We have said that his Grace's ancestors, the old earls, did much to foster this spirit. The history of Sutherland, as a county, differs from all our other Highland districts. Its two great families were those of Reay and Sutherland, both of which, from an early period of the Reformation, were not only Protestant, but also thoroughly evangelical. It was the venerable Earl of Sutherland who first subscribed the National Covenant in the Greyfriars. It was a scion of the Reay family--a man of great personal piety--who led the troops of William against Dundee at Killiecrankie. Their influence was all-powerful in Sutherland, and directed to the best ends; and we find it stated by Captain Henderson, in his general view of the agriculture of the country, as a well-established and surely not uninteresting fact, that 'the crimes of rapine, murder, and plunder, though not unusual in the county during the feuds and conflicts of the clans, were put an end to about the year 1640'--a full century before our other Highland districts had become even partially civilised. 'Pious earls and barons of former times,' says a native of the county, in a small work published in Edinburgh about sixteen years ago, 'encouraged and patronized pious ministers, and a high tone of religious feeling came thus to be diffused throughout the country.' Its piety was strongly of the Presbyterian type; and in no district of the south were the questions which received such prominence in our late ecclesiastical controversy better understood by both the people and the patrons, than in Sutherland a full century ago. We have before us an interesting document, the invitation of the elders, parishioners, and heritors of Lairg, to the Rev. Thomas M'Kay, 1748, to be their minister, in which, 'hoping that' he would find their 'call, carried on with great sincerity, unanimity, and order, to be a clear call from the Lord,' they faithfully promise to 'yield him, in their several stations and relations, all dutiful respect and encouragement.' William Earl of Sutherland was patron of the parish, but we find him on this occasion exercising no patronate powers: at the head of parishioners and elders he merely adhibits his name. He merely _invites_ with the others. The state of morals in the county was remarkably exemplified at a later period by the regiment of Sutherland Highlanders, embodied originally in 1793, under the name of the Sutherlandshire Fencibles, and subsequently in 1800 as the 93d Regiment. Most other troops are drawn from among the unsettled and reckless part of the population; not so the Sutherland Highlanders. On the breaking out of the revolutionary war, the mother of the present Duke summoned them from their hills, and five hundred fighting men marched down to Dunrobin Castle, to make a tender of their swords to their country, at the command of their chieftainess. The regiment, therefore, must be regarded as a fair specimen of the character of the