The modern autobiographical romance of adventure has perhaps been overdone. The hero is always very young and very brave; he is mixed up with great affairs; he is a true lover; he marries the heroine, and he leaves his Memoirs (at six shillings) to posterity. Stereotyped as is the method, and mechanical as are most of the novels thus constructed, it is interesting to compare with them a set of genuine Memoirs, which actually are what the novels pretend to be. Colonel John Macdonell, the author of the Memoirs, was of the Scottos family, a branch of the House of Glengarry. Indeed, in the male line the chiefs of Clan Donald are now represented by the head of the Scottos branch, not to enter on the old controversy as to the chiefship of Clan Ranald. Our Colonel was born in 1728, and was therefore a boy of eighteen in 1746. He had already been conversant with great adventures; he had seen Rome and his King, had been thrice wounded in one engagement of the Italian wars, and had relinquished his excellent prospects in the Spanish service to fight for the White Rose. An emissary between the Duke of York (not yet Cardinal) and the Prince, the bearer of a treasure in gold, our hero arrived in the Highlands just after Culloden. Robbed by the wicked Mackenzies, associated with the last rally of the loyal clans, betrayed by a cousin to a Hanoverian dungeon, young Macdonell must needs fall in love, at this juncture, with his future wife. He insults his enemies, cows the traitor who denounced him (or another traitor), marries his lady, retires to Canada, and, dying in 1810, leaves his Memoirs to his children. What more can be asked from a hero? ‘Oh, Colonel Macdonell and Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, which of you imitated the other?’ the critic is tempted to exclaim. But, if the real Colonel John ‘does it more natural,’ the fictitious David Balfour ‘does it with the better grace.’ The good Colonel never, of course, discourses to us about his contending emotions, or dilates, like Mr. Balfour, on the various trains of casuistry which meet in his simple soul. He never describes a place, nor a person, not even when he meets his King, the Duke of York, or the Duc de Fitzjames; he only describes action, vividly enough. He leaves out the love-interest, with the merest allusion; and thus, though the Colonel played a heroic part in romantic occurrences, he did not write a romance. He arranges his recollections ill, ignoring essential facts, and, later, dragging them in very awkwardly. His Memoirs are such as an elderly warrior of his period would naturally pen; they illustrate the chaotic condition of Highland morals and manners in 1745-54, and introduce us to figures familiar in the Prince’s campaign of Scotland.[106]