This anecdote leads us to notice another trait in the character of our Highland soldiers; they were emphatically religious men, and they were prepared to make any sacrifice for their faith. They were little versed in theology, but, like Cromwell’s Ironsides at Dunbar, they put their trust in God and kept their powder dry. The great mass of them were Presbyterians, and in foreign and far-distant lands they continued to worship as their fathers had worshipped. Soldiers at that period were the most irreligious of men; they “swore terribly in Flanders” and elsewhere. We may form some idea of their morals from Hogarth’s well-known “March to Finchley.” Any display of religious feeling on the part of a soldier excited such surprise as to prove its extreme rarity, especially in the case of the Highlanders, who were esteemed at first to be little better than savages. When the 42nd Regiment first visited the metropolis, the Londoners were surprised to observe that officers and men never sat down to table without first saying grace—a religious observance which should be honoured, but which has become obsolete in our mess-rooms at the present day. An English historian shows how surprised his countrymen were “to see these savages, from the officer to the commonest man, first stand up and pull off their bonnets, and then lift up their eyes in the most solemn and devout manner, and mutter something in their own gibberish, by way, I suppose, of saying grace, as if they had been so many Christians.” Of course, in the eyes of this wiseacre, they could not have been Christians, because they expressed their devotion in a gibberish which, as he charitably implies, was as unintelligible to the Deity as it was to himself; but we know how to judge these things by a different standard, and we condemn the man who could write so narrowly. At first a chaplain was attached to every regiment, and Dr. Carlisle, of Inveresk, mentions in his memoirs, that one of these chaplains, during an engagement in America, freely exposed himself to the fire of the enemy, in order to encourage the young soldiers by his example. We question whether such a display of clerical courage would meet with the approval of the authorities at the War Office at the present day; certain facts have come under our notice that would tend rather to an opposite conclusion. These regimental chaplains had to mess with the officers, and it was imagined that the presence of a clergyman would have an elevating influence upon the latter; experience, however, soon proved that the chaplains, instead of elevating the officers, were, through daily contact, brought down to the same moral level, and it is a significant fact that Burns, although his national spirit was great, considered them fair game for his satire. About the commencement of the present century chaplains were attached to brigades and not to regiments, and this continued to be the case during the Peninsular war. It thus occasionally