made a public declaration against queen Anne, saying, “she had forfeited the crown of Scotland by imposing the Union, and affirmed that it was unlawful to pay her taxes, or render her obedience."

Such was the use that Kerr made of the above quoted document under queen Anne's hand and privy-seal. He finished by accusing Godolphin and his associates of being Jacobites, because he could not prevail on them to supply Edinburgh Castle with ammunition and stores. They in fact scarcely knew what the attachments of John Kerr of Kersland actually were; in reality, they had much the same tendency with their own devoted affections to selfinterest as soon as the most sure method of securing it was ascertained. The last organized struggle against the union of England and Scotland was dissolved by this intrigue. The celebrated "equivalent" rested safely in the fortress of the good city until it was divided among those who had earned it, and the whole island, content or malcontent, obeyed ostensibly the sceptre of queen Anne, as queen of Great Britain, instead of the sovereign of the separate kingdoms of England and Scotland.

While the Cameronians manifested their discontent at the proceedings of Anne, the first queen of Scotland, by formally deposing her at the Mercat Cross, the poets of the north exhaled their indignation in a different mode, and many quaint and comical ballads still remain in oral memory, which, as illustrative of the Union, must, by the way, be pretty considerable enigmas to "the spinners and knitters in the sun," if they are chanted by them at the present day. The most spirited of these lays invoked the name of queen

friends were to follow, and secure the castle-bridge, and one hundred more of the party walking on the Castle Hill were, on this signal, to make the best of their way after them, and secure all the cash. The plan, Kerr declared, was only too feasible; for there were but thirty-five effective soldiers in the castle, some of whom he had himself been the instrument of gaining, and the garrison was destitute of ammunition. Kerr, in vain, gave the alarm to the duke of Queensberry; then finding no measures of security taken, he hastened to London, and from thence hurried to Windsor, where he demanded an audience of lord Godolphin, and proved how trusty he was as the queen's spy and authorized plot-contriver, by informing that minister of an invasion that was intended by France, to take place simultaneously with his attempt on the Castle of Edinburgh.

1 Life of Calamy, vol. ii. p. 67.

2 Lockhart of Carnwath gives the items of its distribution from a document which no one has gainsayed.

Anne in a strain of anything but benediction, to the lively air called by the French, "Je suis un petit tambour," which, if every nation had its right, is, after all, an old Scotch melody: "You're right queen Anne, queen Anne,

You're right queen Anne, queen Anne;
You've towed us in your hand,

Let them tow us out wha can!

"You're right queen Anne, queen Anne,
You're right queen Anne, my dow;1
You've curried the old mare's hide,
She'll fling nae mair you.

"I'll tell you a tale queen Anne,
A tale of truth ye'll hear,
It's of an auld guid man,
That had a good grey mare.

"He'd that mare on the hills,
And twa mair in the sta';2
But that untoward jade,
She'd do no good at a'.

"For when he grathed3 that mare,
Or curried her hide fu' clean,
Then she would stamp and wince,
And show twa glancing e'en.
"Whene'er her tail played whisk,
Or when her look grew shy.
It's then the wise auld man
Had need to stand aby.

"He hired a farrier stout,

Frae out the West countrie,

A crafty selfish loon,

That loved the white money.

"The white and eke the red,

And he has ta'en an aith,5
That he would do the deed.

2 The gray mare on the hills is Scotland, "The twa others in the stall" are England and Ireland.

3 Girthed.

4 Duke of Queensberry.

5 Oath of the High Commission for the Scottish Union.

7 Spur.

The one-and-thirty commissioners.

8 To lash till the skin comes off.

"The mare was hard beset,

And grained and routed sair;
And aye her tail played whisk,
When she durst do no mair.
"And aye he bored her ribs,

And gae her tither switch,
"We'll learn ye to be douce,'
Ye auld wansonsy witch!
"The mare right piteous stood,
And bore all patiently
She deemed it for her good,
Though good she ne'er could see!

"But desperation's force

Will drive a tame man mad,
And desperation's force

Has roused the good auld yaud.2

"And when one desperate grows.
I tell you truth, queen Anne,
None kens what he will do,
Be it a beast or man.

"Our mare first shook her ears,
And then she gave a snore,3

And then she gave a rear,

Made all the smiths to glower!

"The mare then made a burst

With ten mares' strength and mair,

Made a' the kipples crash,

And a' the smiths to rair.

"The smiths were smoor'd ilk ane,*
The wise auld man was slain,

The last word e'er he said,

Was with a waefu' main.

"O wae be to the mare,

And a' her hale countrie,
I wish I had let her rin

As wild as wild could be.'
"The mare she scaped away,

Frae among the deadly stour.
And scampered haim to him
Wha ought her ance before.

