make no account of the fact that a considerable river guarded Dunsinnan from hostile advance of its distant neighbour. Yet a parish minister of these parts has convinced himself that the author of _Macbeth_ must have known the neighbourhood. One conjecture is that he visited Perth with a far-strolling troop of actors. “You will say next that Shakespeare was Scotch!” exclaimed a scornful southron to a Scot who seemed too patriotic; and the cautious answer was, “Weel, his abeelity would warrant the supposeetion.” As for Macbeth and his good lady, it is time that some serious attempt were made to whitewash their characters, as Renan has done for Jezebel, and Froude for Henry VIII. No doubt these two worthies represented the good old Scottish party, strong on Disruption principles and sternly set against the Anglican influences introduced through Malcolm Canmore, in favour of whose family the southern poet shows a natural bias. Did we know the whole truth, that gracious Duncan may have had a scheme to serve the Macbeths as the Macdonalds of Glencoe were served by their guests. The one thing clear in early Scottish history is that the dagger played a greater part than the ballot box, and that scandals in high life might sometimes be obscured by an eloquent advocate on one side or other. Sir Walter does give some hints for a brief in Macbeth’s case, though in his _Tales of a Grandfather_ he sets the orthodox legend strutting with its “cocked hat and stick.” Macbeth, as he says, probably met Duncan in fair fight near Elgin; and the scene of his own discomfiture appears to have been the Mar country rather than the Tay valley. But we are still strolling on the right bank of the Tay, to be followed for a mile or two up to the mouth of the Almond, a pretty walk, which few strangers find out for themselves. There is in Scotland a want of the field paths which Hawthorne so much admired in England, “wandering from stile to stile, along hedges and across broad fields, and through wooded parks leading you to little hamlets of thatched cottages, ancient, solitary farmhouses, picturesque old mills, streamlets, pools, and all those quiet, secret, unexpected, yet strangely-familiar features of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in his idylls and eclogues.” Every inch of tillable land is in the north more economically dealt with; the farmer, struggling against a harsher climate, cannot afford to leave shady hedges and winding paths; his fields are fenced by uncompromising stone walls against a looser law of trespass. Embowered lanes, too, “for whispering lovers made,” are rarer in this land of practical farming. Here it is rather on wild “banks and braes” of streams, unless where their waters can be coined into silver as salmon-fishings, that lovers and poets may ramble at will, shut out from the work-a-day world by thickets of hawthorn, brier, woodbine, and other “weeds of glorious feature”:--