INDEX TO VOL. XIV. OF LITTELL'S LIVING AGE. Ancient World, Australia, Interior of, 194 azon, 153 England, Elections in, 518, 519, 543 Mormon Battalion, . · 136 El Republicano, . 137 545 . 561 Doniphan and Xenophon,. 137 139 376 . 348 Merimée, Prosper, 191 382 406 . 431 503 . 551 154 183, 199 Blind Slave in the Mines, 206 Men, Women, and Books, . 188 321 Bosjernans, Bread, . 336 to Jordan, 27 Montauk Point, 370 371 Bear-hunting in California,. Beaumont and Fletcher, . Balloon, Bursting of, Banvard's Panorama, of, . 399 Grands Jours d'Auvergne, 441 Glaciers, Garden of, 523 Gutta Percha, 593 German Lady Novelists, 594 123 Hook, Grandmother, 130 Honor and Riches, 173 China, Fortune's Wanderings 181 Masorcha Club, Attack upon, and the European Sys- tem, 228 North America, Siberia and New Bedford, Whaling, &c., 73 526 Napoleon at St. Helena, 175 Organ, Remarkable, 530 Jaunts in the Jungle, 574, 617 Dogs, Natural History of, Darien, Trip across the Oregon, Colonization of, 326 Punch, 28, 239, 249, 287, 479, 556 Philip Armytage, 537 Present and Future, 49 80 529 Piano in Illinois, 333 397 What Ireland Wants, 283 Pacific Rovings, 286 bigné,. Picture-book without Pictures, 469 Men of the late, 520 470 Lady, Memoirs of a, Peel Manifesto, 505 Drowning, 499 Dunlop's Central America, 534 MEXICO- 543 mus, Davie Campbell, -Intoxication from Ether, 213 327 on,. British Press and Mexican 16 LITTELL'S LIVING AGE. From the North British Review. Lives of Simon Lord Lovat, and Duncan Forbes of WE lately had occasion in this journal, to consider at some length the more prominent features of the Jacobitism of the last age. Our remarks were confined chiefly to the effects produced by the commotions arising out of the downfall of an ancient dynasty, on the general interests of the country, rather than on the destiny of individuals. The generalities with which, with such an object, we were obliged to deal, compelled us to disregard many of those picturesque details of individual biography, which constitute the most interesting part of this branch of Scottish history; and it is therefore with much gratification, that we are now enabled to fill up blanks that were unavoidable, by a rapid sketch of the story of one of the leading Jacobites, and of one of the few prominent royalists whose name has descended to us untarnished by incapacity or cruelty. When we glance over the history of the Jacobites, even in their most fortunate and happy moments, we are amazed to find how little of real ability they displayed; and how, instead of conduct rising with the occasion, they wasted themselves in a fondness of transient applause-courted by vanity, given by flattery, and vanishing in show, like the qualities which acquired it. Such were Mar and all the leaders of the first rebellion; and if there was more self-sacrifice in the Jacobites of the '45, they have little claim to respect on the score of energy in improving victory or remedying defeat. There was one exception to the mediocrity, which would, ere this, have covered them with oblivion, were it not for the heroism of their deaths; and he who organized, and as often betrayed their schemes, who crushed the first rebellion, and was himself overwhelmed in the second, deserves notice as well from the historical importance he has thus obtained, as from the extraordinary exhibition of character he has left us, and the extraordinary adventures of which he was the hero. In Lovat's life will be found a better insight into the social, and therefore real condition of the people of the north of Scotland, in the transition-time in which he lived, than can be found anywhere out of the Waverley Novels. He joins together the old age of feudal misrule, and that of settled government-connecting the reigns of the last Stuarts with the era of Hume and Robertson, and the kindred spirits who threw so bright a light on the commencement of our literary history. His biography has thus a charm in illustrating both epochs by his own example. The feudal tyrant in the wilds of Stratherick-a law unto himself-exercising unbounded power over the lives and fortunes of a numerous vassalage, is found united in the person of the same man who shone as a courtier in the palace of Louis le Grand-who was the correspondent and friend of literary men, and devoted much of his leisure to writing pious letters to the pious. There is, too, so much of the bandit in this man's history, that no fictitious narra CLXIV. LIVING AGE. VOL. XIV. 1 tive of border feud can exceed it in interest. We read it now with far livelier feelings than it would have produced in his own age; for, in proportion to the maturity of our civilization, is our interest in the portraiture of ruder times-the novelty of the descriptions being aided in producing this effect, by a latent contrast in favor