garb of complex beauty, well suited for fancy balls. The power of the chiefs and the substance of the clan system were finally swept away, though the sentiment lingers, even in the Transatlantic abodes of the clansmen, and is prized, like the dress, as a remnant of social picturesqueness in a prosaic and levelling age. The hills and lakes--at the thought of which even Gibbon shuddered--are the favourite retreats of the luxury which seeks in wildness refreshment from civilization. After Culloden, Presbyterianism effectually made its way into the Highlands, of which a great part had up to that time been little better than heathen; but it did not fail to take a strong tinge of Celtic enthusiasm and superstition. Of all the lines of division in Great Britain, the most important politically has been that which is least clearly traced by the hand of nature. The natural barriers between England and Scotland were not sufficient to prevent the extension of the Saxon settlements and kingdoms across the border. In the name of the Scotch capital we have a monument of a union before that of 1603. That the Norman Conquest did not include the Saxons of the Scotch Lowlands was due chiefly to the menacing attitude of Danish pretenders, and the other military dangers which led the Conqueror to guard himself on the north by a broad belt of desolation. Edward I., in attempting to extend his feudal supremacy over Scotland, may well have seemed to himself to have been acting in the interest of both nations, for a union would have put an end to border war, and would have delivered the Scotch in the Lowlands from the extremity of feudal oppression, and the rest of the country from a savage anarchy, giving them in place of those curses by far the best government of the time. The resistance came partly from mere barbarism, partly from Norman adventurers, who were no more Scotch than English, whose aims were purely selfish, and who would gladly have accepted Scotland as a vassal kingdom from Edward's hand. But the annexation would no doubt have formidably increased the power of the Crown, not only by extending its dominions, but by removing that which was a support often of aristocratic anarchy in England, but sometimes of rudimentary freedom. Had the whole island fallen under one victorious sceptre, the next wielder of that sceptre, under the name of the great Edward's wittold son, would have been Piers Gaveston. But what no prescience on the part of any one in the time of Edward I. could possibly have foreseen was the inestimable benefit which disunion and even anarchy indirectly conferred on the whole island in the shape of a separate Scotch Reformation. Divines, when they have exhausted their reasonings about the rival forms of Church government, will probably find that the argument which had practically most effect in determining the question was that of the much decried but in his way sagacious James