I should have shrieked with laughter. The absurdity of the situation passes the limits even of a farce. A certain Duke, who had received £6000 a year, whereof a large part came of an immoral trade, had been to London and sold his interest in it for £70,000, because if he had not taken that, he would probably have got nothing. With thirteen years' purchase of his insecure revenue in his pocket, and £2000 a year promised, and his salary as Governor-in-Chief besides, he returns to the island where half the people are impoverished by his sale of the island, and nobody else has received a copper coin, and everybody is doomed to pay back interest on what the Duke has received! What is the picture? The Duke lands at the old jetty, and there his carriage is waiting to take him to the house, where he and his have kept swashbuckler courts, with troops of fine gentlemen debtors from London. The Manxmen forget everything except that his dignity is reduced. They unyoke his horses, get into his shafts, drag him through the streets, toss up their caps and cry hurrah! hurrah! One seems to see the Duke sitting there with his arms folded, and his head on his breast. He can't help laughing. The thing is too ridiculous. Oh, if Swift had been there to see it, what a scorching satire we should have had! But the Athols soon spirited away their popularity. First they clamoured for a further sum on account of the lost revenues, and they got it. Then they tried to appropriate part of the income of the clergy. Again, they put members of their family into the bishopric, and one of them sold his tithes to a factor who tried to extort them by strong measures, which led to green crop riots. In the end, their gross selfishness, which thought of their own losses but forgot the losses of the people, raised such open marks of aversion in the island that they finally signified to the king their desire to sell all their remaining rights, their land and manorial rights. This they did in 1829, receiving altogether, for custom, revenue, tithes, patronage of the bishopric, and quit rents, the sum of £416,000. Such was the value to the last of the Athols of the Manx dynasty, of that little hungry island of the Irish Sea, which Henry IV. gave to the Stanleys, and Sir John de Stanley did not think worth while to look at. So there was an end of the House of Athol. Exit the House of Athol! The play goes on without them. HOME RULE