Page:Scott - Tales of my Landlord - 3rd series, vol. 4 - 1819.djvu/168

 laws, language, and dress, they were induced to regard as a nation of savages equally void of fear and of humanity. These various prepossessions, joined to the less warlike habits of the Lowlanders, and their imperfect knowledge of the new and complicated system of discipline for which they had exchanged their natural mode of fighting, placed them at great disadvantage when opposed to the Highlander in the field of battle. The mountaineers, on the contrary, with the arms and courage of their fathers, possessed also their simple and natural system of tactics, and bore down with the fullest confidence upon an enemy, to whom anything they had been taught of discipline was, like Saul's armour upon David, a hinderance rather than an help, "because they had not proved it."

It was with such disadvantages on the one side, and such advantages on the other to counterbalance the difference of supe-