It was aye the opinion of the Political folk, the Whigs, the Black-nebs, the Radicals, the Papists, and the Friends of the People, together with the rest of the clan-jamphrey, that it was a done battle, and that Buonaparte would lick us back and side. All this was in the heart and heat of the great war, when we were struggling, like drowning men, for our very life and existence, and when our colours--the true British flag--were nailed to the mast-head. One would have thought these rips were a set of prophets, they were all so busy prophesying, and never anything good. They kent (believe them) that we were to be smote hip and thigh; and that to oppose the vile Corsican was like men with strait-jackets out of Bedlam. They could see nothing brewing around them but death, and disaster, and desolation, and pillage, and national bankruptcy--our brave Highlanders, with their heads shot off, lying on the bloody field of battle, all slaughtered to a man; our sailors, handcuffed and shackled, musing in a French prison on the bypast days of Camperdown, and of Lord Rodney breaking through the line; with all their fleets sunk to the bottom of the salt sea, after being raked fore and aft with chain-shot; and our timber, sugar, tea and treacle merchants, all fleeing for safety and succour down to lodgings in the Abbey Strand, with a yellow stocking on the ae leg and a black one on the other, like a wheen mountebanks. Little could they foresee, with their spentacles of prophecy, that a battle of Waterloo would ever be fought, to make the confounded fugies draw in their horns, and steek up their scraighing gabs for ever. Poor fushionless creatures! I do not pretend to be a politician,--having been bred to the tailoring line syne ever I was a callant, and not seeing the Adverteezer Newspapers, or the Edinburgh Evening Courant, save and except at an orra time,--so I shall say no more, nor pretend to be one of the thousand-and-one wise men, able and willing to direct his Majesty's Ministers on all matters of importance regarding Church or State. One thing, however, I trust I ken, and that is, my duty to my King as his loyal subject, to old Scotland as her unworthy son, and to my family as their prop, support, and breadwinner;--so I shall stick to all three (under Heaven) as long as I have a drop of blood in my precious veins. But the truth is--and I will let it out and shame the de'il--that I could not help making these general observations (as Maister Wiggie calls the spiritualeezing of his discourses), as what I have to relate might well make my principles suspected, were they not known to all the world to be as firm as the foundations of the Bass Rock. Ye shall nevertheless judge for yourselves.