of present comforts. Since then-a century has passed away-dynasties have been extinguished:-Europe has been revolutionized, and its social condition has undergone a change more complete than had been felt in all the previous ages since the Crusades. Lovat was born in the year 1676, in the reign of Charles the Second. He was the second son of the peer of Lovat, and was early sent to the University of Aberdeen, at which he appears to have been diligent. He acquired there the extensive acquaintance with the precepts of morality, scattered through the ancient classics, and which he applied with much facility and tact in the exigencies of his subsequent career. Is there any man who accuses him of treachery, which at the particular moment it did not suit his purpose to disclose, he cites you from Virgil the picture of a good man, the victim of the world's slander, and the object of divine commiseration;—is he anxious to condole with one whose father or brother he has hurried to his account, he brings from Seneca solemn reflections on mortality; and if he wishes to describe a patriot's death, he applies to himself the language of Horace, as to the beatific rapture consequent on dying for one's country. After leaving the university, his first act was to induce his cousin, the then Lord Lovat, to endeavor to disinherit his only child, a daughter, and to call to the succession to the honors and estates Simon's father and himself, as the nearest male-heirs. The cousin died in the year 1696, and then began a long struggle, which occupied about thirty years, between Lovat on the one hand, and the heiress and her friends on the other, in regard to the succession. Her uncle, the Marquis of Athole, was at that time influential with the government; and from that influence, and the violence of his opponent, he was enabled to direct against Lovat the whole artillery of the law, with which, indeed, the latter had a stand-up fight until the day of his death. Athole first attempted to soothe his ambition or work upon his fears; but the terms offered were either insufficient in value or in security, and they were rejected; and as Lovat is the sole historian of the transaction, they were rejected with the indignation becoming a virtuous man insulted, "I do not know what hinders me, knave and coward as you are, from running my sword through your body. You are well known for a poltroon; and if you had one grain of courage," &c. &c. These were the brave words put together in the security of after years, when, in a fit of Jacobitism, he composed what he jocosely terms "Memoirs of his Life;" and in which all his powers of imagination as to facts are well illustrated. If there was one characteristic of the man, it was the hypocrisy with which he rubbed gently down any victim on whom he had designs-the words of eastern adulation with which he plied his vanity, and the patience with which he suppressed the appearance of his half-robber, half-savage ferocity-covering its outbreaks, by bewailing it always as the indiscreet zeal of an unruly clan. Being somewhat diffident as to the result of a litigation with the Marquis of Athole, acting for his niece, he devised and executed, far away among his Highland hills, a scheme worthy of his genius, and direct and speedy in its results. In after life, when experience had sharpened his capacity, we find specific foresights and preparations for all contingencies, until success had made him presumptuous, and the relaxation of age had unstrung his vigor; but in his eager pursuit of the inheritance, his caution overleaped itself, and he fell on the other side, into a number of difficulties, for which he was obliged to endure, many a year, a vagabond life of wandering. An unsuccessful attempt to marry the heiress was followed by the next best thing-a successful one to marry her mother. This lady was at the time living at Castle Dounie, the old seat of the Frasers; and, without any warning, she one morning received a visit from Lovat, who carried her, screaming for mercy, to an inaccessible retreat used by him in his more recondite schemes. The old castle is now in ruins. The victors of Culloden, after their labors on the field were ended, devoted themselves to the destruction of the strongholds of the rebel chiefs; and Castle Dounie was among the number. In the vaults of this pile, Lovat kept the victims on whom he meant to operate; but when clamant reasons of expediency demanded it, he furnished to them a more secure retreat from worldly distractions. An island of the name of Aigas, in the midst of the rapid Beauly, which bubbles and rushes past it with resistless violence, formed an excellent natural prison, to which the dowager-peeress was immediately conducted. The account of the marriage has been taken from the records of the judicial