“The clergy,” says a late animated historian, “whose vocation it was to persecute the repose of his last moments, sought, by the terrors of his sentence, to extort repentance; but his behaviour, firm and dignified to the end, repelled their insulting advances with scorn and disdain.  He was prouder, he replied, to have his head affixed to the prison-walls, than to have his picture placed in the king’s bed-chamber:  ’and, far from being troubled that my limbs are to be sent to your principal cities, I wish I had flesh enough to be dispersed through Christendom, to attest my dying attachment to my king.’  It was the calm employment of his mind, that night, to reduce this extravagant sentiment to verse.  He appeared next day, on the scaffold, in a rich habit, with the same serene and undaunted countenance, and addressed the people, to vindicate his dying unabsolved by the church, rather than to justify an invasion of the kingdom, during a treaty with the estates.  The insults of his enemies were not yet exhausted.  The history of his exploits was attached to his neck by the public executioner:  but he smiled at their inventive malice; declared, that he wore it with more pride than he had done the garter; and, when his devotions were finished, demanding if any more indignities remained to be practised, submitted calmly to an unmerited fate.”—­Laing’s History of Scotland, Vol.  I. p. 404.

Such was the death of James Graham, the great marquis of Montrose, over whom some lowly bard has poured forth the following elegiac verses.  To say, that they are far unworthy of the subject, is no great reproach; for a nobler poet might have failed in the attempt.  Indifferent as the ballad is, we may regret its being still more degraded by many apparent corruptions.  There seems an attempt to trace Montrose’s career, from his first raising the royal standard, to his second expedition and death; but it is interrupted and imperfect.  From the concluding stanza, I presume the song was composed upon the arrival of Charles in Scotland, which so speedily followed the execution of Montrose, that the king entered the city while the head of his most faithful and most successful adherent was still blackening in the sun.

THE GALLANT GRAHAMS.

  Now, fare thee weel, sweet Ennerdale! 
    Baith kith and countrie I bid adieu;
  For I maun away, and I may not stay,
    To some uncouth land which I never knew.

  To wear the blue I think it best,
    Of all the colours that I see;
  And I’ll wear it for the gallant Grahams,
    That are banished from their countrie.

  I have no gold, I have no land,
    I have no pearl, nor precious stane;
  But I wald sell my silken snood,
    To see the gallant Grahams come hame.

  In Wallace days when they began,
    Sir John the Graham did bear the gree,
  Through all the lands of Scotland wide;
    He was a lord of the south countrie.