The strong feeling which existed in loyal breasts at the Restoration regarding the treatment which Montrose had experienced, is shewn by the long imprisonment and sufferings of Neil M‘Leod of Assynt, who had taken the marquis prisoner after his defeat in Strathoikel, and delivered him up (for a mean reward, it is said, of certain bolls of meal). On the 10th of December 1664, the Council received a petition from M‘Leod, shewing that he had now been confined in the Tolbooth and city of Edinburgh for _four years_, so that, by the neglect of his affairs, he was ‘brought near the point of ruin.’ ‘Being,’ he said, ‘a stranger and far from his country and friends, and out of all credit and respect by reason of his long imprisonment,’ he could have ‘no one to engage for him as caution;’ but he offered to come under any kind of bond for his reappearance, if allowed a temporary liberty. The Earl of Kincardine offering to be security that M‘Leod would send a guarantee to the amount of twenty thousand pounds Scots, he was favoured by the Council with liberty to go home for the next four months. It was not till February 1666 that a special letter from the king at length freed M‘Leod from trouble on account of his concern in the doom of Montrose.--_P. C. R._ * * * * * [Sidenote: JAN. 8.] [Sidenote: 1661.] This day appeared the first number of the first original newspaper attempted in Scotland. It was a small weekly sheet, entitled _Mercurius Caledonius; comprising the Affairs now in Agitation in Scotland, with a Survey of Foreign Intelligence_. The editor was Thomas Sydserf, or Saint Serf, son of a former bishop of Galloway, who was soon after promoted to the see of Orkney. Principal Baillie alludes to this ‘diurnaler’ in bitter terms--‘a very rascal, a profane atheistical papist, as some count him;’ the truth being that he was an Episcopalian loyalist of merely a somewhat extravagant type. Little is known of his previous history, beyond his having borne arms under Montrose, and published in London in 1658 a translation from the French under the title of _Entertainments of the Cours, or Academicall Conversations_, dedicated to the young Marquis of Montrose. Of the _Mercurius Caledonius_, only nine numbers were published, the last being dated March 28, 1661. It must be admitted that the style of composition and editorship was frivolous and foolish to a degree surprising even for that delirious period.