“O for that pencil, erst profuse Of Chivalry’s emblazoned hues, That traced of old in Woodstock bower The pageant of the Leaf and Flower, And bodied forth the tourney high, Held for the hand of Emily! Then might I paint the tumult broad, That to the crowned abbey flowed; Paint the dejected cavalier, Doubtful, disarmed and sad of cheer; And his proud foe, whose formal eye Claimed conquest now and mastery; And the brute crowd, whose envious zeal Huzzas each turn of Fortune’s wheel.” “The Legend of Montrose” takes us once more into the Highlands of Scotland, where the same deadly feuds divide the clans which we witnessed in reading the “Fair Maid of Perth.” The Northern Highlanders, under the leadership of Montrose, espouse the side of King Charles. The Western Highlanders, under Argyle, rally on the side of Parliament. The picture of these two leaders is admirably drawn, as well as the character of their bold followers, who seemed unconscious of hardship; who were not only willing “to make their couch in the snow, but considered it effeminate luxury to use a snow-ball for a pillow.” The principal character of the book is Captain Dalgetty. A critic in the Edinburgh _Review_ complained that there was perhaps too much of Dalgetty; that he engrossed too great a proportion of the work. But in the very next line he says that “the author has nowhere shown more affinity to that matchless spirit, who could bring out his Falstaffs and his Pistols, in act after act, and play after play, and exercise them every time with scenes of unbounded loquacity, without exhausting their humor, or varying a note from its characteristic tone, than in his large and reiterated specimens of the eloquence of the redoubted Dalgetty.” Like many of the Scottish soldiers the captain had served under Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, and never lost his enthusiasm for the Lion of the North, the bulwark of the Protestant faith. Dalgetty is a rare specimen of Scotch “canniness,” willing to hire out to the side that paid the most, but true to his contract when made. To him war was a sort of drama, and he merely engaged himself as one of the “star actors.” We dismiss the captain with reluctance, and we imagine the reader will likewise when he closes the volume.