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apprehensions and anxiety, and justify any conciliatory arts that he 

 may have employed, while Jesuits and others were industrious, 

 under these and similar pretexts, in questioning his right to so valu- 

 able an inheritance. 



A third plan, less objectionable and not less noble, and to which 

 he was consistently and systematically attached, was to conciliate 

 contending factions, and to introduce civilization into the remoter 

 parts of his dominions. When only twenty-one years of age, " he 

 attempted a work worthy of a king," as it is justly styled by 

 Robertson, " to suppress the deadly feuds among the great fa- 

 milies of Scotland, which had distracted that kingdom more, per- 

 liaps, than any other in Europe. After many preparatory negotia- 

 tions, he invited the contending parties to a royal entertainment, 

 and obtained their promise to bury their dissentions in oblivion. 

 From thence he conducted them, marching by pairs, each hand in 

 iiand with his enemy, to the public cross, where a collation was 

 prepared, and they drank to each other, as a sign of reciprocal 

 forgiveness and future friendship." 



Shortly before his accession to the throne of England, he devised 

 a scheme for civilizing the Highlands and the Isles. Beside a 

 number of wise laws, enacted for this purpose, he established three 

 royal boroughs, as a retreat for the industrious, and a nursery for 

 arts and commerce, and transported a colony from Fife to Lewis, 

 as an experiment, to improve the natives in the arts of life, and par- 

 ticularly in fishing. From the further prosecution of this plan he 

 was diverted by the death of Elizabeth. In the Basilicon Doron he 

 encourages his son to pursue this process : " you may civilize the bor- 

 derers and islanders, if, after my example, you conduct colonies 

 from the continent to the islands, that by intercourse with them, 

 those of milder dispositions may learn civility." This bears so 



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