[Illustration: SILVER STRAND, LOCH KATRINE] “Wee Magregors” and such-like, once looked on as wolf cubs to be caged or exterminated. And much of this favour and familiarity comes through the figure cut by Rob Roy, to make famous a name he himself durst not bear, unless by stealth, when his foot stood firm on his native heath. As to the popular hero of her clan, Miss Murray Macgregor has not so much to say as might be expected; she seems even inclined to belittle his reputation, and to denounce his freebooting exploits as discreditable anachronism in a day of “changing moral sense.” She would have us know that he was by no means the chief of the clan, as has been lightly said, but only uncle and tutor to the young chieftain of Glengyle, a junior branch rooted at the head of Loch Katrine. But he is by far the most widely celebrated son of Gregor; and we need turn to no more recondite source than Scott for fact and fiction to illustrate a career that in its own day made copy for a London hack writer. Sir Walter, by the way, regrets that rare tract, _The Highland Rogue_, not having fallen to be written by Defoe; but there now seems reason to believe that this catchpenny piece was Defoe’s work. Better informed biographies of Rob Roy have been written in our time, one decked out in trappings of fiction by the novelist James Grant; but he is still best known from the novel that bears his name, or from Wordsworth’s humorously idealising verses. Not to swell out the following sketch of his life with vain repetitions of such qualifying phrases as “it is said,” “he is believed,” the reader will please understand that a writer has here to pick out what seems most likely to be the fact from a mass of deficient and sometimes contradictory materials more easily handled by fiction than by history. Our critical generation has gleaned very little to round off the presentment of his hero by a romancer who in youth had opportunities to gather what passed for truth about the scenes of Rob’s exploits.