north side of the river Tay, without the means of providing for their families, their personal distress excited compassion-their resignation, or determination, as they termed it, rather to suffer than to sin, demanded respect, and the relish of their doctrine, now about to be lost to them, called for the regrets of their flocks.

It did not,' says our author, content the congregation to weep all of them, but they howled with a loud voice, weeping with the weeping of Jazer, as when a besieged city is sackt. Then Middleton began to curse and swear (as he spared not) what would these mad fellows do? he knew very well many of them hade not a stock could maintain their poor families for six months: and that was very true; but he understood not they resolved to live by faith, as sufferers used to doe.'

The ministers thus expelled from their charges found succour and comfort from those who pitied their case, respected their persons, and admired their doctrines. And it was one obvious error amongst many attending this harsh and impolitic measure, that the bishops were taken unawares, and found it impossible to levy a sufficient number of well-educated and qualified persons of their own persuasion to fill two hundred pulpits thus rendered vacant at once. The hasty recruits which were drawn for this purpose from the schools in the north, where alone episcopacy had retained favourers, were so raw and ill-qualified that a wag observed, that since the expulsion of the presbyterian clergy they had not been able to get a lad to keep the cattle there they had all turned curates. It was not likely that under such teaching the people should forget the 'spiritual manna which of late fell so thick about their tents; and it was in the natural course of things that the expelled clergy should continue to preach in houses, barns, and at length in the open fields; and that their ancient flocks should gather round them on such occasions. The bishops endeavoured to counteract the tide of favour and popularity, which was taking a direction so ominous, by sending several of their best scholars to make a progress through the west, and, if possible, preach the congregations back again into the churches which had been emptied by the insufficiency of the curates. It is remarkable that Gilbert Burnet (the future low-church historian and bishop of Salisbury) was one of those episcopal missionaries, and went, according to Kirkton, furnished with other means of persuasion than those of rhetoric. The primate Sharp saw no redress for this general defection but obtaining from the civil power denunciations against those who attended conventicles, and of fines upon those who absented themselves from the church-measures which they endeavoured to justify by appealing to the penal acts in Queen Elizabeth's time against papists, but which, whenever or wheresoever used, can never be justified in mo

rality,

rality, and seldom if ever in sound policy, in which state-necessity is a word very rarely and suspiciously received.

Meantime the curates came into the churches as a sort of invaders, and Kirkton has given a whimsical account of their general reception, some points of which he frankly admits to be little to the credit of his own sect, who were the actors on those occasions. In some places the new incumbents were welcomed with tears and requests to get them gone; in others with reasoning and disputes; in others with affronts and indignities. Sometimes the clapper of the bell was stolen; sometimes the church doors were barricadoed; sometimes the unfortunate incumbent was received with vollies of stones. On one occasion a box full of pismires was emptied into the curate's boots. On another, which our presbyterian divine tells at more length than we care to rehearse it after him, a trick, something like that played off on the millar of Trompington, was practised on two of these hated divines, who were thus led innocently and involuntarily into a breach of the seventh commandment. Kirkton adds candidly, 'I have known some profane people that, if they committed an error over night, thought affronting a curate to-morrow a testimony of their repentance.'

We have before us, at this moment, the opposite evidence of one of these obnoxious incumbents, called Andrew Symson, minister of Kirkenner, who professes that when he and his episcopal brethren came to Galloway, in 1663, they found several parishes not only vacantes but vocantes, desiring and soliciting their ministry. He does not, indeed, assert that they had a formal popular call, yet contends that when they had performed service for several Lord's days, and duly executed their edicts, the representatives of the parish attended upon their ordinations, assisted them in their duties, and thus ratified their ministry. And he declares that he himself was never insulted by his parishioners, but often saved by them from the violence of strangers. These and some other curious passages occur in his preface to a poem called Tripatriarchichon. But if Mr. Symson was so cordially received and fostered by his parishioners, it is certain his case was singular among the western curates.

When so much provocation is admitted by the historian, it was certainly to be expected that the government would employ some means of supporting the authority of the church which they had set up. To rash and violent men the use of the sword, and of superior force, is always the most readily resorted to upon such occasions. These means had been taught them by the presbyterians themselves, who, during the domination of the council of estates, had first introduced the severities of free quarters, fines, cess, and other burthens imposed on recusants, until their domination, unknown in Scotland; and, in their mode of imposing their Solenin League and

Covenant

Covenant on all persons above the age of ten years, had set an example which was as unadvisedly as unconscientiously followed by those who had now succeeded to their And as power. this precedent is often lost sight of, we shall here quote, from an impartial eye-witness, the manner in which the covenanters enforced uniformity of sentiment in matters religious and political while they possessed the power of doing so. The scene is Aberdeen, then occupied by a powerful force of covenanters; the date 1639.

Mr. Robert Douglas, minister of Kirkaldie, preached beforenoon: after sermon he read out the Covenant, and caused the hail town's people convened, who had not yet subscribed, both men and women, to stand up before him in the kirk, and the men subscribed the Covenant. 'Thereafter the women were urged to swear with their uplifted hands to God, that they did subscribe and swear the Covenant willingly and freely, and from their hearts, and not from any fear or dread that should happen; syne the kirk dissolved. But the Lord knows how thir town's people were brought under perjury by plain fear, and not from a willing mind, by tyranny and oppression of thir covenanters, who compelled them to swear and subscribe, suppose they knew it was against their hearts.'-Spalding's Troubles in Scotland, vol. ii. p. 132.

