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particular features that have not been already described. The house is on a plateau, close under the Ardjoeno peak, and was built about ten years ago by a Scotch sugar-planter who has since left Java. A small charge is made for its occupation, and there is sufficient furniture in it, but the visitor has to bring food and bedding. The ascent to the crater of Ardjoeno is a three hours' rough scramble through forest and over blocks of lava, and presents no difficulties for a good walker. The descent takes two hours. The Welirang crater requires four hours there and back. Both these volcanoes are now extinct, but in the latter sulphur fumes still rise and deposit crystals on planks which are placed for the purpose over the crevices. The masses of crystals thus obtained sometimes attain a length of nearly two feet; and we met several natives carrying baskets of them down to the plains for sale. The Ardjoeno

flora contains the temperate plants usually found at similar elevations, with some additions not observed before, among which was a small geranium (G. ardjoense), closely related to an Australian species, and remarkable as the only geranium found in the Malay archipelago.

The visit to Prigen brought our Javan tour to an end, and we left the hotel at 5 A.M. in sados, arrived at the Porong railway station at half-past six, and reached Soerabaja at nine o'clock. The same evening we sailed in a Dutch steamer for Batavia, calling en route at the small island of Bawejan, where we stayed a few hours. This is of volcanic origin, and its hills are covered with dense forest, giving place on the lower slopes to sugar-cane and other cultivated crops. On the third day we landed at Batavia, whence we sailed in the weekly steamer to Singapore, arriving there on 12th June.

H. COLLETT.

VOL. CLVI.-NO. DCCCCXLV.

G

SIDE-LIGHTS ON THE BATTLES OF PRESTON AND FALKIRK.

CHARLES EDWARD had landed at Borrodale in Arisaig in the last week of July 1745. His hopes of support from the French Government had been greatly disappointed, but the enthusiasm and persistent purpose of the man had led to this bold-apparently most hazardous-initial step. The same qualities, joined to considerable sagacity and insight, and great physical endurance, sustained him to the last through many discouragements, led him even to more than one victory, and after the final disaster of Culloden, stood him in good stead in his wanderings and terrible hardships. His standard had been unfurled in the vale of Glenfinnan, at the head of Loch Shiel—a banner of red silk with a white space in the destined to draw many hearts to it, to evoke much chivalrous devotion, to be identified for a time with heroism and victory, but the precursory symbol of the wreck of many a noble life and the ruin of many an ancient home. Highland clan after clan furnished contingents for the enterprise. At length he found himself strong enough to set out on the march southwards. Sir John Cope was sent with peremptory orders to intercept him. Cope got as far as Dalwhinnie, within sight of Corriearrick, whose summit the Highlanders had already occupied from the other side. Instead, however, of facing the foe, Cope thought it prudent to turn to the right and march on to Inverness, thus leaving the Prince free to continue his march

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on Edinburgh. In the capital internal dissensions prevailed. There was a struggle for municipal office. The tradesmen of the guilds were much more interested in the question as to who should be Deacon, than in that of who should be King. No proper precautions had been taken to meet the emergency, and Provost Stuart and Captain Drummond, of opposite political leanings, did not work in harmony. The result was that no competent force was sent out from the capital to stay the march of the Pretender; and in the end, Lochiel and other chiefs with 900 Highlanders contrived to enter by the Nether Bow Port at five in the morning. The citizens were asleep, and the city was now at their mercy. The valiant Scottish officials of Bench and Bar, to say nothing of municipal and ecclesiastical dignitaries, had almost universally fled. The Highlanders might do as they chose, but here at least they behaved well. The Prince entered Holyrood in the course of the day amid great enthusiasm.

He and his army remained in the capital until Cope had returned from Inverness, and was threatening them from Dunbar on the east. On Friday the 20th September the Prince, at the head of his army, set out from Duddingston, where they had bivouacked during the night. Cope was advancing from Dunbar. The Royalist army reached Preston a little after noon. At first Cope drew up his line fronting the west. Finding the Highlanders passing him to the south, he changed his position

1 Chambers, Rebellion, 1745, vol. i. p. 95.

so as to front southwards. In the morning of the battle he returned to his first position, with his line, however, facing the east. He had Cockenzie and the sea on his flank to the north. On the south of his line was a boggy morass traversed by a deep ditch or drain, that made for the sea by the east of Seton Castle. The Highlanders lay down for the night in an open stubblefield to the west and south of Cope's position. Towards evening a thick mist or easterly haar settled down on land and sea. The Prince, along with his officers and soldiers, slept under the open heaven in this field of cut pease a sheaf of pease-straw serving each man for pillow.

