Session, who still lives in Edinburgh,* is the cousin-german of one of the chieftains who led out their clans in that memorable year, and nephew to a gentlewoman who was seized and taken prisoner to London for having concealed the Chevalier. This individual entered the faculty of advocates in the year 1765, and may consequently be said to have been nearly seventy years connected with the court. There also lives at the present time in the New Town, a lady who recollects having been taken, when a child of about seven years, to see the Stuart court revived at Holyroodhouse: a Highland chieftain came out of the porch, and, with infantine wonderment at his appearance, she took hold of his kilt; her maid was astonished, when, instead of killing her with his dirk, he stooped down and clapped the child on the head. This lady remembers distinctly many of the Gaelic phrases used by the soldiers to each other on the streets of the city, and especially at the Netherbow Port, where they kept a guard. Greshort-make hastewas one of those most frequently in use, as might be expected from the hurried and adventurous nature of the whole affair. For some years past, many recently deceased Highlanders have been successively chronicled in the newspapers, as the last survivors of all who were engaged in that enterprise. Every forty-five hero who died, was naturally supposed by all who knew no other, to be almost for certain the last. The last, however, would appear to be still alive, if even he be alone in this curious historical distinction. The person I allude to is Andrew Wallace, who lives, or very lately lived, in Chester county, Pennsylvania, at the age of one hundred and three. He was born at Inverness in 1730, fought at the battle of Culloden on the side of Prince Charlie, and, in 1752, emigrated to America. He has since then fought in all the American wars, and was discharged so lately as 1813, after having been nearly seventy

Sir William Macleod Bannatyne. He died in November 1833, three months after the publication of the above paper.

years a soldier. He enjoys a pension of twenty-six cents per diem from the American government, and has a wife and two children, the younger about fifteen years of age.

If we go back a few years, we find persons in extreme senility, whose association with proportionately earlier ages was equally remarkable. Dean Swift's curate died so late as 1797;* the dean himself had expired at a great age in 1744. The widow of the famous Lord Lovat (born in 1666, and executed in 1748) died in 1796, a hundred and thirty years after the birth of her husband.† In March 1787, Torquil Macleod died in the Isle of Lewis, at one hundred and thirteen: he had been engaged in every battle fought for the house of Stuart since the Revolution, nearly a century before, namely, Killiecrankie, Sheriffmuir, and those of the Forty-five. If he had lived to July 1789, he would have survived his first battle a hundred years! Martha Hanna, however, who died so lately as 1808, remembered hearing the shots fired in one of the engagements during the residence of King James in Ireland—an incident nearly contemporaneous with the first battle fought by this aged islander. What an interval of improvement in every thing (at least for Britain) between the event of which Martha recollected, and her death! Not many years ago, a woman, named Margaret Wylie, aged one hundred and thirteen years, was assisting at haymaking, in a field at Lawston, near Newcastleton, Roxburghshire, when it suddenly occurred to her that she had tedded hay in the very same place, when she was, as she expressed it, a gilpy lassie. On considering the matter farther, it turned out, to the astonishment of all present, that the old woman had been employed exactly as she was now, on the same spot, and in the same day of the year, a century before! The scenery was the same: the hay was what hay always was and will be there were also smiling

The Rev. Bellingham Swan. He died at 102.

+ What is equally strange, the widow of Lord Lovat's son, General Fraser, survived till February 1835.

