JACOBITE LOYALTY.
The Spirit of Jacobite Loyalty : an Essay towards the Better Understanding of the '45. By G. Blaikie Murdoch. (William Brown, Edinburgh. 2s. 6d.)—It is not a little curious at the present time to come across an historical writer—one, too, who has evidently read a great deal and thought not a little—who subscribes manfully to Samuel Johnson's doctrine : A Jacobite, sir, believes in the divine right of Kings. Ile that believes in the divine right of Kings believes in a Divinity. A Jacobite believes in the divine right of Bishops. He that believes in the divine right of Bishops believes in the divine origin of the Christian religion." Besides, Mr. Blaikie Murdoch holds "that the Scottish Gael is an idealist, and that his idealism was of a nature sufficiently intense to lend itself to the belief in the divine right of Kings. The Celt requires illusion ere he can act; he gets it in believing that the Stuarts hold a brief for the Crown from the Almighty." Mr. Murdoch, therefore, in dealing once more with all the disputed points in the history of the Jacobite Rising, and in a spirit exactly opposite to that mani- fested in such books as Mr. Lang's "Pickle the Spy," has had a field all to himself. He performs his work as a defender of his Celtic countrymen with gusto, and, it must be added, with a great deal of genialplausibility, and if he occasionally denounces what he calls "the blatant and confident statements of Dixon, Hill Burton and Buckle," he may be excused. His little chapters on such subjects as the " humanity " of the Highlanders seem to us to be in the main convincing. It the very least all students of jacobitism must reckon with this interesting little volume.
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