of the children and of the mob.  King Charles II. used to swear at him, for bringing such a rabble of boys together, to be squeezed to death, while they gaped at his long beard and antique habit, and exhorted him to shave and dress like a Christian, to keep the poor bairns, as Dalziel expressed it, out of danger.  In compliance with this request, he once appeared at court fashionably dressed, excepting the beard; but, when the king had laughed sufficiently at the metamorphosis, he resumed his old dress, to the great joy of the boys, his usual attendants.—­CREICHTON’S Memoirs, p. 102.]

The same deplorable circumstances are more elegantly bewailed in Clyde, a poem, reprinted in Scotish Descriptive Poems, edited by Dr John Leyden, Edinburgh, 1803: 

  “Where Bothwell’s bridge connects the margins steep,
  And Clyde, below, runs silent, strong, and deep,
  The hardy peasant, by oppression driven
  To battle, deemed his cause the cause of heaven: 
  Unskilled in arms, with useless courage stood,
  While gentle Monmouth grieved to shed his blood: 
  But fierce Dundee, inflamed with deadly hate,
  In vengeance for the great Montrose’s fate,
  Let loose the sword, and to the hero’s shade
  A barbarous hecatomb of victims paid.”

The object of Claverhouse’s revenge, assigned by Wilson, is grander, though more remote and less natural, than that in the ballad, which imputes the severity of the pursuit to his thirst to revenge the death of his cornet and kinsman, at Drumclog;[A] and to the quarrel betwixt Claverhouse and Monmouth, it ascribes, with great naivete the bloody fate of the latter.  Local tradition is always apt to trace foreign events to the domestic causes, which are more immediately in the narrator’s view.  There is said to be another song upon this battle, once very popular, but I have not been able to recover it.  This copy is given from recitation.

[Footnote A:  There is some reason to conjecture, that the revenge of the Cameronians, if successful, would have been little less sanguinary than that of the royalists.  Creichton mentions, that they had erected, in their camp, a high pair of gallows, and prepared a quantity of halters, to hang such prisoners as might fall into their hands, and he admires the forbearance of the king’s soldiers, who, when they returned with their prisoners, brought them to the very spot where the gallows stood, and guarded them there, without offering to hang a single individual.  Guild, in the Bellum Bothuellianum, alludes to the same story, which is rendered probable by the character of Hamilton, the insurgent general.  GUILD’S MSS.—­CREICHTON’S Memoirs, p. 61.]