TARTAN STUDIES

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 21010, 11 November 1933, Page 15

TARTAN STUDIES

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY SCOTS Challenge to the Highlander. By A. A. W. Ramsay. John Murray. 327 pp. (7/6 net.)

This book will move any Celt who may read it; and it will be best understood by those Celts, and they are not few, who have the fortitude to face the unpleasant and weak phases of Scottish character. The men of this race are gallant, daring, full of initiative, intelligent; but they are emotionally fickle, impetuous, prone to despair, and they have a grasping sense of property. Only a Celt will understand why the race lias thrown up leaders of incredible audacity and incredible timidity, men who did not know their own bravery and cowardice, men who could inspire loyalty to an impossible cause, and who, more often than not, led their unshaken followers through dire suffering into irretrievable ruin.

Dr. Ramsay does much more than describe his six hero-scoundrels, Montrose, Argyll, Wariston, Lochiel, Lovat, Forbes of Culloden. He has set right long-standing historical misconceptions by the thoroughness of his researches, and his scholarship is masked by the clarity of his exposition and by his insight into the essential humanity of his men. He has told the story of seventeenthcentury Scotland with illuminating glimpses of English and Irish politics. In a phrase or two he has characterised English kings and prelates, Scottish judges, and the remarkable Scottish emigres who infested the French Court before and alter the Restoration. Without special pleading he has reversed the usual conception of Highlander and Lowlander. It is the Lowlander who is the poet, the idealist, and the Highlander who is the materialist, the scientist, colonist, soldier, politician. The men who were Jed by Lochiel and Lovat and other great lords lived "in a hovel where an English- | man would not have housed his cattle"; they were foul-mouthed and loose-living, the despair of the minister, yet withal keen theologians . . . capable of cruelty and treachery to the enemy and the most self-sacrificing loyalty to their country; and when trained, the best pikemer. in Europe. Montrose, Argyll, Lochiel, and Lovat were constrained, by their self-seeking and desire to hold their own lands and their rivals', to make decisions fatal to themselves and their men. Their plans were often foolish and treacherous; but by their courage and endurance they put off inevitable defeat and misery, and even seemed at times to be set on a victorious course that could not fail. Yet all but Lochiel died on the scaffold,* and he, in his cold cowardice, cleceitfulness, and selfishness was most worthy of the rope. He lived more than 90 years, and died in luxury and contentment. Lovat, the most violent in his rascality, was also the most likeable for his geniality, complete selfdeception, and bravery in the face of death. Johnstone of Wariston, the diplomat, was the real revolutionary, a Scottish Mazzini or Lenin. His life-long self-torture over scruples of religion and his unflagging wisdom and energy deserved a happier life. Forbes of Culloden is historically the most important character described by Dr. Ramsay. In his lifetime he received little gratitude and no material reward for his extraordinary exertions; and to this day his work is almost unknown. From 1715 to 1745 he worked for the reclamation of the Highlands, so that when the '45 came there was no danger of another cleavage between Scotland and England. The book was worth writing to restore his injured name: but the accompanying portraits of the lords of Scotland whose names have been obscured by the adulation or calumny of legend and ballad make these decades of involved and bloody strife seem, as they were, the national' fruit, of the jealousy and selfishness, of the bravery and patriotism of Highlander and Low-