, or perhaps to a very general
Scottish fashion of giving young men of rank a legal education, he had been bred
with a view to the bar. But the politics of his family precluding the hope of
his rising in that profession, Mr. Bradwardine travelled with high reputation
for several years, and made some campaigns in foreign service. After his démêlé
with the law of high treason in 1715, he had lived in retirement, conversing
almost entirely with those of his own principles in the vicinage. The pedantry
of the lawyer, superinduced upon the military pride of the soldier, might remind
a modern of the days of the zealous volunteer service, when the bar-gown of our
pleaders was often flung over a blazing uniform. To this must be added the
prejudices of ancient birth and Jacobite politics, greatly strengthened by
habits of solitary and secluded authority, which, though exercised only within
the bounds of his half-cultivated estate, was there indisputable and undisputed.
For, as he used to observe, »the lands of Bradwardine, Tully-Veolan, and others,
had been erected into a free barony by a charter from David the First, cum
liberali potest. habendi curias et justicias, cum fossa et furca (LIE pit and
gallows) et saka et soka, et thol et theam, et infang-thief et outfang-thief,
sive hand-habend, sive bak-barand.« The peculiar meaning of all these
cabalistical words few or none could explain; but they implied, upon the whole,
that the Baron of Bradwardine might, in case of delinquency, imprison, try, and
execute his vassals at his pleasure. Like James the first, however, the present
possessor of this authority was more pleased in talking about prerogative than
in exercising it; and, excepting that he imprisoned two poachers in the dungeon
of the old tower of Tully-Veolan, where they were sorely frightened by ghosts,
and almost eaten by rats, and that he set an old woman in the jougs (or Scottish
pillory) for saying »there were mair fules in the laird's ha' house than Davie
Gellatley,« I do not learn that he was accused of abusing his high powers.
Still, however, the conscious pride of possessing them gave additional
importance to his language and deportment.
    At his first address to Waverley, it would seem that the hearty pleasure he
felt to behold the nephew of his friend had somewhat discomposed the stiff and
upright dignity of the Baron of Bradwardine's demeanour, for the tears stood in
the old gentleman's eyes, when, having first shaken
