Who knows the early history of that Lady of Loch Leven, mother of the Regent Murray? Grimly enough she is painted by Scott in her old age as the keeper of Queen Mary. Yet assuredly once she was lovely and young, and had strange beatings of heart as she listened to the whispers of her Royal lover, that all too gallant James V. What was their parting like, when the parting came? Was there the last touch of regretful hands, a remorseful caress from the royal lips, a passionate farewell? Or was there only the cruel news by alien mouths that her place was filled by another, that she had been forsaken? No one can tell us now. Then what of the Lady Anne Campbell of Argyle, at one time betrothed to Charles II.? The youthful Prince, aged twenty, had been crowned gorgeously, after the ancient manner of the Scottish Kings, at Scone. But King only in name, with England still under the iron rule of Cromwell, and only a faction in Scotland devoted to his cause, his immediate fortunes were entirely in the hands of the Scottish leader, the crafty, covenanting Marquis of Argyle. Reaching ever higher in ambition, and dazzled by the weird vision of the race of MacCallum More mounting the throne, Argyle proposed that Charles should marry his daughter. Needy and reckless, and eager to attach Argyle to the Royalist cause by the golden bands of hope, the King pretended consent. Alas for the Lady Anne! What maiden could keep still her heart when wooed by so royal a lover? For wooing there must have been, to keep up the pretence of betrothal, and how was the maiden to know that those words and looks, and, it may have been, those warmer caresses, were all no more than a diplomacy? And when the crash came, with Cromwell’s defeat of the covenanting army at Dunbar, and the revelation that she had given up her all and had been deceived--how bitter, how cruel the discovery! The contemporary Kirkton relates circumstantially that “so grievous was the disappointment to the young lady, that of a gallant young gentlewoman, she lost her spirit, and turned absolutely distracted.” Then there is a pitiful little song, unprinted and all but forgotten,[A] sung to a quavering, pathetic old tune, and relating in quaint ballad fashion something of the story of one Jeanie Cameron, an adherent of Prince Charles Edward in the rebellion of 1745. It narrates how the maiden, having fallen sick, not without a suspicion of its being heart-sickness, and all cures of the leeches failing, was prescribed “ae bricht blink o’ the Young Pretender.” So she sate her down and wrote the Prince “a very long letter, stating who were his friends and who were his foes.” This letter she had closed, and was just “sealing with a ring,” when, as used to happen in ballad story, “ope flew the door, and in came her King.” Poor young lady!-- She prayed to the saints and angels to defend her, And sank i’ the arms o’ the Young Pretender. Rare, oh, rare! bonnie Jeanie Cameron!