"Take heed, queen Anne, queen Anne!
Take heed queen Anne, my dow,
The auld gray mare's oursel-
The wise auld man is you."

Tame and sweet-tempered.

Mare, or rather jade with the j pronounced y.

3 Snort.

5 The heirs of James II.

4 Smothered each one. Owned; "ought," as the past of the verb own, is still vernacular among the East Anglians; he ought her, is in the same sense as in the above ballad, "he owned her."

No doubt, laureate odes invocatory of the name of queen Anne, sung at St. James's, on her birth-nights, being "done into music by the best hands," might be quoted; the tenour of which would be more in unison with that species of solemn dulness, called "the dignity of history." But to show the spirit of an age at one bold dash, let the songs of the people, on any movement reported to emanate from the sovereign, be examined. This northern lyric, it will be noticed, threatens queen Anne with Scotlandscaping haim to him wha aught (owned) her ance (once) before;" a Jacobite hint, which occurs in another national ballad, possessing, moreover, the advantage of hitching the whole of the queen's commissioners for the Union of Scotland, with some of their characteristics, into a much shorter and livelier page, than if attempted in plain

prose:

"Now fy, let us a' to the Treaty!'

And we shall see wonders there,
For Scotland's to be a bride, sirs!
And wed to the earl of Stair.

There's Queensberry, Seafield, and Marr, sirs,
And Morton comes in, by the bye;
There's Loudon, and Leven, and Weems, sirs,
And Sutherland frequently dry.1

"There's Roseberry, Glasgow, and Duplin,
Lord Archibald Campbell and Ross-
The president Francis Montgomery,
Wha ambles like any paced horse.

There's Johnstoun, Dan Campbell, and Ross, too!
Whom their court hath still on their hench;

There's solid Pitmedden and Forgland,

Wha designs jumping soon on the bench.

"There's Ormistoun and Tillicoultrie,

There's Smollett for toun o' Dunbarton,
There's Arniston, too, and Carnwathie,2
(Put in by his uncle lord Wharton.)
There's Grant and the young Pennicuik, sirs,
Hugh Montgomery, Davy Dalrymple,
There's one who will surely bear bouk, sirs,
Prestongrange who indeed is not simple.

1 The devotion of this noble to strong potations, is frequently glanced at in Jacobite satire.

2 The Jacobite historian, Lockhart of Carnwath. Lord Wharton was so furious a republican Whig, that Lockhart the Jacobite being put into the commission by his interest seems surprising. Yet if we compare the ballad with his history, the assertion seems true enough. Probably the Jacobitism of Lockhart developed itself in the course of this business, as it seems his first entry into historical life.

"Now we'll all bless the jimp one-and-thirty,
If they prove not to be traitors in fact.
But see that their bride be well drest, sirs,
Or their councils must ilka gae back.

May the auld one then take the hale pack, sirs,
Awa on his back with a bang.

Then well may our new buskit bride, sirs,

For her ain first wooer look lang!"

Meantime, the list of union-commissioners enumerated in the above ballad, which comprised the chief of queen Anne's Scotch agents, became exceedingly unpopular in the north; and, assuredly, the scandalous corruptions in regard to the equivalent-money were quite sufficient to throw all Scottish people at large into the state of desperation so graphically allegorized in the ballad of "The Auld Grey Mare." The landing of the chevalier St. George was looked forward to by many in the north, as the only event likely to effect a "repeal of the Union,"-a cry that soon became as much reiterated in Scotland in the earlier years of the eighteenth century, as we have heard it in the nineteenth in regard to Ireland. The pride of the Scots was deeply hurt at the extinction of their parliament and the monarchical dignity of their separate realm, as they told to the world in the following historical song:

"Fareweel to a' our Scottish fame,
Fareweel our ancient glory;
Fareweel e'en to our Scottish name
Sae famed in martial story.

"Now Sark rins o'er the Solway sands,
And Tweed rins to the ocean;

To mark where England's province stands―
Sic a parcel of rogues in a nation!"

The extreme mildness and mercy of queen Anne's conduct, in return for many provocations (incited by such lays as these) was after all the best policy, even had she studied its mere statistical effect, instead of positively refusing, as she did, to shed blood on the scaffold for insurgency.

Much despised as the personal character of Anne has been, the peculiar tone of action which she prescribed to herself -perhaps, as penitence for former ill deeds, the memory of which was heavy on her heart-had the beneficial effect of preventing inflammatory retaliation. If the angry demonstration of the people of Scotland had been met by a spirit

'Lord Dartmouth's Notes to Burnet's Own Times, vol. i. p. 489. “King William III. told the earl of Jersey, that it was a maxim of the Stuart