The attack was to be made in the morning, but the difficulty for the forces of the Prince was how to get across the morass and ditch with safety and without exposure to unreturned fire. A scheme for doing so was brought to Lord George Murray and the Prince, in the early hours of the night, by a son of Anderson of Whitborough, a proprietor in Lothian. It was at once adopted, and it was resolved to follow his guidance through the bog, and attack the Royalists in the early morning. The force began to move about three o'clock, some three hours before sunrise. Following Anderson in dead silence, they stole down the valley that runs through the farm of Ringan Head,-concealed by the darkness of the night, and, as day broke, by the mist. When near ing the morass, they were discovered by an advance-guard of dragoons; but they were able to cross and form on the firm ground on the other side without molestation. Cope was meanwhile riding in hot haste from Cockenzie, where he had been wakened from his

sleep. The sun had now risen, and was breaking the mist into cloudy masses that rolled from the Firth on their right to the fields on their left. But neither army could be seen by the other. The line of the Highlanders hastily formed was somewhat irregular, but advance to the attack was at once made. Before they got half-way, the sun had partly dispelled the mist, and displayed the glittering array of the bayonets of the Royalist line. Lochiel and the Camerons led, and pierced impetuously through a fire of cannon and musketry. Nothing could withstand their onset. They met a squadron of dragoons under Colonel Whitney, who panicstruck merely fired a few shots and fled. The famous Colonel Gardiner then advanced to fill the place of the vanished squadron, but his cavalry too fled in panic and precipitation, much to their leader's grief. In a similar manner Hamilton's dragoons on the left flank turned from the field in terror before the MacDonalds, without, it is said, even firing a shot. The defenceless infantry was thus left to the sweep of the Highland broadsword and the thrust of the dagger. As was their custom, the Highlanders when within range fired one volley of musketry, then threw away their pieces, and, having the broadsword in the right hand and target and dirk in the left, made a torrent-like rush on the opposing line. The gleam of the terrible steel burst through the smoke of the fire. Receiving the thrust of the enemy's bayonet in the target, where it stuck, each man cut down his fronting foe. The assailants were speedily within the opposing line, pushing right and left with sword and dagger. The battle was decided in a few minutes. What followed was mere but terrible car

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nage,1-made by broadsword and the scythe-headed pole. Though the number of combatants on either side was not great, yet the sun has rarely shone on any battle-field that presented a more gory or ghastly spectacle than that of Preston on that September Saturday.

Sir John Cope, after in vain trying to rally the dragoons, who had behaved so shamefully, and boggling on horseback amid the lanes of Preston, rode from the field with 400 cavalry. The panic of the day had evidently permeated him, for he never halted until he had put more than twenty miles behind him, and got to Lauder, where he halted for refreshment.2 Thence he rode to Coldstream, and next day reached Berwick, carrying through the Lowlands like a flying courier the first news of his own defeat.

The following letters were written after the battle, and they contain reports of eye-witnesses. They do not add materially to our information, but they confirm and illustrate points in the ordinary narrative. They are of interest as the resuscitation of the feelings and mood of mind of people who were living at the time, and as citizens eager, even personally anxious, for news of the fight. There are, further, picturesque touches in them of real human interest. The writer of most of them was a Mr James Christie, indicated in one of the . letters as of Durie, in Fife. But he was now living at Neidpath Castle, by the Tweed, about a mile from Peebles. The ancient castle had been let to strangers after the sudden death of the second Earl of March in 1731, when his son,

