ng laird discreetly fled,
Was seiz'd, and hang'd till he was dead, dead, dead.
"_Jockey._ Full sorely may we all lament that day,
For all were losers in the deadly fray;
Five brothers had I on the Scottish plains,
Well dost thou know were none more hopeful swains;
Five brothers there I lost, in manhood's pride,
Two in the field, and three on gibbets dy'd:
Ah! silly swains! to follow war's alarms;
Ah! what hath shepherd's life to do with arms?
"_Sawney._ Mention it not--There saw I strangers clad
In all the honours of our ravish'd Plaid;
Saw the Ferrara, too, our nation's pride,
Unwilling grace the awkward victor's side.
There fell our choicest youth, and from that day
Mote never Sawney tune the merry lay;
Bless'd those which fell! curs'd those which still survive!
To mourn Fifteen renew'd in Forty-five."

As our memory of our personal experiences about the period in Scottish
history at which the above scene is laid is extremely obscure, we cannot
take upon ourselves to speak authoritatively of the fidelity of the
picture. But Churchill, we grieve to say it, was a regular--a thorough
Cockney. The instant a Cockney opens his mouth, or puts pen to paper about
Scotland, he stands confessed. Here Charles's attempt at the Scottish
dialect betrays the taint. Not a single one of the words he chucklingly
puts into the lips of Jockey and Sawney as characteristically
Scoto-Arcadian, was ever heard or seen by the breechless swains of that
pastoral realm. Never does an alien look so silly to the natives, be they
who they may, as when instructing them in their own language, or mimicking
the niceties and delicacies of its dialects. They pardonably think him
little better than a fool; nor does he mend the matter much by telling
them that he is satirical and a wit.

Considerable latitude in the article of language must be allowed to the
poet, who presents to us engaged in dialogue two natives of a country
where clothes and victuals are nearly unknown. "Rude must they be in
speech--and little graced with the set phrase of peace." Churchill was
bound to have conceived for them an utterance natural to their condition,
as Shakspeare did for Caliban. But over and above the Cockneyisms
committed by him, he makes them twaddle like middle-aged men in
middle-sized towns, who had passed all their nights in blankets, and all
their days in breeches, with as liberal an allowance of food as parish
paupers.