harried and dragooned towards conformity, proved a hot-bed of strong Protestant and Presbyterian feeling, inspired by resentment as well as by religion, a lesson in the use of persecution that stops short of extermination. The quartering of Highland clans was among those means of grace brought to bear on the stubborn Whigs, with whose scruples the Gael as a rule had scant sympathy. But the great western clan Campbell, neighbours of the Whig country across the Clyde, obeyed chiefs otherwise tempered, two of whom rank among the victims of Charles II.’s reign; and the House of Argyll continued to furnish champions for the Whig and Presbyterian interest. Over adjacent clans, the powerful Macallum More had too much played the tyrant; then it was hatred to the Campbells as much as loyalty to Charles or James that brought so many tartans round the banner of Montrose and Dundee. On the other hand, sore memories of that Philistine “Highland host” helped to keep the Whig country loyal in the later Jacobite movements. It was long before “wild Highlandmen,” or dragoons, would be looked on with a friendly eye by the sons of the Covenanters. When the goodman one Saturday night had “waled a portion” that led him to corrupt the verse, “another wonder in heaven, and behold a great red _dragoon_”--he was interrupted by his wife, “I doot ye’re making a mistake, John; there’s no’ many o’ that sort gets in there!” but he had a sound answer ready: “Weel, woman, and doesna’ it say it was for a wonder?” It was in another part of the country that some misquoting Mac could chuckle over a text which seemed to make it easier for a rich man to go through a needle’s eye than for a Cam’ell to enter the kingdom of heaven. Whatever they may have been in the past, no worse if more strong than their neighbours, the Campbells of Argyll have risen on the flowing tide of progress. The house lost nothing under that statesman who figures as Jeanie Deans’s patron, nor under that host who so courteously entertained Dr. Johnson, though his wife would not speak to Boswell. The late Duke, a man of note in any station of life, was looked on as, in a manner, chief of the Presbyterian establishment, even when--so have times changed--he could not get one of his sons elected as member for the county. But long before his time this Church had ceased to be one and undivided, soon indeed showing strongly fissiparous energies, which, till our day, kept it “decomposing but to recompose.”