PREFATORY LETTER. TO HUGH LITTLEJOHN, ESQ. MY DEAR CHILD, I HAVE now finished the task I had imposed on myself, of giving you an opportunity of acquiring a knowledge of the past events of Scottish History; and a bloody and tragic tale it has been. The generation of which I am an individual, and which, having now seen the second race of their successors, must soon prepare to leave the scene, have been the first Scotsmen who appear likely to quit the stage of life, without witnessing either foreign or domestic war within their country. Our fathers beheld the civil convulsion of 1745-6,— the race who preceded them saw the commotions of 1715, 1718, and the war of the Revolution in 1688-9. A third and earlier generation witnessed the two insurrections of Pentland Hills and Bothwell Bridge, and a fourth lived in the bloody times of the great Civil War; a fifth had in memory the civil contests of James the Sixth's minority; and a sixth race carries us back to the long period when the blessings of peace were totally unknown, and the state of constant hostility between England and Scotland, was only interrupted by insecure and illkept truces of a very few years' endurance. And even in your Grandfather's own time, though this country was fortunate enough to escape becoming the theatre of bloody conflict, yet we had only to look abroad to witness such extensive scenes of war and slaughter, such subversion of established states, and extinction of ancient dynasties, as if the European world was again about to return to the bondage of an universal empire. We have, therefore, had an unexpected, and almost unhoped-for escape from the evils of war in our own country, at the expense of beholding from our island the general devastation of the Continent, with the frequent alarm that we ourselves were about to be involved in it. It is with sincere joy that I see a period arrived, in which the rising generation may for |