150 SCOTLAND ILLUSTRATED. 



on this Highland frontier presents some theme of intense interest. The phantoms 

 of history become embodied, and the lengthened battalions, in hostile attitude, 

 assume their stations as in the day of conflict. The mutual defiance, the impe- 

 tuous charge, the clang of trumpets, and the clash of encountering steel, strike 

 upon the ear ! Anon the scene is changed ! — the din of battle is hushed ; the 

 field is covered with dead ; the standard of liberty waves in triumph ; but the 

 very hour of its triumph is marked with the tears of widows and orphans ! 

 But years roll by; the mourners have dried their tears, or joined those whom 

 they deplored. The field that blushed with the blood of its victims is 

 restored to its pastoral destination, or ripens in harvests, till the march of 

 conflicting armies again halts upon its fated soil, and the combat rages with 

 renewed fury. Once more its natural hues are efiaced, and the conqueror and 

 the conquered are " shovelled together" under the same turf, where now — 

 as the ploughshare unsepulchres the relics of heroes from their shallow bed, 

 the peasant rejoices in the happier destiny to which his country has at length 

 arrived — a destiny in which the humblest of her children participate. 



Those battle-fields which have entailed so much glory on the descendants 

 of the victors, and established an independence which nothing but their swords 

 could achieve, must ever continue as places of national pilgrimage, at which the 

 youth may imbibe the first glow of patriotism, and the old revive the fervour of 

 youth. It is by revisiting such localities that the love of country is kept alive 

 — for in such places only the genius of freedom is to be invoked ; her most 

 appropriate altar is on that battle-ground where her votaries have wrested their 

 country from the oppressor, and left an example for posterity through all ages, 

 that freedom waits on the " resolution to be free." With the names of Leuctra 

 and Marathon, Morat and Morgarten, every friend of liberty will associate 

 the fields of this hard-debated frontier ; and when he hears of the oppression 

 which yet wastes and paralyzes a once proud and independent nation, he will 

 remember the ardent apostrophe of the " poet of liberty" — 



" O, yet again to Freeilom's cause return 

 The patriot Tell — the Bruce of Bannockburn ;" 



For the last fourscore years this district has enjoyed the fruits of that internal 

 repose and industry which ensure prosperity, and made extensive progress 

 in all those measures which enrich and embellish a country. Those who only 

 remember Stirlingshire as it appeared even twenty years ago, can form little 

 idea of its actual condition — a condition which, in spite of the depressed state 

 of agriculture, evinces the most agreeable picture of moral as well as physical 



