As we look at the old cannon, now serving for ornaments and mementoes, we ask, Who, when this castle of Stirling was built, could have conceived the power of artillery in our century? Scott tells, in his picturesque way, of a cannon ball shot against a party of rebels on their way to Edinburgh; but to-day one need only mount a fifteen-inch rifled cannon or a sixteen-inch mortar on these ramparts, to tumble down the whole structure by mere concussion and recoil. Yet in the old days of catapults and smooth-bore cannon, it was quite possible for “gray Stirling, Bulwark of the North,” to command the point between the Highlands and the Lowlands. By stationing a party at the Ford of Frew, near Aberfoyle, the main passage from the mountain district was completely closed. Thus it was true that the Forth on which Stirling Castle was situated “bridled the wild Highlander.” It is said that the merry King James V (1512–42) put on various disguises, in order to ramble _incognito_ about his realm to see that justice was regularly administered--and also to indulge in gallantry. Sir Walter Scott, in “The Lady of the Lake,” pictures him as the Knight of Snowdon, who meets and kills Roderick Dhu and rewards Ellen Douglas and Malcolm Graham. On such occasions, the king took his name from Ballingeich, a place near the castle. It is said that the two comic songs, “The Gaberlunzie Man” and “The Jolly Beggar” were founded on the success of this monarch’s amorous adventures when travelling in the disguise of a beggar. Around the castle is an excellent path, called “the Back Walk,” furnished by a citizen long ago, and a stone seat has been erected to accommodate the aged and infirm who resort to this spot. The guide in the castle points out many another spot, around which romantic or historical associations cluster, though as a rule these are more interesting to a native than to a foreign tourist. Looking at the Grey Friars’ Church, built in 1494 by James IV and added to by Archbishop Beaton, uncle of the cardinal, we find a type of architecture peculiar to Scotland; that is, of the later pointed Gothic. Though contemporary with the depressed, or perpendicular, style of architecture in England, this edifice might appear a century older than it is. The later forms of English Gothic architecture, however, were never adopted in Scotland, for the Scots preferred to follow the taste of their friends in France rather than that of their enemies in England. Here King James I of Great Britain was crowned, John Knox preaching the coronation sermon. It was this same James, “the wisest fool in Christendom,” under whose reign the Bible was again translated,--then a “revised,” but now, for centuries, the “accepted” version,--and to whom the translators dedicated that presentation address which to Americans is positively disgusting in its fulsome laudation.