Claimed conquest now and mastery;
And the brute crowd, whose envious zeal
Huzzas each turn of Fortune’s wheel.”
“The Legend of Montrose” takes us once more into the Highlands of Scotland, where the same deadly feuds divide the clans which we witnessed in reading the “Fair Maid of Perth.” The Northern Highlanders, under the leadership of Montrose, espouse the side of King Charles. The Western Highlanders, under Argyle, rally on the side of Parliament. The picture of these two leaders is admirably drawn, as well as the character of their bold followers, who seemed unconscious of hardship; who were not only willing “to make their couch in the snow, but considered it effeminate luxury to use a snow-ball for a pillow.”
The principal character of the book is Captain Dalgetty. A critic in the Edinburgh Review complained that there was perhaps too much of Dalgetty; that he engrossed too great a proportion of the work. But in the very next line he says that “the author has nowhere shown more affinity to that matchless spirit, who could bring out his Falstaffs and his Pistols, in act after act, and play after play, and exercise them every time with scenes of unbounded loquacity, without exhausting their humor, or varying a note from its characteristic tone, than in his large and reiterated specimens of the eloquence of the redoubted Dalgetty.” Like many of the Scottish soldiers the captain had served under Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, and never lost his enthusiasm for the Lion of the North, the bulwark of the Protestant faith. Dalgetty is a rare specimen of Scotch “canniness,” willing to hire out to the side that paid the most, but true to his contract when made. To him war was a sort of drama, and he merely engaged himself as one of the “star actors.” We dismiss the captain with reluctance, and we imagine the reader will likewise when he closes the volume.
In one of the last chapters Scott treats us to a specimen of the lofty eloquence and undying hate of an old highland chief in his last words to his grandson: “In the thicket of the wilderness, and in the mist of the mountain, keep thou unsoiled the freedom which I leave thee as a birthright. Barter it neither for the rich garment, nor for the stone roof, nor for the covered board, nor for the couch of down—on the rock or in the valley, in abundance or in famine—in the leafy summer, and in the days of the iron winter—son of the mist! be free as thy forefathers. Own no lord—receive no law—take no hire—give no stipend—build no hut—enclose no pasture—sow no grain; let the deer of the mountains be thy flocks and herds—if these fail thee, prey upon the goods of our oppressors—of the Saxon and of such Gael as are Saxon in their souls. Remember those who have done kindness to our race, and pay their services with thy blood, should the hour require it. Farewell, beloved! and mayst thou die like thy forefathers, ere infirmity, disease, or age shall break thy spirit.”
Robert Aytoun in his poem on the “Execution of Montrose,” which occurred a few years subsequent to our story, caught the true spirit of the Gael, in the Highlander’s address to Evan Cameron:
“’Twas I that led the Highland host
Through wild Lochaber’s snows,
What time the plaided clans came down