battle-cry of a badly-pressed sovereign, "On, Stanley, on!"
Murthley Castle, the seat of Sir William Stewart, and the beautiful
grounds which front and surround it, will excite the admiration of
the traveller and pay him well for a moment's pause to peruse its
illuminated pages opened to his view. The baronet is regarded as an
eccentric man, perhaps chiefly because he has built a splendid Roman
Catholic chapel quite near to his mansion and supports a priest of
that order mostly for his own spiritual good. Near Dunkeld, Birnam
Hill lifts its round, dark, bushy head to the height of over 1,500
feet, grand and grim, as if it wore the bonnet of Macbeth and hid
his dagger beneath its tartan cloak of firs. "Birnam Wood," which
Shakespeare's genius has made one of the immortals among earthly
localities, was the setting of that hill in his day, and perhaps
centuries before it. Crossing the Tay by a magnificent bridge, you
are in the famous old city and capital of ancient Caledonia,
Dunkeld. Here centre some of the richest rivulets of Scotch
history, ecclesiastical and military, of church and state, cowl and
crown. Walled in here, on the upper waters of the Tay, by dark and
heavily-wooded mountains, it was just the place for the earliest
monks to select as the site of one of their cloistered communities.
The two best saints ever produced by these islands, St. Columba and
St. Cuthbert, are said to have been connected with the religious
foundations of this little sequestered city. The old cathedral,
having been knocked about like other Roman Catholic edifices in the
sledge-hammer crusades of the Reformation, was _ruined_ very
picturesquely, as a tourist, with one of Murray's red-book guides in
his hand, would be likely to say. But the choir was rebuilt and
fitted up for worship by the late Duke of Atholl at the expense of
about 5,000 pounds.