Colonel ftbomas Uboruton 57 



more wonder and admiration then than a peregrination 

 through Thibet would excite now. There were numbers 

 of English people who still remembered the appearance 

 of Prince Charlie's wild Highlanders as, with unkempt 

 locks, and filthy tartan plaids, jabbering an un- 

 known tongue, they marched through the streets of 

 Carlisle, Preston, and Derby; and most folks thought 

 that all Scotland was a barbarous country inhabited 

 solely by these ferocious savages. For the picturesque 

 kilt of to-day had not yet been invented by an English 

 tailor, and no Walter Scott had yet arisen to throw 

 the glamour of romance over the men and mountains 

 of " Caledonia stern and wild." 



Colonel Thornton was not, indeed, the first English- 

 man to visit Scotland in search of sport, for that honour 

 belongs, as I have already shown, to that good fisherman 

 but most affected writer Richard Franck, sometime 

 Captain in Cromwell's Ironsides. But the Puritan 

 angler dealt only with one branch of sport, whilst the 

 convivial Colonel gives us a medley of shooting, fishing, 

 hawking, and hunting. 



It is probably only as the author of "A Sporting 

 Tour through the Northern Parts of England and 

 Great Part of the Highlands of Scotland " that Colonel 

 Thornton is now known. The book has become a 

 sporting classic, but the famous " Tour " was only one 

 of many notable sporting episodes in a life full of racy 

 incident. The Colonel's career was not in every respect 

 what moralists call edifying; but he was the greatest 

 all-round sportsman of his day, and for that reason 

 this brief biography will, I am sure, be of interest to 