afterwards Duke of Queensberry, succeeded. This personage, known as "old Q," preferred the joys of London to the simple pleasures of the scenery of the Tweed. But the castle itself had not as yet been denuded of its furnishing and ancient tapestry, and the old trees of many generations stood round it untouched. It was still a suitable residence for a country gentleman. Mr Christie's neighbour and friend, to whom the letters are addressed, was James Burnett of Barns, an adjoining property, the representative of a very old family which was still in the full enjoyment of its ancestral lands. His descendant had not yet begun to "improve" the estate and the family off the roll of landed gentry. Mr Burnett was, I rather suspect, like a good many others of the Lowland lairds, a Jacobite at heart, though he took no outward part in the rising. His close correspondent was Mr David Beatt, a teacher of writing in Edinburgh, and an ardent Jacobite, who officially proclaimed King James the VIII., and read the commission of regency in favour of his son Charles, before the palace of Holyrood after the Prince's entrance. The Barns family were evidently in cordial sympathy with Mr Beatt and his views. He continued to correspond with them for several years after Culloden. From one of his letters we learn that he had one interesting pupil in 1747. The heroine, Flora Macdonald, freed from her restraint in London, came to Edinburgh for instruction in penmanship, a part of her education which had apparently been neglected. Mr Beatt excuses himself for

1 Compare the accounts of John Home and R. Chambers in their respective Histories of the Rebellion in 1745.

2 Report of Cope's Trial, p. 43.

not visiting Barns in these words (September 25, 1747):—

"As I have enter'd with Miss Flory M'Donald, who waited five weeks for my return to Town, and who needs very much to be advanced in her writing, confines me to daily attendance, and must do so till she is brought some length in it, which obliges me to keep the Town close."

Mr Christie had a son a lieutenant in Colonel Murray's Regiment, which took part in the battle of Preston. He writes to Mr Burnett the day after the battle, under date "Sunday morning" (22d September), and says:

"A sentinel of Colonel Murray's Regiment, in which my son is lieutenant, is just come to our house [Neidpath], and is a little wounded in the leg. He says that Colonel Gairdner and Captain Leslie in Murray's Regiment are killed, and 'tis said that Cope is killed. Many of the dragoons are killed. Gairdner's Dragoons and the men were not to blame. Their horses being young, and the Highlanders throwing up their plaids, and the sight of their broadswords so frightened them that they threw many of the riders, and killed many of their own foot. Many of the dragoons were also shot. Hamilton's Horse behaved better. My son John, he says, commanded one of the platoons of his own regiment in the rear of his own regiment, and his captain commanded another on the right. My son went off with the remaining part of the dragoons towards Berwick, where it is now said there are six thousand Dutch landed. This man says that they were but three thousand five hundred, and the Highlanders nine or ten thousand. He says they stood within pistol-shot of one another some time, and neither horse nor foot of them had orders to fire one shot, but did it of their own accord, and fired but one. They have thirteen hundred prisoners, eight cannon, and all the baggage."

John Walker, Lieut. Christie's servant, rode to Neidpath from

Preston to inform the father of the disappearance of his son, and of the fruitless search he had made for him on the field (Sept. 23). Walker said that he did not hear that the Dragoons got any orders to fire, but that they did so of their own accord,—some of them five, three, and four times, others only once. There is no account, he says, of Cope.

The following is written September 23-the Monday after the battle. The servant sent out for news about the son has not yet returned, and the father and family are "still in great pain for Johnie." Some soldiers had come from the battle-field on Saturday to Etlstoun (Eddleston), and on to Peebles on Sunday. One of them, who was in the same regiment and company with young Christie, came up from Peebles to Neidpath Castle on the same day. He reported to the anxious father that the Lieutenant had gone off with the Dragoons, believed

to be for Berwick:

"But we are still at an uncertainty about Johnie till John Ker comes back.

The young man said that several Highlanders were killed by their comrades, and that the Highlanders still fired, and charged for about two hundred yards, as they (the Highlanders) were approaching them; that he saw Colonel Gairdner fall, and that Lieutenant-Colonel Clayton, their Lieutenant-Colonel, was also killed, and that he saw Captain Leslie fall upon his knee, and there is no certainty about Cope. He seemed to be much surprised when he saw the number of Highlandmen, for he was made believe that they were not above three thousand. The young man said that after their first fire the Highlanders surrounded them, being triple their number, and that the Dragoons fought as well as possibly they could, for their horses threw many of them, and killed them and several of their foot; and after the Dragoons had gone a little off, three or four troops of them

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