In reality, though it was not known then, the bulk of the people of Scotland were a branch of the great Teutonic race which possesses Germany and some other countries in the north-west of Europe. Precisely the same people they were with the bulk of the English, and speaking essentially the same language, though for ages they had been almost incessantly at war with that richer and more advanced community. As England, however, was neighboured by Wales, with a Celtic people, so did Scotland contain in its northern and more mountainous districts a Celtic people also, rude, poor, proud, and of fiery temper, but brave and possessed of virtues of their own, somewhat like the Circassians of our own day. These Highland clansmen--whom the English of that time contemptuously called _Redshanks_, with reference to their naked hirsute limbs--were the relics of a greater nation, who once occupied all Scotland, and of whose blood some portion was mingled with that of the Scots of the Lowlands, producing a certain fervour of character--‘_perfervidum ingenium Scotorum_’--which is not found in purely Teutonic natures. The monarchy had originated with them early in the sixth century of the Christian era, and had gradually absorbed the rest of Scotland, even while its original subjects were hemmed more and more within the hilly north. But, by the marriages of female heirs, this thorn-encircled crown had come, in the fourteenth century, into a family of Norman-English extraction, bearing the name of Stuart.