fruit of yet darker ages,--Arths, and Knarths, and Donagilds, and
Hanlons. In truth, they had been formerly the stormy chiefs of a
desert, but extensive domain, and the heads of a numerous tribe,
called Mac-Dingawaie, though they afterwards adopted the Norman
surname of Bertram. They had made war, raised rebellions, been
defeated, beheaded, and hanged, as became a family of importance,
for many centuries. But they had gradually lost ground in the
world, and, from being themselves the heads of treason and
traitorous conspiracies, the Bertrams, or Mac-Dingawaies, of
Ellangowan, had sunk into subordinate accomplices. Their most
fatal exhibitions in this capacity took place in the seventeenth
century, when the foul fiend possessed them with a spirit of
contradiction, which uniformly involved them in controversy with
the ruling powers. They reversed the conduct of the celebrated
Vicar of Bray, and adhered as tenaciously to the weaker side, as
that worthy divine to the stronger. And truly, like him, they had
their reward.

Allan Bertram of Ellangowan, who flourished tempore Caroli primi
was, says my authority, Sir Robert Douglas, in his Scottish
Baronage (see the title Ellangowan), "a steady loyalist, and full
of zeal for the cause of his sacred majesty, in which he united
with the great Marquis of Montrose, and other truly zealous and
honourable patriots, and sustained great losses in that behalf. He
had the honour of knighthood conferred upon him by his most sacred
majesty, and was sequestrated as a malignant by the parliament,
1642, and afterwards as a resolutioner, in the year 1648."--These
two cross-grained epithets of malignant and resolutioner cost poor
Sir Allan one half of the family estate. His son Dennis Bertram
married a daughter of an eminent fanatic, who had a seat in the