ses lay unburied so
long as these limmers were ungone to the camp."

The Commissary-Clerk was on Montrose's side, but he had the hatred of a
Lowlander of that day for the Highlanders. He has a great many amusing
episodes describing the light-fingered lads from the hills coming down,
and in the general confusion of the times plundering Cavalier and
Covenanter alike; and on these occasions he drops his usual placidity
and becomes rabid and abusive, as the best-tempered Americans are said
to become when they speak of niggers, and deals out to them the terms
limmers, thieves, robbers, cut-throats, masterful vagrants, and so
forth, with great volubility. Of some of their chiefs, renowned in
history, he speaks as mere robber-leaders, and when they are known by
one name in their own country and another in the Lowlands, he puts an
_alias_ between the two. The very initial words of his chronicle are,
"Efter the death and burial of Angus Macintosh of Auldterlie, _alias_
Angus Williamson."

Montrose having departed, Argyle's troops commenced to plunder the
district for having submitted to his enemy, and these, being doubly
offensive as Covenanters and Highlanders, are treated accordingly. But
it is necessary to be impartial; and having bestowed so much on the
Cavalier annalist, let us take a glimpse at the other side.

Robert Wodrow.

From the collections of the Reverend Robert Wodrow, the historian of The
Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, a rich harvest has been reaped by
the northern clubs, one of which appropriately adopted his name. He was
a voluminous writer and an inexhaustible collector. It is generally
classed among the failings of the book-hunter that he looks only to the
far past, and disregards the contemporary and the recent. Wodrow was a
valuable exception to this propensity. Reversing the spirit of the
selfish bull which asks what posterity has done for us, he stored up
contemporary literature for subsequent generations; and he thus left, at
the commencement of the eighteenth century, such a library as a
collector of the nineteenth, could he have sent a caterer before him,
would have prepared to await his arrival in the world. The inestimable
value of the great collection of the civil-war pamphlets made by George
Thomason, and fortunately preserved in the British Museum, is very well
known. Just such another of its kind is Wodrow's, made up of the
pamphlets, broadsides, pasquinades, and other fugitive