This clear and concise description will serve to convey an idea of clanship as it existed in the Highlands, about the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the system was in full force and vigour. It presented a singular mixture of patriarchal and feudal government; and everything connected with the habits, manners, customs, and feelings of the people tended to maintain it unimpaired, amidst all the changes which were gradually taking place in other parts of the country, from the diffusion of knowledge, and the progress of improvement. There was, indeed, something almost oriental in the character of immutability which seemed to belong to this primitive institution, endeared as it was to the affections, and singularly adapted to the condition of the people amongst whom it prevailed. Under its influence all their habits had been formed; with it all their feelings and associations were indissolubly blended. When the kindred and the followers of a chief saw him surrounded by a body of adherents, numerous, faithful, and brave, devoted to his interests, and ready at all times to sacrifice their lives in his service, they could conceive no power superior to his; and, when they looked back into the past history of their tribe, they found that his progenitors had, from time immemorial, been at their head. Their tales, their traditions, their songs, constantly referred to the exploits or the transactions of the same tribe or fraternity living under the same line of chiefs; and the transmission of command and obedience, of protection and attachment, from one generation to another, became in consequence as natural, in the eye of a Highlander, as the transmission of blood or the regular laws of descent. This order of things appeared to him as fixed and as inviolable as the constitution of nature or the revolutions of the seasons. Hence nothing could shake his fidelity to his chief, or induce him to compromise what he believed to be for the honour and interest of his clan. He was not without his feelings of independence, and he would not have brooked oppression where he looked for kindness and protection. But the long unbroken line of chiefs is of itself a strong presumptive proof of the general mildness of their sway. The individuals might change, but the ties which bound one generation were drawn more closely, although by insensible degrees, around the succeeding one; and thus each family, in all its various successions, retained something like the same sort of relation to the parent stem, which the renewed leaves of a tree in spring preserve, in point of form and position, to those which had dropped off in the preceding autumn.