rustics around her now as then. But how different herself!—a single withered leaf in the midst of a green forest. How much had passed notelessly since the former period! What a retrospection !—an eighteenth part of all the time since the birth of Christ! In 1785, there died at Dryhope, in Yarrow, a woman named Marion Renwick: the American war was then just concluded, and men were beginning to talk about Mr Pitt, the singularly juvenile minister. Strange to say, this woman had been baptised in the year 1682, in the house wherein she died, by the good and famous Mr Renwick, who suffered death a fortnight after in the Grassmarket, on account of his religion! Thus were the reigns of Charles the Second and George the Third, so essentially different, brought by one particular life into conjunction. Marion Renwick must have lived under eight sovereigns, counting William and Mary as two ; and she had seen the Revolution, the union of England and Scotland, the accession of the Brunswick dynasty, the various civil wars in favour of the house of Stuart, and other political events of signal importance. She had seen Poland defend Christendom against the Turks, and divided, like a spoil, among three of the nations which it had defended. Another of those ancient worthies was the old Countess of Loudoun, whom Dr Johnson visited on his tour to Scotland. She died in 1777, aged one hundred. Her father was that Earl of Stair who directed the massacre of Glencoe in 1691; and her father-in-law's father, the first Earl of Loudoun, had figured at the head of affairs in Scotland during the civil war, and is said by Burnet to have once been ordered for a secret death in the Tower by Charles the First. Her ladyship had survived her marriage seventy-seven years.

A very remarkable beggar appeared on the streets of Edinburgh in the year 1770. He had an uncommonly dignified and venerable appearance, and generally sat bareheaded under a dead-wall in the Canongate. On inquiry being made into his history, it turned out that he was an

attainted baronet, named Sir John Mitchell of Pitreavie, who had early in life been an officer in the Scots Greys, but was broke for sending a challenge to the Duke of Marlborough, which he was provoked into by some expressions used by his grace in contempt of the Scottish nation. A subscription was opened on behalf of the venerable unfortunate; but we are not acquainted with its success, or with his subsequent history.

If we go back into a period somewhat earlier, we shall meet with stretches of human existence quite as remarkable. A clergyman, named James Ker, died minister of a parish in Roxburghshire, in 1694-therefore might have been conversed with by Marion Renwick, who lived almost to our own times. Now, this man had been ordained as a clergyman a year before the death of James the First of Great Britain-that is, seventy years before; and, what is still more remarkable, he had for all this time been minister of but one parish, except during the triumph of episcopacy. As he could hardly fail to have been born before the king went to reign in England, we may assume that his life, and that of Marion Renwick, bring us almost into contact with those early days, so different from our own, when Scotland had a distinct king and court. All these instances, however, sink into insignificance compared with that of Henry Jenkins, who died in 1670, at the age of 169: Jenkins must have recollected the reign of Henry the Seventh, who closed the wars of the Roses, and ended the feudal times in England. The events of the Reformation must have been the historical panorama that passed before his eyes in what is generally considered middle life, but which to him was as early childhood. He must have recollected every thing that happened in the sixteenth century, including all the glories of Elizabeth, and almost every thing in the seventeenth too. The lives and recollections of several generations of men were, in a manner, packed into the individual person of this wonderful patriarch: he was an epitome of several ages of history. He must have

He

at length seen so many of the changes wrought by the passions and reason of mankind, that nothing they did would astonish him. "Ah," I can imagine him saying to a modern, who talked of the execution of the regicides, "if you had but seen the fires of Smithfield!" The friends of his early days must have been so long perished from the face of the earth, that they would look like the creatures of a dream; and his very descendants must have at length become almost as alien to him as ordinary strangers. would seem to himself like a weed cast out upon the shore of human existence, which no returning tide had ever been able to reach; and his memory, like a lachrymatory, could be filled with only the relics of sorrow. In short, a man under Jenkins's circumstances would be the most solitary and friendless of created beings; and his protracted existence would only give him occasion to feel more acutely the inherent pains and drawbacks which attend the condition of mortal life.

NELLY BALLANTYNE.

NELLY BALLANTYNE was one of a class of persons to whom allusion was made in the article entitled "TURNERS"a decent old widow, maintaining herself, in a creditable way, as the mistress of a small public-house in one of the villages near Edinburgh. Her lowly whitewashed hostelry was for many years a favourite resort of the lovers of fruit in summer, and the lovers of skating in winter, and turners all the year round. It was a great Saturday house-that is to say, a number of decent stoutish gentlemen who had offices in the Register House or the Exchequer, and did not get much abroad during the week, liked to come out to see Nelly on the afternoon of the last day of the week, which, after the manner of their ancestors, they always kept sacred to recreation. Nelly knew her men well enough, and