Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

HISTORY OF LEWIS. 289
cileable and opposite virtues and vices both tog-ether
dirt and cleanliness, industry and activity, poverty and
wealth. But I need not describe the fashions of Old Stor-
novvay; the parallel and the substitutes which it presents
to and for the customs and the lavender water of the
New. I had occasion to allude to them on some farmer
occasion ; and possibly the smell may be in your nostrils
still. We may venture to relieve the present politics,
whether of the middens of the Old, or the tea-tables of
the New Town, with a retrospect into the politics of ancient
days: politics which, duly reasoned on, as Hume
or Tacitus might have done, and as I dare not venture to
do, would teach what I must not insinuate, and induce
us, possibly, to be content with modern degenerate Chiefs,
potatoes, laws, shoes, English, sheep, and the reign of
King- George the Fourth, in place of Neill, Rory, Tormot,
or Torquil Dhu.
The district of Lewis was the property of a Rory
Macleod, (the Chief, I believe, of that name, and the
great ancestor of the present representative), about the
year 1612, when it fell into the hands of the Mackenzie
of Kintail, the present possessor. If it be possible to
make a long story short and intelligible at the same
time, a sketch of this revolution will convey a pretty
clear idea, a confused one I should rather say, of the
political condition of the islands, even down to so late a
period as the end of the sixteenth century. " Ex uno
disce omnes." This specimen will serve in place of
many more. I have not professed to be a compiler of
anecdotes which have been told and retold till the world
is weary of them ; and I do not know that the exploits
of these our barbarian ancestors are particularly deserv-
ing of record.
This worthy Chief, having lost his first wife and her
only issue, a son, thought fit to repudiate a second wife,
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