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The Edinburgh Evening News Limited.
Registered Office. 18 MARKET STREET,
EDINBURGH 7th October, 1913
[note in pencil: n.b. there had been a critical review of Montrose in the Edinburgh Evening News. See [Cutting? Books 1904-19 p.86]
Dear Mr. Buchan,
I must thank you for your very kind letter about the "Montrose" review. Yours was one of the few books, out of so great a multitude, which it is a pleasure, as well as a duty, to read.
It would certainly have solved an interesting military problem had Montrose and Cromwell met. Personally, I should have been sorry for the Highlanders in that event. Though, of course, the whole thing is speculative, it is scarcely likely the Ironsides would have stampeded in the
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fashion of Gardiner's dragoons at Prestonpans, and even in that muddled business at Sheriffmuir, good cavalry were too much for the clans. Discipline brought about a complete transformation, when the Highlanders came to provide the typical "thin red line". The old rustling type won battles, sometimes, and lost them, sometimes, but he never managed to make much permanent impression.
By the way, the Argyll of 1715, and also of "The Heart of Midlothian", is nowadays rather an obscure and forgotten figure. Yet his time was an interesting one, picturesque, and full of incident. Would he not make rather a good subject for a historical biography?
I think you rather give away the case of the Scottish Cavaliers when you