proceedings, immediately instituted by her infuriated family. "The said Captain Simon Fraser takes up the most mad and villanous resolution that ever was heard of; for, all in a sudden, he and his said accomplices make the lady close prisoner under his armed guards, and then come upon her with three or four ruffians in the night time, and having dragged out her maids, he proposes to the lady that she should marry him; and when she fell in lamenting and crying, the great pipe was blown up to drown her cries, and the wicked villains ordered the minister to proceed." The lady fainted, and bemoaned to the idle winds; "the bagpipe is blown up as formerly, and the foresaid ruffians rent off her clothes, cutting her stays with their dirks, and so thrust her into bed." The succeeding morning displayed her in all the agony of outraged honor, her face swollen, and stupefied with grief. "For Christ's sake," she implored one of the witnesses at Lovat's trial, "take me out of this place either dead or alive." The house at the same time was surrounded by armed ruffians, who played up the bagpipe, when returning consciousness enabled the lady to express her sufferings by her screams. The Scottish privy council, who, in the absence of the sovereign, conducted the government of Scotland, found the doings of Lovat to come peculiarly within their jurisdiction. They accordingly de'barred the lieges from giving him and his father food or lodging, and commission was given to a commander of troops to enter his domains and seize him, dead or alive. The army in Scotland at that period was small enough; but Lovat in his usual grandiloquent style, in his later life, made the most of what he termed "the several regiments of cavalry and dragoons," whom he of course defeated, and whom he laid under the sanction of an oath, when he thought it unnecessary to keep them prisoners: 66 They renounced their claims in Jesus Christ, and their hopes of heaven, and delivered themselves to the devil and all the torments of hell, if they ever returned into the territories of Lord Lovat, or occasioned directly or indirectly the smallest mischief to Lord Lovat." Lovat was tried in the court of justiciary, for having assembled in arms, with his followers, and carried off Lord Saltoun, who had gone to the assistance of the heiress. This act, according to the wide sweep of the criminal law of those days, was construed into treason-conviction followed; and his name and honors, with those of his father, were declared forever extinct, and their lands and possessions forfeited. He was the last man tried in Scotland, where a conviction was obtained, and a sentence pronounced, in the absence of the accused. In the midst of these difficulties his father died, and he immediately assumed the title. But this increase of rank brought no cessation to the ceaseless pursuit which followed his conviction. From one fastness to another, from valley to mountain, he was hunted with unrelenting perseverance, deriving from his clan a precarious subsistence. Away in the remote regions of Glen Strathfarar and Stratherick, he kept up a band of devoted desperadoes, by whose ready assistance he carried on the war against the flying parties from Fort-William. Over his own people his influence had no limits. He once mildly said, that "the Highland clans, to a man, would regard it as their honor and boast to cut the throat, or blow out the brains of any one, be he who he would, who should dare to disturb the repose of their laird." The indolence of the Highlanders is proverbial; and they may also be set down as among the dirtiest even of Celts. If it is so in our day, when every motive to exertion exists, in the near community of an active population, it was far more so in that of Lovat, when our civilization was young. What the bravoes were in Italy, the retainers of a Highland chief might be considered here-they kept themselves, and paid their rent in the personal services rendered to their lord. Lovat found, in the course of a long life of war upon the world, many occasions for unhesitating service. He made it a point of sacred policy to keep his vassals in training; and no man of the last age did more to preserve alive the feeling of clanship throughout the half-savage regions of the north-making obedience to the chief be regarded in the light of an honorable duty. If there was some danger in this kind of existence, it had its advantages in its ease and idleness. Their "houseless heads and unfed sides, their looped and windowed raggedness," were matters that their thorough goût de la vie vagabonde made endurable; far more so, at least, than the monotonous pursuits of peaceful industry. At last, Lovat found that he was unable to cope with the forces sent against him; and having, by skilful flattery of Argyle, at