'For a century,' says Mr. Robertson, 'their privileges have been lessening: they dare not now hunt the deer, or shoot the grouse or the blackcock; they have no longer the range of the hills for their cattle and their sheep; they must not catch a salmon in a stream: in earth, air, and water, the rights of the laird are greater, and the rights of the people are smaller, than they were in the days of their forefathers. Yet, forsooth, there is much talk of philosophers of the progress of democracy as a progress to equality of conditions in our day! One of the ministers who accompanied me had to become bound for law expenses to the amount of £20, inflicted on the people for taking a log from the forest for their bridge,--a thing they and their fathers had always done unchallenged.' One eloquent passage more, and we have done. It is thus we find Mr. Robertson, to whose intensely interesting sketch we again direct the attention of the reader, summing up the case of the Rosses of Glencalvie:-- 'The father of the laird of Kindeace bought Glencalvie. It was sold by a Ross two short centuries ago. The swords of the Rosses of Glencalvie did their part in protecting this little glen, as well as the broad lands of Pitcalnie, from the ravages and the clutches of hostile septs. These clansmen bled and died in the belief that every principle of honour and morals secured their descendants a right to subsisting on the soil. The chiefs and their children had the same charter of the sword. Some Legislatures have made the right of the people superior to the right of the chief; British law-makers have made the rights of the chief everything, and those of their followers nothing. The ideas of the morality of property are in most men the creatures of their interests and sympathies. Of this there cannot be a doubt, however: the chiefs would not have had the land at all, could the clansmen have foreseen the present state of the Highlands--their children in mournful groups going into exile--the faggot of legal myrmidons in the thatch of the feal cabin--the hearths of their loves and their lives the green sheep-walks of the stranger. 'Sad it is, that it is seemingly the will of our constituencies that our laws shall prefer the few to the many. Most mournful will it be, should the clansmen of the Highlands have been cleared away, ejected, exiled, in deference to a political, a moral, a social, and an economical mistake,--a suggestion not of philosophy, but of mammon,--a system in which the demon of sordidness assumed the shape of the angel of civilisation and of light.' _September 4, 1844._ ----- {1} _The Rosses of Glencalvie_, by John Robertson, Esq. (article in the Glasgow _National_, August 1844).--ED. THE POET MONTGOMERY.