How the country could have been so long the dupe of high-sounding pretensions, I do not understand. It could never be from the general appearance of the corps, for of all the Highland regiments in the service, they are the most despicable, or, to use an expressive term, _shauchlin_, in point of appearance. Is it for their superior discipline? all who have seen them in quarters or in the field, know that the reverse is the fact. Was it for their superior courage? this I deny: they have often got into scrapes by their want of steadiness, and when they did so, they fought desperately, no doubt, to recover themselves; but if a man, through his own imprudence, were to set his house on fire about his ears, his hazarding a jump of two stories to escape the flames, could scarcely be cried up as a very heroic action. Trace them from their origin as a police corps in the Highlands, through Egypt, the Peninsula, in fact wherever they have been, and what have they done to merit the particular distinction above every other corps in the service, which they pretend to? Nothing—absolutely nothing: they are a complete verification of the proverb, ‘If you get a name of rising early, you may lie in bed all day.’ No doubt much of the popular feeling relating to them has been revived and cherished by certain writers, who have thrown the charm of romance round an age distinguished by tyranny and unrelenting barbarity on the one hand, and brutal ignorance and superstition on the other,—whose taste might be questioned as much as that of a painter, who would throw gorgeous drapery around a hideous skeleton. It must have confounded every person of any judgment to see the nation carried away with this mania, until they were dancing in masquerade, from the peer to the half-starved mechanic, doffing their warm comfortable breeches to sport a pair of extenuated spindle-shanks in a kilt, and those who could not afford to buy one, throwing a piece of tartan over their shoulders, or wearing a bonnet filled with ostrich feathers, and dubbing themselves Highland societies, under the name of Celtic, &c. &c., although perhaps they never saw the Highlands, unless at the distance of forty or fifty miles. These things are now dying away, and, if we except the casual appearance of some frail dandy, who has failed to attract attention by any other means, and who does so to put himself into the mouth of the public, philabegs are banished to their native hills. You may now find buckles and ostrich feathers in every broker’s shop, articles which, by the by, the real clansmen never heard of until they came down to the Lowlands to see their dress and manners caricatured; if they ever wore feathers, they must have been crow feathers, and their shoe-buckles, I believe, were as scarce as those for the knee.