[22] We remember once in such a house--it was a rainy day, and for the amusement of the inmates a general rummage was made among old papers--that in a corner of a press of a law library were found a multitude of letters very precisely folded up, and titled--they had a most business-like and uninteresting appearance, but on being examined they were found to consist of the confidential correspondence of the leaders of the Jacobite army in 1745. Their preservation was accounted for by the circumstance that an ancestor of the owner of the house was sheriff of the county at the period of the rebellion. He had seized the letters; but, finding probably that they implicated a considerable number of his own relations, he did not consider himself especially called on to invite the attention of the law officers of the crown to his prize; while, on the other hand, the damnatory documents were carefully preserved, lest some opportunity should occur of turning them to use. They are now printed in a substantial quarto, under the patronage of one of the book clubs. [23] _Miscellany of the Spalding Club_, iii. 60. [24] _Miscellany of the Spalding Club_, iii. 6. [25] _Houston's Memoirs_, 92. [26] _Miscellany of the Spalding Club_, iii. 34-5. [27] _Miscellany of the Spalding Club_, iii. p. 57. [28] _Miscellany of the Spalding Club_, iii. p. 46. [29] _Miscellany of the Spalding Club_, iii. 4. [30] Ibid. p. 6. [31] _Miscellany of the Spalding Club_, pp. 17-20. [32] _Houston's Memoirs_, p. 31. [33] Ibid. p. 8. [34] It is a curious coincidence, that the _first man_ whom her Majesty met with and addressed, when she landed in Glasgow, was the _Earl of Morton_, the lineal descendant of the ruthless baron whose arms then proved so fatal to her beautiful and unfortunate ancestress. [Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.] End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 407, September, 1849, by Various