We quote this fact, as we may do others hereafter, by no means as affirming that it justifies the power of compulsion over the human conscience, assumed by the episcopalians, but simply that' the reader may bear in mind he is reading not the history of saints and martyrs on the one side, and heathen persecutors on the other, but that of two fierce contending factions in a half civilized country, who alternately tyrannized over each other's persons and consciences-one in the abused names of gospel-freedom and civil liberty; the other under the no less misplaced watchword of social order and loyalty. Our ingenious editor, though he seems to enter into the vindication of the cavaliers somewhat further than we can accompany him, has made this plain in many passages of the book, contrasting the charges of cruelty and oppression, brought by his author against the episcopalians, by instances of their own misconduct while they possessed the power of persecution.

Kirkton gives us a very animated picture of the contest betwixt Middleton and Lauderdale, and, with the satirical humour of which he is not sparing, draws a lively sketch of the two rivals for power.

'Middleton was a soldier and had suffered with the king, and undertaken for him a very dangerous part, to command the tories on the hills, in Cromwell's time; and he hade for his patrons the Duke of York and Chancellor Hyde. Lauderdale was a witt and a courtier; he had suffered much for the king, and was his private in his secret pleasures, in which office, to keep himself in favour, he acted a most dishonourable part; for after the king's fleet was burnt at Chatham, and the Dutch retired, he came to the king's privy chamber and danced

in a woman's petticoat to dispel the king's mellancholy. But he knew well what the king's delights were; he choosed for his patron neither statesman nor prince; Barbra Villiers, first Mrs. Palmer, then Dutchesse Cleveland, was his choise; and before her bedside he would have kneeld ane hour at one time to implore her friendship with the king, because he knew well what influence his miss hade upon him, and with thir weapons he prevailed.'-p. 138.

In this controversy, as was to be expected, the sword yielded—not to the gown-but to the petticoat; and Lauderdale must be thenceforth considered as absolute minister in Scotland, though his ally Rothes bore the office of commissioner. It might have been supposed that the greater wisdom and moderation of this intelligent statesman would have modified the violent courses which Middleton had begun. But he probably found that severe measures were most acceptable at court, where the least countenance afforded to presbyterianism was held allied to disloyalty; and, besides, though it is easy to forbear entering upon such a headlong career, it is very difficult to controul or temper its violence when once fairly commenced: whence it sometimes happens that a minister, moderate in his own principles, is, for a time at least, obliged to pursue the line of conduct adopted by a violent predecessor in authority.

The people continued to complain on the one hand, and the bishops on the other. The former alleged that most of the curates intruded into lowland parishes were ignorant, and many of them debauched; and it is highly probable that they allowed themselves too much latitude, in compliance with the dissolute manners of the cavaliers, and in contradiction to the reserved deportment of the presbyterians, which they stigmatized as hypocrisy. Kirkton enlarges on these topics; but though we believe him strictly honest, we conceive him to be a little prone to receive the exaggerated reports of others; and in particular we cannot subscribe to the probability of the crime of witchcraft being half so common as he pretends among the episcopal clergy. We will not go so far as Mrs. Elizabeth Harris, who declares she never took one of that cloth for a conjurer in her life; but we doubt that Mr. Gideen Penman ever said grace at the devil's table as his chaplain. (p. 190.) We conceive that the bullets of nine assassins would have slain Archbishop Sharp, though he had several strange things,' and in particular 'parings of nails' about his person. (p. 84.) We think also, it may be rash to call Mr. Thomson, the curate of Anstruther, a diabolic man,' although the wench who bore a lantern before him, as he returned from a visit, 'affirmed that she saw something like a black beast pass the bridge before him.' (p. 188.) We do further verily believe, that any strange circumstances in the life, and suddenness in the death of the celebrated

6

General

General Dalzell may be accounted for the former by a savage temper improved by a Russian education; and the latter by a stroke of apoplexy, without supposing a covenant betwist Old Tom of Binns and the enemy of mankind: and we own that our worthy author's proneness to credit these and many similar accusations leads us to suspect the accounts which he gives us both of the gross debaucheries and of the dying agonies of divers of the curates, one of whom his informers affirmed to have roared on his death-bed like a woman in the torments of child-birth, merely on account of his having held a cure under the episcopal establishment. These are the scandals by giving credit to which men furious in controversy disgrace themselves and their cause; and, as Kirkton justly says of imputations against himself by the episcopalians, such are the arrows of the wicked, even bitter words.'

On the other hand, the bishops complained that in the western shires particularly their authority was totally disregarded; and the government chose to remedy this matter by quartering forces among the obnoxious presbyterians under command of Sir James Turner. This person was of an active and somewhat harsh temper, not improved certainly by his service under the Covenanters, under whose authority he was the spectator if not participant of two horrid massacres at Dunnaverty and Duart. (See p. 44.) He wrote his own memoirs, besides several works on military discipline; the former are extant in manuscript and are at present announced for publication. Kirkton imputes to him extreme severities in the execution of the laws for recovery of the fines. This Turner denies in his memoirs, affirming, that he never levied above half the fine inflicted on any one delinquent. The vexations which he inflicted, however, were sufficient to stir up a fierce but shortlived rebellion.

Kirkton gives a curious narrative of this event. It arose, according to his authorities, which Mr. Sharpe seems to dispute, from the interference of the country people to rescue an old man, whose bare person the soldiers were going to place on a red hot girdle or gridiron. Successful in disarming this party, the insurgents marched suddenly to Dumfries, and made Sir James Turner prisoner. It is a sufficient proof of the hardships which the poor people must have endured that, expecting to be attacked by regular forces, they assembled about three thousand men; and it is no small credit to them that they neither slew Turner, according to the proposal of the more violent, nor committed any material injury, as they marched through the country, only taking free quarters and provisions. Turner describes their horse as armed with sword and pistol; their infantry with musket and pike, and some with scythes, hay-forks, and staves. He saw two of their squadrons go through