That Rob's fame endured beyond his time had nothing to do with his politics, and little to do with Walter. Scott's use of his name to title a good novel, but everything to do with his force of character. Rob had figured in Scott's story incidentally and been grossly libelled, although still with the grain of truth that won esteem. His life's lasting value came of his fight to keep personal integrity through long trial. He was not like Job a man of piety. But he did have an uncommon regard for his fellow men and the Highland way of life. Perhaps in the courts of Heaven the 'Adversary' had repeated against Rob the old charge made against privileged men, that he loved because he prospered. The test was made. Adversities were heaped up until he could know temptation in anguish and yet, by a simple betrayal of trust, end all ills. The predicament is universal to man, and the way it is met of perennial interest. The strengths of mind, will, and heart required to confront it were in Rob, and I should have liked to believe that the public discerned this behind the romantic narratives of Defoe, Macleay, Scott, and Millar. Instead, I think the people of the Lowland South ranked him with his buccaneering contemporary Edward Teach (Blackbeard of the Spanish Main), or, in more recent times, perhaps with Al Capone. It is a vagary of the human mind to exalt chosen villains above their infamy. The honour thus paid to Rob Roy was for once the man's due, although not until this century, and only since mid-century, has it become possible to win the true facts from original sources.

To get the truth, or as near to it as possible, the author searched out Rob's life in the estate papers of Argyll, Atholl, Breadalbane, Buchanan, MacGregor, Montrose, and others; in the records of the Privy Council, Estates of Parliament, and local government; in the historical MSS held by the Scottish Record Office, War Office, and the National Library; and in the social histories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Bibliography gives a full list. The apparent anomalies in his character and acts, which had baffled early writers, now become explicable; his basic integrity emerges battered but unbroken, and a life that outwardly failed can be seen as the triumph it was.

In righting the wrong done to Rob Roy's name by Scott, and by the historians whom he arid others followed, the author found Rob Roy to be of stronger character than the early writers had imagined. Their works on Rob Roy require so much correction and refutation that few readers would wish to plough a way through the quagmire. I have spared them an exposition of past errors save on a very few points of importance to character, and instead have given my sources.

A reader new to the social life of the Highlands of 1700 may receive an impression of economic poverty greater than it was, unless he appreciates the difference in the value of money then and now. No accurate comparison of prices and earnings can be made. Fuel was not bought, it came free from the peat-banks. Cattle, the staple of trade and wealth, were abundant but of very much smaller weight than today's. Clothes were mostly handwoven at home from home-grown wool and flax. All manner of domestic items were home-made, ranging from ploughs to houses. Wages were paid partly in kind, and rents almost wholly in kind.

The reader may have difficulty getting through all the detail in this book but it is worth it for no other reason than the rich narrative of the life of the Highlands in the 1700s. This book is available for $9.56. If you are interested in ordering you have two options either going through our open book to use a credit card

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