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These letters throw so much light on the lovable
character of the man to whom they are addressed, and are
in themselves so interesting, not only proving the intense
and touching clannishness of these Scots, but illustrating
the fateful events of the last years of that fearful
struggle in Germany which is known as the Thirty Years’
War, that to omit them from our account of the Scots
in Sweden would be a serious blemish. The difficulty
lay in the selection, where to give all was an impossibility.
In this we have been guided by the general and
personal interest of the letters in question as well as by
the very practical consideration of their legibility, as
will be readily understood if we remember that these
letters were written in Swedish, German, and English, and
in all these languages equally ungrammatically and
unorthographically, not to speak of the handwriting,
which, with most of the old Scottish warriors, proved of
greater difficulty than the wielding of the sword. It can
scarcely been called a child’s scrawl.1
Especially numerous are the letters from the many
members of the Forbes clan. Let us begin with them.
Colonel William Forbes, the same whose diary we have
mentioned in our text, writes on the 8th of March, 1649,
from Leinburg,2 near Niirnberg, about his wound—he had
been shot in the right loin—as following: “I thank God
that my wound is better than a month ago. I have made
them cut the loin again and more than 130 pieces of
bone have come out and continue to do so, some of them
several inches long. My condition has improved so much
that I hope with God’s help to be restored in a short
while, though I shall never be as strong as before.” The
writer expresses a wish to see his uncle—u Vaterbruder,”
1 Many letters were written by a secretary.
2 A small village of 700 inhabitants.
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