The Heart of Mid-Lothian - Penn State University

more upon it, especially that foolish spring the
Cameronian march!”—Life and Death of Three Famous
Worthies, etc., collected and printed for Patrick Walker,
Edin. 1727, 12mo, p. 59.
It may be here observed, that some of the milder class
of Cameronians made a distinction between the two
sexes dancing separately, and allowed of it as a healthy
and not unlawful exercise; but when men and women
mingled in sport, it was then called promiscuous dancing,
and considered as a scandalous enormity.
Sir Walter Scott
645
NOTE G.—MUSCHAT’S CAIRN.
Nichol Muschat, a debauched and profligate wretch,
having conceived a hatred against his wife, entered into
a conspiracy with another brutal libertine and gambler,
named Campbell of Burnbank (repeatedly mentioned
in Pennycuick’s satirical poems of the time), by which
Campbell undertook to destroy the woman’s character,
so as to enable Muschat, on false pretences to obtain a
divorce from her. The brutal devices to which these worthy
accomplices resorted for that purpose having failed,
they endeavoured to destroy her by administering medicine
of a dangerous kind, and in extraordinary quantities.
This purpose also failing, Nichol Muschat, or Muschet,
did finally, on the 17th October 1720, carry his wife under
cloud of night to the King’s Park, adjacent to what is
called the Duke’s Walk, near Holyrood Palace, and there
took her life by cutting her throat almost quite through,
and inflicting other wounds. He pleaded guilty to the