his couch, for to do that was impossible—­he had made it so vile; but she betrayed it, inviting to it not only Alfieri the Filthy, but the coarsest grooms.  Doctor King, the warmest and almost last adherent of his family, said, that there was not a vice or crime of which he was not guilty; as for his foes, they scorned to harm him even when in their power.  In the year 1745 he came down from the Highlands of Scotland, which had long been a focus of rebellion.  He was attended by certain clans of the Highlands, desperadoes used to free-bootery from their infancy, and, consequently, to the use of arms, and possessed of a certain species of discipline; with these he defeated at Prestonpans a body of men called soldiers, but who were in reality peasants and artizans, levied about a month before, without discipline or confidence in each other, and who were miserably massacred by the Highland army; he subsequently invaded England, nearly destitute of regular soldiers, and penetrated as far as Derby, from which place he retreated on learning that regular forces which had been hastily recalled from Flanders were coming against him, with the Duke of Cumberland at their head; he was pursued, and his rearguard overtaken and defeated by the dragoons of the duke at Clifton, from which place the rebels retreated in great confusion across the Eden into Scotland, where they commenced dancing Highland reels and strathspeys on the bank of the river, for joy at their escape, whilst a number of wretched girls, paramours of some of them, were perishing in the waters of the swollen river in an attempt to follow them; they themselves passed over by eighties and by hundreds, arm in arm, for mutual safety, without the loss of a man, but they left the poor paramours to shift for themselves, nor did any of these canny people after passing the stream dash back to rescue a single female life,—­no, they were too well employed upon the bank in dancing strathspeys to the tune of “Charlie o’er the water.”  It was, indeed, Charlie o’er the water, and canny Highlanders o’er the water, but where were the poor prostitutes meantime?  In the water.

The Jacobite farce, or tragedy, was speedily brought to a close by the battle of Culloden; there did Charlie wish himself back again o’er the water, exhibiting the most unmistakable signs of pusillanimity; there were the clans cut to pieces, at least those who could be brought to the charge, and there fell Giles Mac Bean, or as he was called in Gaelic, Giliosa Mac Beathan, a kind of giant, six feet four inches and a quarter high, “than whom,” as his wife said in a coronach she made upon him, “no man who stood at Cuiloitr was taller”—­Giles Mac Bean the Major of the clan Cattan—­ a great drinker—­a great fisher—­a great shooter, and the champion of the Highland host.

The last of the Stuarts was a cardinal.