were we to take foreign novelists as true painters of English manners, we would find in Madame Cotin's _Malvina_, that a French beauty having secured the affections of an English duke, his powerful relations seize her after she has become his wife, and lock her up in a turret of their private castle, where, though the neighbouring physician and the clergyman visit her, and all the world knows that she is imprisoned, no one dares to interfere in her behalf; and her fate is only balanced by that of her husband, whom the Attorney-General transports, by a writ of _Habeas Corpus_, to the West Indies. Somewhat similar, if our memory serves us right, are the notions of British liberty embodied in _Walladmor_, the story got up to pass as a Waverley novel at one of the Leipsic fairs, where, in the year 1818, the Lord Lieutenant is found committing every person with whom he quarrels to his private dungeons in his own castle. [11] Raymond's _Reports_, 474. We need no writers of romance to find instances of kidnapping in Scotland before the Union. The vast solitudes which frequently separated inhabited districts from each other, the feudal fortalices scattered hither and thither, the weakness of the crown, the judicial powers possessed by many of the barons; and we may add to this, the spirit of clanship, which surrounded every Highland chief with an army of retainers, as faithful to the preservation of his secrets as they were relentless in avenging his feuds--all conspired to render it too easy for a powerful individual to adopt such a form of outrage against his enemy. Not that the practice was pursued in the manner of a sordid trade, as we have found it followed in England, and as we shall find that at a later period it was adopted among ourselves. The Scots had no colonies to be supplied with this species of living merchandise; and in truth the human animal has seldom been with us so valuable a commodity in the home market, as greatly to raise the cupidity of his neighbour.