that time the dictator of Scottish affairs, obtained his interest with King William, he hurriedly left Scotland, and presented himself, in pursuit of pardon, before that monarch in the Low Countries. He was so far successful, that he received a qualified pardon. It remitted all the crimes for which he had been already tried; | tunate men to the scaffold, where they died with leaving the outrage on Lady Lovat yet unreprieved. the most affecting protestations of their innocence The former proceedings being thus quashed, he I did not stop here, for I carried the head of Capwas cited, at the instigation of Athole, to stand trial tain Green to the grave; and in a few months after, on the 17th February, 1701, for the abduction of letters came from the captain for whose murder, the dowager. Here again he made no appearance and from the very ship for whose capture, the unforat the trial-proceeding coolly to manage his estates tunate men suffered, informing their friends that and to keep up a horde of retainers-to levy rents, they were all safe." This execution was resented and to act with as much vigor, as if he had been in England as a national insult, and produced a the undoubted owner of property, handed down to bitterness scarcely credible at the present day. him unchallenged through a long line of ancestors. Then came the vexed subject of the succession to He was declared an outlaw, and was again com- the crown-the fruitful source of national jealousy, pelled to flee his country. He sought a refuge from followed as it nearly was by actual hostilities. At the pursuit in France, leaving his brother John to last the noted act of security of the Scottish parliaact as lieutenant in his absence, to exact rents, levy ment was passed. It was magnified in England contributions, and keep the whole district of the into a declaration of absolute independence, and Aird and Stratherick in commotion. To meet this, was followed up by an act of the English parliathe privy council, at the instance of the heiress, ment, professing to remedy its alleged mischiefs. issued an abundance of orders and proclamations; This last act was effectually a declaration of open and, as was their custom with disobedient districts, war by England against Scotland, unless in a few they hounded out upon the Frasers some neighbor-months the crown should be settled on the German ing clans to ravage and desolate. At this period, Lovat was uncertain whether or not the Stuarts would be restored; and upon this depended the course to be adopted, amid the difficulties by which he was surrounded. Upon the whole, it seemed more probable that they would. Shortly after the commencement of the reign of Anne, her opinions began to glide into the juredivinity toryism at which they settled. She had no violent antipathies against her brother; and if she had no violent affection to gratify by his restoration, there was at least a greater probability that she would lean to this, than call an obscure German elector to the throne held for generations by her family. Minds as astute as Lovat's, and nearer the scene, were deceived by such appearances even at a later date, when the quarrel with Marlborough and his duchess sealed the doom of the whigs. In the mean time, Lovat, who cared nothing for the person who filled the throne, provided his own interests were not affected, did no disgrace to his sagacity in adhering at that time to the Stuarts. elector. Matters had, by these means, come to a crisis at the end of the year 1705. The people in both nations had revived the national hatreds which had slept for many years. Nay, even the very governments of the same sovereign seemed determined to run counter to one another in all their councils; and every parliament wished only to outstrip its predecessor in heaping insult upon the other country, and placing obstructions on its commerce. England laid a new impost upon Scottish cloth; Scotland prohibited all the English woollen manufacture in general, and exported all her own wool to the continent; the sister country thereupon proceeded to prohibit the importation of Scottish cattle, and to interrupt by force our long-established trade with France. It was unfortunate for the Stuarts, that amid all these conflicting elements of disunion, they had no able head to plan a national conspiracy. There were, indeed, many plots at this period, hatched on their behalf, but they all came to nothing, through the treachery or imprudence of their agents. We shall immediately see the part adopted by Lovat, in regard to one of the most feasible of these, which he himself concocted and destroyed. Prior to the union, indeed, there were circumstances that might have been worked up into a national cause, under which they might have been restored. From the accesson of Anne, down