Jacobite, Lochgarry, travelling through the Highlands, exciting
hopes, consulting the chiefs, unburying a hidden treasure, and
encouraging the clans to rush once more on English bayonets.

Romance, in a way, is stereotyped, and it is characteristic that the
last romance of the Stuarts should be interwoven with a secret
treasure. This mass of French gold, buried after Culloden at Loch
Arkaig, in one of the most remote recesses of the Highlands, was, to
the Jacobites, what the dwarf Andvari's hoard was to the Niflungs, a
curse and a cause of discord. We shall see that rivalry for its
possession produced contending charges of disloyalty, forgery, and
theft among certain of the Highland chiefs, and these may have helped
to promote the spirit of treachery in Pickle the Spy. It is
probable, though not certain, that he had acted as the agent of
Cumberland before he was sold to Henry Pelham, and he was certainly
communicating the results of his inquiries in one sense to George
II., and, in another sense, to the exiled James III. in Rome. He was
betraying his own cousins, and traducing his friends. Pickle is
plainly no common spy or 'paltry vidette,' as he words it. Possibly
Sir Walter Scott knew who Pickle was: in him Scott, if he had
chosen, would have found a character very like Barry Lyndon (but
worse), very unlike any personage in the Waverley Novels, and
somewhat akin to the Master of Ballantrae. The cool, good-humoured,
smiling, unscrupulous villain of high rank and noble lineage; the
scoundrel happily unconscious of his own unspeakable infamy, proud
and sensitive upon the point of honour; the picturesque hypocrite in
religion, is a being whom we do not meet in Sir Walter's romances.
In Pickle he had such a character ready made to his hand, but, in the
time of Scott, it would have been dangerous, as it is still
disagreeable, to unveil this old mystery of iniquity. A friend of