Prince Charles when, with Ned Burke and Donald Macleod for companions, after roving about all night, excessively faint for want of food, he was obliged to subsist on meal stirred in brine—there being no fresh water within reach. The prince is said to have expressed himself thankful for even this nauseous food—“salt-water drammock”—and to have declared, on the occasion, that if ever he mounted a throne, he should not fail to remember “those who dined with him to-day.” When Flora Macdonald and Lady Clanranald, not long afterwards, came to the royal outcast,—on entering the hut they found him engaged in roasting the heart and liver of a sheep on a wooden spit; a sight at which some of the party could not help shedding tears. “Charles, always the least concerned at his distressing circumstances, though never forgetting the hopes inspired by his birth, jocularly observed that it would be well perhaps for all kings if they had to come through such a fiery ordeal as he was enduring.” At a subsequent period we find him living for days together on a few handfuls of oatmeal and about a pound of butter—referring to which he afterwards told a Highland gentleman that he had come to know what a quarter of a peck of meal was, having once subsisted on such a quantity for the better part of a week. Another time we find him spending the night in an open cave, on the top of a high hill between the Braes of Glenmorriston and Strathglass,—a cave too narrow to let him stretch himself, and in which he lay drenched to the skin, with no possibility of getting a fire to dry him. “Without food, and deprived of sleep by the narrowness and hardness of his bed, the only comfort he could obtain was the miserable one of smoking a pipe.” Hardly was Lear himself more thoroughly exposed to feel what wretches feel, on that night beside the hovel on the heath. In that paradoxical essay of his, on saying grace before meat, Charles Lamb remarks that the indigent man, who hardly knows whether he shall have a meal the next day or not, sits down to his fare with a present sense of the blessing, which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into whose minds the conception of wanting a dinner could never, but by some extreme theory, have entered. According to the essayist, the heats of epicurism put out the gentle flame of devotion: the incense which rises round is pagan, and the belly-god intercepts it for his own. “The very excess of the provision beyond the needs, takes away all sense of proportion between the end and means. The Giver is veiled by his gifts. You are startled at the injustice of returning thanks—for what?—for having so much, while so many starve. It is to praise the gods amiss.”