Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/161

Rh cession, with golden promises to the first who entered; but as fast as they approached the walls, the close, steady fire from within tore their ranks into shreds, and strewed the ground with the dead and wounded; and as fast as they fell back, Mackinnon and his little band sallied from their defences, piled up the dead bodies in front of the doors as a rampart, and hurried back to their posts as soon as a fresh inundation of fire and steel came sweeping down upon them. Again and again was this manoeuvre successfully performed, but in the midst of imminent peril, by which the brave band of defenders was reduced to a handful. Still, the utmost efforts of Napoleon upon this point were defeated, and Hougoumont was saved. At last the farm-house was relieved, and Mackinnon with his party joined the British army, now assailants in their turn. But the wound which he had previously received in his knee from a musket-shot, and which he had disregarded during the whole of the action, now occasioned such pain, accompanied with loss of blood, that he fainted, and was carried off the field in a litter to Brussels, where he was treated with the utmost courtesy and kindness. The wound was healed, but the buoyant activity which had hitherto made exercise a necessary of life to him was broken. As for the sword, which he had appropriated to his own use at such a curious crisis, he not only fulfilled his promise, by using it gallantly in the defence of Hougoumont, and through the whole action, but ever afterwards wore it on field-days and parade, as a fair trophy of Waterloo.

Thus, at the early age of twenty-four, the military career of this intrepid soldier was closed by the return of universal peace not, however, without a ten years' service, and having won by his merits a rank which few soldiers so young are privileged to occupy. He still continued to hold his commission in the army; and a majority in the Coldstream having become vacant, he was induced to purchase it, by which he obtained the rank of a full colonel in the service, and the ultimate command of the regiment.

From the foregoing account, it could scarcely be expected that Colonel Mackinnon should also obtain distinction in authorship. Entering the army at the raw age of fourteen, when a stripling's education is still imperfect, and returning to domestic life at a period when few are willing to resume their half conned lessons, and become schoolboys anew, we are apt to ask, how and where he could have acquired those capacities that would enable him to produce a well-written book? But this, by no means the easiest or least glorious of his achievements, he has certainly accomplished. Soon after the accession of William IV., his majesty was desirous that a full history of the Coldstream Guards should be written, and he selected no other than the gallant colonel of the regiment to be its historian. Such a choice, and the able manner in which it was fulfilled, show that Mackinnon must have possessed higher qualities than those of a mere s wordier however brave, and that he must have cultivated them with much careful application after his final return to England. For this, indeed, if nothing more than recreation had been his motive, there was an especial inducement, arising from his wound received at Waterloo, by which he was prevented from more active enjoyments. Although such a task required no small amount of historical and antiquarian research, the origin of the Coldstreams dating so far back as the year 1650, he ably discharged it by his work in two volumes, entitled "The Origin and Services of the Coldstream Guards," published in 1833, and dedicated by permission to his Majesty. In this work he has traced the actions of this distinguished brigade in England and Scotland during the wars