Page:A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland - Johnson (1775).djvu/239

 method was to guess; and when numbers are guessed they are always magnified.

Thus has for several years been filled with the atchievements of seventy thousand Highlanders employed in. I have heard from an English officer, not much inclined to favour them, that their behaviour deserved a very high degree of military praise; but their number has been much exaggerated. One of the ministers told me, that seventy thousand men could not have been found in all the Highlands, and that more than twelve thousand never took the field. Those that went to the American war, went to destruction. Of the old Highland regiment, consisting of twelve hundred, only seventy-six survived to see their country again.

The Gothick swarms have at least been multiplied with equal liberality. That they bore no great proportion to the inhabitants, in whose countries they settled, is plain from