said to have been internally undisturbed, and no private papers contain matters of state, save those of the great families whose ancestors have been high in office. But in Scotland, the various outbreaks, and the unceasing Jacobite intrigues, made almost all the country gentlemen statesmen--made too many of them state offenders. The Essex squire, be he ever so rich, was still but the lord of a certain quantity of timber and oxen, grass and turnips. The Highland laird, be he ever so poor, was a leader of men--a person who had more or less the power of keeping the country in a state of war or danger--a sort of petty king reigning over his own people. Hence, while the letters of the last century one might pick up in a comfortable old English mansion, would relate to swing-gates and turnpike roads, game preserves and tithes, those found hidden behind the wainscoat of a gaunt old cheerless Scottish fortalice, would relate to risings at home, or landings from abroad--to the number of broadswords and targets still kept in defiance of the Arms Act--to communications received through French Jesuits, or secret missions "across the water."[22] We believe that the passages from these documents, on which we are now to comment, in the first place exhibit to us pretty plainly the motive of Lord Grange for the deportation of his wife; and, in the second place, prove that he entertained designs of a similar character against another female with whom he was nearly connected. When Lady Grange's strange history was first communicated to the public, it was believed that the cause of her abduction was not merely her violent temper, but her possession of certain secrets which would enable her to compromise the safety of her husband and his friends, by proving their connexion with the Jacobite intrigues of the period. The view more lately taken of the mystery, has been that she was merely a mad woman, and that her abduction, with all its laborious mystery, was only an attempt to accommodate the judge with a resource in which Scotland was then deficient--a lunatic asylum for insane relatives. Though, as we shall presently see, his confidential communications give other and darker revelations, this was the light in which Lord Grange wished the matter to be viewed, after his plot had been discovered; and in his controversial letter to Mr Hope, already referred to, he gives an account of her frantic outbreaks, which certainly affords a picture of one likely to have been a most distressing partner in life to a grave judge, having a few secrets to conceal which required him to be peculiarly circumspect in his walk; and holding a high, but a rather precarious position, in the opinion of the religious world. After stating that she had agreed to a separation, he continues--