At that time the Duke of Atholl seemed the most powerful of them all. In 1715 he was reckoned as having 6000 claymores at his call, as many as the two great Campbell families put together; but the call behoved to be against the Government, for most of the clan followed his sons in intermittent service of the Pretender. Through their chief taking the prosaic side, or through the growth of new conditions of life, by 1745 his influence had shrunk so that his following was estimated as having fallen by a half; then, as we have seen, it did not rise heartily either at his bidding, or at his Jacobite brother’s. There seems hint of a reason for this in the fact that Lord George Murray’s own regiment was counted not among the Highland but the Lowland contingent of Prince Charlie’s army; then a recently published official report, written 1750, on the state of the clans, hardly mentions Atholl, treating it rather as brought to Lowland law and order. Leases, as once charters, came to be a solvent for the old adhesiveness of clan life. Not only in Scotland was Atholl’s Duke a great man. By the spindle side, he inherited the Derby Earl’s kingship of the Isle of Man, a too pretentious title abridged to that of Lord, and finally sold to the Crown for nearly half a million in all, which went to tame and adorn Atholl. When claymores could be beaten into ploughshares, the dukes were not behind other great Highland proprietors in improving their estate, turning robbers’ lairs into snug farms, the camps of turbulent chieftains into trim parks, and covering the bare glens with lordly plantations, among which tens of thousands of trees came to be blown down by that storm that wrecked the Tay Bridge. One of those dukes is said to have planted trees by the million. At the same time they cultivated what may be called an ornamental Highland feeling; and if nowadays they are not so wealthy as British nobles enriched from City moneybags or American pork butcheries, they have a considerable holding in sentimental loyalty not wholly uprooted by sheriff courts and railways. An hereditary taste for sport helped to win the hearts of a people cherishing so much of their ancestral instincts, while efforts to keep the northern wilds of Atholl as a deer forest rather than a tourist ground did not go to gild this coronet in the eyes of Southerners. The most outstanding of the race in our times was that Duke of the Victoria and Albert days, of whom hard things were said in newspapers when he tried to shut up Glen Tilt. In _Bonnie Scotland_ I echoed those revilings, so now, _per contra_, let me quote Dr. John Brown’s appreciation of this last of the Highland chiefs.