GRANGE HOUSE. 13 



tumuli, been the scene of a battle at so early a period 

 that history bears no recollection of the event, but that 

 a farm in its vicinity still bears the name of Acknagarne, 

 i. e. field of the carcasses ; and that a rock in the sea, 

 which Sir Thomas, in his survey of the burgh, has 

 marked out as one of its boundaries, and on which 

 tradition, says a boat was once wrecked, is still known 

 as Clack Mallacha, i. e. the stone of the curse. We had 

 some conversation on the Celtic character. I described to 

 Sir Thomas the form of the old Celtic head, as given us 

 by the phrenologists, and as I have seen it in the skulls of 

 the Inverness Museum ; concluding my description by re- 

 marking that civilization seems to produce variety in the 

 human species, somewhat in the manner that domes- 

 tication produces it in some of the inferior animals. 

 Sir Thomas seemed pleased with the thought, and illus- 

 trated it by a fact or two. 



f He must have been a very busy man. He showed 

 me his Travels in Italy in MS. They form four thick 

 quarto volumes, elegantly bound, and illustrated with 

 admirable crow-quill drawings. He showed me an 

 elegant piece of penmanship, " The Lamentable Case 

 of Sir William Dick," a thin folio, in which the old 

 style of printing and engraving was so well imitated, that 

 it was only from the freshness of the paper I detected it as 

 a copy. This Sir W. Dick was one of his ancestors (Scott 

 makes David Dean allude to him, in the Heart of Mid- 

 lothian, as the godly provost), who was possessed, in the 

 days of Charles I., of the then enormous sum of 200,000, 

 but who lost almost all during the Commonwealth and the 

 reign of Charles II. Sir Thomas stated to us besides that 

 he had filled with notices of his family a roll of vellum 

 about eighty feet in length. On Mr Black and I rising to 

 go away, he took down his large stick, and accompanied 



