this part of my work I have taken care to have recourse to the best and most modern authority, and have stated hardly any facts which are not vouched for by the editor of the _Dictionary of National Biography_. In my selection of cases to be reported I have been guided by a variety of considerations. Personally, I admit that I like the political cases best. There is a squalor about private crime, which, though I like it myself, is inferior to politics as a staple. Besides, one has heard of the heroes of the political trials before; and to read Raleigh's little retort when Coke complains of a want of words adequately to express his opinion of Raleigh; to be reminded how the worst of kings proved himself an admirable lawyer, and the possessor of manners which, in a humbler station, would assuredly have made the man; to hear the jokes as to Essex's responsibility for the financial prospects of the proposed revolution which amused the company of desperate men in the wine-merchant's upper room; to come across the ghost of the conversation in lonely St. Martin's Lane between the revellers at the Greyhound Tavern, and its interruption by the hostile band hurrying to the duel in Leicester Fields, creates, in my mind at least, the fantastic illusion that Raleigh, Charles I., Russell, Mohun, and the rest of them were all once actually alive. I feel that I have unduly neglected the claims of what, at the period I have had to do with, was the sister kingdom of Scotland. The Scotch were not then, taking the difference of the population of the two countries into consideration, at all behind the English in the production of treason, murder, and other interesting forms of crime; and their misdeeds were in many respects the more picturesque of the two. I had hoped to place before my readers the true account, or what passes for such, of that murder of Colin Roy Campbell of Glenure which, as we now know, produced such romantic consequences for David Balfour. The 'Forty-five should have been represented, and Lord Lovat's adventures ought to have served my purpose to a turn. But, alas! the lawyers on these occasions have been hopelessly beaten by the professed story-tellers; and the reports of the trials of Lord Lovat and James Stewart are as dull as the romances of _Waverley_ and _Catriona_ are entrancing. Why this should be so I do not know. I can ascribe it only to the inferiority of the Scots criminal procedure to our own; and ignorance prevents me from proving that inferiority by any other fact than the one which I am anxious to account for. After diligent and minute inquiry, I am pleased, though not surprised, to find that Ireland was perfectly free from serious crime during the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.