to the incorporation of the parliaments, causes of dispute On his arrival in France, he proceeded to the between the two countries, productive of exasper-country-house where embryo statesmen resolved ation, jealousy and distrust, were hourly occurring. There was first the celebrated Darien scheme, annihilated by William to conciliate the English East India Company; but whose train of disasters were not terminated in the reign of Anne. The massacre of Glencoe, left behind it a deep feeling of insult and of wrong. Then followed the seizure of the English ship Worcester, and the execution (insisted for by the Edinburgh rabble) of Captain Green, and two of his crew-a judicial murder, perpetrated against evidence, against the convictions of the judges, and against the will of government. Of all the men of note in this matter, the only person who appears to have had moral courage to resist the popular fury was Duncan Forbes, then a young student at college, who, in the debate on the Porteous riots in the house of commons, referred with honest pride to an incident of his early life, when he had the courage, in the midst of a universal fury, to expose the pusillanimity of the privy council, who signed the order for the execution. "I was," said the orator, "so struck with the horror of the fact, that I put myself in deep mourning, and with the danger of my life, attended the innocent but unfor and re-resolved upon the affairs of Europe. James the II. had carried his single-minded bigotry to the grave, and Mary of Modena became openly, what she had in reality ever been, the source and lifespring of Jacobitical intrigue. To her, Lovat applied himself with his accustomed dexterity and Highland shrewdness. He appeared before her with protestations of inviolable attachment; and, what was more to the purpose, he made assurances as to the fidelity of the clans. He never, indeed, neglected the great principle of accommodation to his company, inter lupos ululandum. A short time, however, had elapsed, when he saw through the whole farce of the do-nothing secretaries, and endeavored to free himself from the idle kind of life to which he was doomed. It was here he devised the only scheme that was ever practical for the restoration of the Stuarts. England being furiously Protestant, and Lowland Scotland sternly Presbyterian, it was hopeless to look there for a successful rising. Through the Highlands alone-the stronghold of the Stuart family-could an impression be made; and, accordingly, Lovat fixed upon the weak point with a sagacity that experience justified. To give his scheme feasibility, he drew of course | treated like a traitor and a villain, and if I had not largely upon his imagination, in stating himself to be the authorized agent of the clans. The last days of the glory of old Louis le Grand were approaching; but the prestige of the name that had long awed Europe still survived. The victories of Malborough at this period of 1702, when Lovat landed in France, had not yet convinced the world that he was no longer the invincible; and Mr. Burton somewhat anticipates the desolation which overtook the French monarchy. With the old monarch, Lovat obtained an interview, and impressed him—a shrewd judge of character-with a high notion of his abilities. He retired from the presence of the king, to consult with his ministers; and while his proposals were cautiously received, he had the satisfaction of being sent back to his own country for further information, and with an assurance of assistance on any favorable conjuncture. On his arrival in Scotland, he had some interviews with the Highland chiefs, when a new light as to his own interest dawned upon him. He immediately wiped his hands of his mission, and one night entered the presence of the Duke of Queensberry, the commissioner to the Scottish parliament, with the startling intelligence of the organization of a rebellion. The duke, overjoyed at being the instrument through whom such important information was procured," entertained Lovat with some money," and many promises. The government, on being informed of the matter, became alarmed, as the account implicated men who had much to lose, and who would, therefore, not rush blindly into rebellion. A message was conveyed to parliament, and strong resolutions were passed. The Marquis of Athole, one of the parties falsely implicated by Lovat, having got intelligence of the trap laid for him, immediately addressed the queen, in a memorial, which exposed the character of his assailant, and the means by which Queensberry had been duped, in crediting all his informant's calumnies. The affair vanished in smoke. No evidence could be found against any of the Jacobites; and the Queensberry plot added another to the hundred-and one plots of the day, leaving Lovat in the