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Up wi’ the bonny blue bonnet,

The kilt and the feather and a’!

But at that time the philabeg was as the smock frock of an English peasant. One would affectionately remonstrate with Mr. Neil Munro, who, in the seventeenth century, makes a gently-born hero “put on his kilt for town.” A chief or gentleman commonly wore trews of tartan, as Prince Charlie did at Edinburgh, where on one occasion his “Highland garb” is reported as including “red velvet breeches”; and Waverley assumed the Highlander in trews to the approval of his mentor, the Baron of Bradwardine. Much farther back, for an excursion into the Highlands, “FitzJames” had equipped himself with three ells of Highland tartan at 4s. 4d. the ell, “to be hose to the king’s grace”; and there is reason to suppose that the wearing of the trews was common in his day. In the same century we have a note of “breekis” supplied to Argyll’s son, whose pedagogue seems to have gone gowned in a plaid, as became humbler station. A kilt, indeed, does not lend itself to horsemanship. The supporters of Highland coats of arms are sometimes represented as wearing one the kilt (occasionally marked as the “servile” dress), the other trews, which latter Mr. David MacRitchie (Scottish Historical Review, July 1904) insists on as the true form of Celtic garb, handed down from the most ancient times, and would have proud Sassenachs know that they took the use as the name of trousers from the race they despised as half naked. Quoting Defoe, who describes trews-wearing Highland soldiery as “like a regiment of merry Andrews ready for Bartholomew Fair,” he boldly suggests that Harlequin may belong to the clan of Celtic jugglers. But this writer appears a true Celt in his love for lost causes and costumes. When bayonets began to prick tartans, at all events, a belted plaid was the common wear of henchmen and gillies: in the Lowlander’s eyes, as Macaulay says, the dress of a thief. And even a smart thief’s sweetheart could boast of her Gilderoy—