United States or Qatar ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


On the recommendation of Lord Holland he received an appointment in the office of the Sec. of State, and was thereafter private sec. to Lord Kinnoull in Portugal, and to Pitt in 1761-2. He was then transferred to the War Office, where he remained from 1762-72, during which period he contributed to the press under various pseudonyms.

But neither minute description nor well-turned phrase, neither sensuous adjective nor spiritual smile can tell half the truth of a beautiful living thing." The noble Roman, prompted to exclaim "Behold the Tiber" as he stood on the summit of Kinnoull Hill and gazed upon the fertile valley of Scotland's noblest stream, saw no fairer sight than this veritable Garden of Eden in Equatorial Java.

At length Kinnoull, who had always been delicate, flung himself down on the heather, and in a few hours died of exhaustion. There his friends were forced to leave him, without even a grave, and wandered on, their steps and their hearts heavier than before, till a light suddenly beamed at them out of the dusk.

It has no mountainous eminence in its midst, castle-crowned, like Stirling, from which to look off upon such a scene as the latter commands. But Nature has erected grand and lofty observatories near by in the Moncrieffe and Kinnoull Hills, from which a splendid prospect is unrolled to the eye.

Full of hope, Montrose at once set off on his recruiting journey, and sent off some troops to the Orkneys to be drilled under the earls of Kinnoull and Morton; but Morton in a very short time caught fever and died.

Their horses were next abandoned, and Montrose changed clothes with a peasant, and with young lord Kinnoull and Sinclair of Caithness plunged into the wild mountains that lay on the west. Now began for the three fugitives the period of bodily anguish that was to cease only with their lives.

This was another cause of rejoicing to his foes; but they were careful to give him food lest he should escape them as Kinnoull had done. And at each halting-place there came a minister to heap insults and reproaches on his head, which he seldom deigned to answer.