couch he would have risen half
poisoned with stench, half blind with the reek of turf, and half
mad with the itch.

"This is not an attractive picture. And yet an enlightened and
dispassionate observer would have found in the character and
manners of this rude people something which might well excite
admiration and a good hope. Their courage was what great exploits
achieved in all the four quarters of the globe have since proved it
to be. Their intense attachment to their own tribe and to their own
patriarch, though politically a great evil, partook of the nature
of virtue. The sentiment was misdirected and ill regulated; but
still it was heroic. There must be some elevation of soul in a man
who loves the society of which he is a member and the leader whom
he follows with a love stronger than the love of life. It was true
that the Highlander had few scruples about shedding the blood of an
enemy; but it was not less true that he had high notions of the
duty of observing faith to allies and hospitality to guests. It was
true that his predatory habits were most pernicious to the
commonwealth. Yet those erred greatly who imagined that he bore any
resemblance to villains who, in rich and well governed communities,
live by stealing. When he drove before him the herds of Lowland
farmers up the pass which led to his native glen, he no more
considered himself as a thief than the Raleighs and Drakes
considered themselves as thieves when they divided the cargoes of
Spanish galleons. He was a warrior seizing lawful prize of war, of
war never once intermitted during the thirty-five generations which
had passed away since the Teutonic invaders had driven the children
of the soil to the mountains....

"His inordinate pride of birth and his contempt for labor and trade
were indeed great weaknesses, and had done far more than the
inclemency of the air and the sterility of the soil to keep his
country poor and rude. Yet even here there was some compensation.
It must in fairness be acknowledged that the patrician virtues were
not less widely diffused among the population of the Highlands than
the patrician vices. As there was no other part of the island where
men, sordidly clothed, lodged, and fed, indulged themselves to such
a degree in the idle, sauntering ha