[28] Bourienne.
[29] "The sabre I recognised at once; only since I had last seen it, the following words had been engraved on the blade:—Sabre worn by the Emperor on the day of the battle of Mount Tabor."—Bourienne, vol. iv.
[30] Biographie Universelle, &c.
OF BINNS, GENERAL OF THE SCOTTISH ARMY, AND FIRST COLONEL OF THE SCOTS GREY DRAGOONS.
In my novel of The Scottish Cavalier I have endeavoured to portray the character of this celebrated cavalier officer, with all that military sternness and ferocity of disposition which has generally been attributed to him, but chiefly by his enemies, for the poor man seems never to have found a single friend among the many historians of the Covenant. Thus, notwithstanding his unwavering loyalty to the House of Stuart in the days of its declension, by his extreme severity when that House was in the zenith of its power, he became so unpopular in Scotland, that his memory is still execrated there. He is stigmatized as a "persecutor," as the Bloody Dalyell, whose spirit is yet averred to haunt the fields where he routed or slew the children of the Covenant—who had sold himself to the devil; one who was shot-proof, and
"Whose form no darkening shadow traced
Upon the sunny wall;"
one who, when he spat, burned a hole in the earth; one in whose military boots water would boil, and whose spectre, habited in a buff coat and morion, wearing that voluminous white beard for which he was so remarkable, still haunts the house in which he was born and the tomb in which he lies.