disagreeable position of having fallen between two stools. Being under sentence of outlawry still, Athole opened the bull-dogs of the law once more upon him in full cry, and once more he was obliged to retire to the continent. Rotterdam was the place he selected as a kind of neutral position, from which he could soothe the roused spirits of the Scottish Jacobites and the Court of St. Germains on the one hand, and also induce the English government, on the other, to retain him in their pay. With all his invincible humor of lying, it was difficult for him, in telling this portion of his history, to prevent some inkling of the truth. The Jacobites discovered some of his letters; and as there was no destroying the relation of identity between twice two and four, it was impossible to avoid the awkward conclusion to which his Jacobite friends found themselves obliged to come. To some he put his defence for betraying them, upon the ground of anxiety to serve their interest; and nothing can be better than the mode in which the paradox is supported. With regard to others again, who had not so clear evidence against him, he took the easier course of indignant denial: "I believe," he writes from Liege to a Scotch Jacobite," all the devils are got loose to torment me-with you I am abused, ruined, and my reputation torn. Here I suffer by those whom I served, and am had good friends here of strangers, I had perished like a dog. I do not yet know what my fate will be; but I have dear bought my conversation with those you call my real friends. You tell me that K. (Keith?) betrayed me to A., (Athole,) and now we hear of his sufferings for me; but none in England could wrong me (anglice, cxpose him) but he or you, and if either of you has wronged me, I cannot trust myself, or any flesh and blood; my comfort is, that I neither betrayed my trust or my friends, nor would not for the universe (!!!). For my part I believe the day of judgment is at hand, for I see a great many of the symptons of it." After waiting at Rotterdam for some time, he found it expedient to quit it in the disguise of a Dutch officer; and having fled to France, he was very disagreeably astonished, by being immediately seized, and encaged in the Bastile, or in the Castle of Angoulème. We have followed the history of this strange being, whose moral nature was as rotten as his intellect was acute, aided by the certain light of contemporary documents. He now, however, glides off the public stage, beyond the view of the letterwriters, and the reach of the legal warrants, which have enabled us hitherto to follow him. For ten years he lived in France, and during part of that time, there can be no doubt he was in prison. He appears, however, to have been liberated, and to have taken holy orders, joined the Jesuits at St. Omer, and, according to some accounts, to have officiated as curé at that city. During his protracted absence, the heiress of Lovat had married a gentleman of the name of M'Kenzie, who had got hold of the estates, but not of the affections of the clan. They ever regarded Lovat as their chief; and deep was their sorrow, when a report was spread, that "he had rotted in the Bastile." No communication appears to have been allowed between him and his vassals in Scotland; and, as a last resource, they determined to send a special embassy to discover, and if possible relieve him. The person selected was a Major Fraser, who has given an amusing account of the disastrous chances he suffered in his journey. Having discovered his chief among the Jesuits at St. Omer, it was found impossible to obtain the consent of the French authorities to his liberation. The two accordingly concerted an escape, which they effected by means of an open boat, which landed them on the English shore in the year 1714, at the critical moment of the death of Queen Anne. His arrival in London being soon known, his old enemy Athole once more set the officers of the law upon his track, and he only found rest to his weary footsteps, when he arrived among the wide solitudes of his own mountains. The rebellion of the '15 was raging on his arrival in the north. The indecisive battle of Sheriffmuir proclaimed the weakness of government, and the danger of energetic action on the part of the Jacobites. It was fortunate, therefore, that so influential and clever a man as Lovat, in the vigor of manhood, and with his abilities sharpened by experience, sided with the government, and recalled the whole clan of the Frasers who had gone to join the rebels. As soon as they returned, he put himself at their head, and along with Duncan Forbes, reduced the town of Inverness, on the day that the battle of Sheriffmuir was fought. This quieted the north. It prevented many from engaging in the rebellion, and cut off the communication between |