About a century ago the Highlanders were regarded as little better than a race of savages. Their dress, their language, and their manners were the subject of ridicule among their Southern neighbours, and their well-known attachment to the house of Stuart excited the suspicion and the distrust of the government of the day. “When the English thought of the Highlander at all,” says Macaulay—“and it was seldom that they did so—they considered him as a filthy, abject savage, a slave, a papist, a cut-throat, and a thief.” The great historian then proceeds to show that this estimate bordered very closely on the truth, and that the Highlanders were little better than they were represented to be. He seems to feel a cruel pleasure in exposing the weaknesses of those whose blood flowed in his own veins, and he, doubtless, meant to display in his picture of Highland manners a proof of his own impartiality. He gives implicit credence to all that he finds in “Burt’s Letters,” without reflecting that the author, from his very position, must have felt and written like a partisan. Burt was an officer of Engineers employed under General Wade in constructing those roads which opened up the Highlands to the advance of the English forces. He remained in the North from 1726 to 1737, and amused his friends in the South with those letters, in which he professed to describe the manners of the alien race among whom he was placed. There is no reason to believe that he was wilfully untruthful, but the work in which he was engaged rendered him hateful to the Highlanders, and he hated them cordially in return. He was probably unconscious of this feeling himself, but it is perceptible in almost every line he wrote. Johnson carried with him to the Highlands all the prejudices of his countrymen, and a good many others peculiar to himself; but his rugged nature was softened by the hospitality he everywhere met with, and he occasionally gives forth a grunt of approval. The reaction produced by the publication of his “Tour to the Hebrides” was increased by the appearance of the poems and novels of Scott, which created a sort of _furore_ in favour of everything Highland, and rendered the land of the mountain and the flood almost classical. Royalty itself condescended to listen to the songs which it would once have been treason to sing aloud; the garb of old Gaul was assumed by many who had no right to wear it; the tartan became a favourite article of dress with both sexes; every nook and corner of the North was explored; the land of Ossian became the land of romance, and its inhabitants were invested with every possible virtue.