while the Romans possessed Britain one of his ancestors was already chief of a Scottish clan, afterwards known as the Clan Campbell. From about the year 1250 the history of the family is recorded and traceable; the present Duke of Argyll, father of the Marquis of Lorne, being the twenty-first lineal inheritor of the family honors. Two centuries before the discovery of America the head of the Campbells fought for Robert Bruce; and one of his sons appears to have founded a line from which sprang Duncan, King of Scotland, who was murdered by Macbeth. About the year 1300 the chief of the Campbells married Marguerite, daughter of the King of Scotland. Two centuries later, Colin V, the first of the Campbells who was called Count of Argyll, married Isabelle Stuart, another princess of the blood royal. The present Marquis of Lorne, therefore, is the third of his family who has married a princess of royal lineage.
During many ages the chief of a Scottish clan was little more than the head of a numerous band of robbers, who lived in rude, precarious abundance, in habitations which had no other desirable quality but that of strength to repel attacks. His landed possessions were extensive, but little productive, until better modes of culture and the working of mines and quarries enabled the lands to support a more numerous population. The present Duke of Argyll is one of the few great landowners of his country. He has, it is said, an estate so extensive that he can ride thirty miles in a straight line without going off his own land. This seems highly absurd; and it is reasonable to think that, in the course of another century or so, social science will have devised some agreeable and just mode of relieving the family of a part of this burden.
During the last two or three generations the Dukes of Argyll, though descended from this long line of mail-clad
