THE CELTIC MAGAZINE.
No. V.MARCH 1876.
THE MASSACRE OF GLENCOE.
Very interesting and instructive, though very sad it is to chroniclecertain undeniable and not unfrequent facts in the history of humannature, outbursts, as Carlyle calls them, of the feral nature, that elementwhich man holds in common with the brutes, and which, when it breaksforth in him, assumes, by contrast, a more hideous and savage characterthan in them, even as fire seems more terrible in a civilized city thanamidst a howling wilderness; among palaces and bowers than amongheathery moorlands or masses of foliage, and even as the madness of a manis more fearful than that of a beast. It is recorded of Bishop Butler thatone day walking in his garden along with his Chaplain immersed in silentthought, he suddenly paused and turning round asked him if he thoughtthat nations might go mad as well as individuals. What reply theChaplain gave we are not informed; but fifty years after the FrenchRevolution with its thunder-throat answered the Bishop's question. Nay—ithad been answered on a less scale before by Sicilian Vespers—Massacresof Bartholomew, and the Massacre of Glencoe, and has been answered since,apart from France, in Jamaica, India, and elsewhere. God has made ofone blood all nations that dwell on the face of the earth. Yet alas,that blood when possessed by the spirit of wrath, of revenge, of fiercepatriotism, or of profound religious zeal, and heated sevenfold, becomes anelement only inferior in intensity to what we can conceive of the passionsof hell, such as Dante has painted in his Ugolino in the Inferno, gnawinghis enemy's skull for evermore; such as Michael Angelo has sculptured onthe roof of the Sistine Chapel, in eyes burning with everlasting fury, andfists knotted to discharge blows, the least of which were death, butwhich hang there arrested as if for ever on the walls, and such as Miltonhas represented in Moloch's unappeaseable malignity, and in Satan'sinexorable hate.
It is to one of these frightful outcomes of human ferocity, an eventwith which even after a period of 200 years that all Scotland, andespecially all the Highlands, rings from side to side, and which unborngenerations shall shudder at, that we propose to turn the attention of thereaders of the Celtic Magazine. We do so partly, no doubt, from theextreme interest of the subject, and partly also, because important lessonsof humanity, of forgiveness, of hatred at wrong and oppression, of thebenefits of civilization, of the gratitude we feel for the extinction of clan[Pg 132]quarrels and feuds, and the thousand other irregularities and inhumanitieswhich once defaced the grandest of landscapes, and marred a noble anda manly race of men; because such lessons may be, if not formallydrawn, yet may pervade and penetrate the whole story as with a livingmoral.
The occasion of the Massacre of Glencoe was as follows:—Althoughthe Lowlands, since the date of the Revolution, were now quiet, it wasfar different with the Highlands. There, indeed, the wind was down, butstill the sea ran high. The Highlanders were at that time very poor, verydiscontented, and very pugnacious. To subdue them seemed a long anddifficult process. To allow them to exterminate one another, and re-enacton a much larger scale, the policy of the battle between the clans on theNorth Inch of Perth seemed as unwise as it was cruel. There was a thirdcourse proposed and determined on, that of buying them up,