more, and he has ay the matter gadged, and leaves ay the devil in the lee side,-sirs, O work in the day of the cross."

The more moderate Presbyterian ministers saw with pain and resentment the lower part of their congregation, who had least to lose by taking desperate courses, withdrawn from their flocks, by their more zealous pretenders to purity of doctrine, while they themselves were held up to ridicule, old jog-trot professors and chaff winnowed out and flung away by Satan. They charged the Cameronian preachers with leading the deluded multitude to slaughter at Bothwell, by prophesying a certainty of victory, and dissuading them from accepting the amnesty offered by Monmouth. “All could not avail," says Mr. Law, himself a Presbyterian minister, "with M'Cargill, Kidd, Douglas, and other witless men amongst them, to hearken to any proposals of peace. Among others that Douglas, sitting on his horse, and preaching to the confused multitude, told them that they would come to terms with them, and like a drone was always droning on these terms with them: 'they would give us a half Christ, but we will have a whole Christ, and such like impertinent speeches as these, good. enough to feed those that are served with wind, and not with the sincere milk of the word of God." Law also censures these irritated and extravagant enthusiasts, not only for intending to overthrow the government, but as binding themselves to kill all that would not accede to their opinion, and he gives several instances of such cruelty being exercised by them, not only upon straggling soldiers whom they shot by the way or surprised in their quarters, but upon those who, having once joined them, had fallen away from their principles. Being asked why they committed these cruelties in cold blood, they answered, "they were obliged to do it by their sacred bond." Upon these occasions they practised great cruelties, mangling the bodies of their victims that each man might have his share of the guilt. In these cases the Cameronians imagined themselves the direct and inspired executioners of the vengeance of Heaven. Nor did they lack the usual incentives of enthusiasm. Peden and others among them set up a claim to the gift of prophecy, though they seldom foretold anything to the purpose. They detected witches, had bodily encounters with the enemy of mankind in his own shape, or could discover

him as, lurking in the disguise of a raven, he inspired the rhetoric of a Quaker's meeting. In some cases, celestial guardians kept guard over their field-meetings. At a conventicle held on the Lomond hills, the Reverend Mr. Blacader was credibly assured, under the hands of four honest men, that at the time the meeting was disturbed by the soldiers, some women who had remained at home, “clearly perceived as the form of a tall man, majestic-like, stand in the air in stately posture with the one leg, as it were, advanced before the other, standing above the people all the time of the soldiers shooting." Unluckily this great vision of the Guarded Mount did not conclude as might have been expected. The divine sentinel left his post too soon, and the troopers fell upon the rear of the audience, plundered and stripped many, and made eighteen prisoners.

But we have no delight to dwell either upon the atrocities or absurdities of a people whose ignorance and fanaticism were rendered frantic by persecution. It is enough for our present purpose to observe that the present Church of Scotland, which comprises so much sound doctrine and learning, and has produced so many distinguished characters, is the legitimate representative of the indulged clergy of the days of Charles II, settled, however, upon a comprehensive basis. That after the revolution, it should have succeeded episcopacy as the national religion, was natural and regular, because it possessed all the sense, learning, and moderation fit for such a change, and because among its followers were to be found the only men of property and influence who acknowledged presbytery. But the Cameronians continued long as a separate sect, though their preachers were bigoted and ignorant, and their hearers were gleaned out of the lower ranks of the peasantry. Their principle, so far as it was intelligible, asserted that paramount species of presbyterian church-government which was established in the year 1648, and they continued to regard the established church as erastian and time-serving, because they prudently remained silent upon certain abstract and delicate topics, where there might be some collision between the absolute liberty asserted by the church and the civil government of the state. The Cameronians, on the contrary, disowned all kings and government whatever, which should not take the Solemn League and Covenant;

and long retained hopes of re-establishing that great national engagement, a bait which was held out to them by all those who wished to disturb the government during the reign of William and Anne, as is evident from the Memoirs of Ker of Kersland, and the Negotiations of Colonel Hooke with the Jacobites and disaffected of the year.

A party so wild in their principles, so vague and inconsistent in their views, could not subsist long under a free and unlimited toleration. They continued to hold their preachings on the hills, but they lost much of their zeal when they were no longer liable to be disturbed by dragoons, sheriffs, and lieutenants of militia. The old fable of the Traveller's Cloak was in time verified, and the fierce sanguinary zealots of the days of Claverhouse sunk into such quiet and peaceable enthusiasts as Howie of Lochgoin, or Old Mortality himself. It is, therefore, upon a race of sectaries who have long ceased to exist, that Mr. Jedediah Cleishbotham has charged all that is odious, and almost all that is ridiculous, in his fictitious narrative; and we can no more suppose any modern Presbyterian involved in the satire, than we should imagine that the character of Hampden stood committed by a little raillery on the person of Ludovic Claxton, the Muggletonian. If, however, there remain any of these sectaries who, confining the beams of the gospel to the Goshen of their obscure synagogue, and with James Mitchell, the intended assassin, giving their sweeping testimony against prelacy and popery, The Whole Duty of Man and bordles, promiscuous dancing and the Common Prayer Book, and all the other enormities and backslidings of the time, may perhaps be offended at this idle tale, we are afraid they will receive their answer in the tone of the revellers to Malvolio, who, it will be remembered, was something a kind of Puritan: "Doest thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?Ay, by Saint Anne, and ginger will be hot in the mouth

We intended here to conclude this long article, when a strong report reached us of certain transatlantic confessions, which, if genuine (though of this we know nothing), assign a different author to these volumes, than the party suspected by our Scottish correspondents. Yet a critic may be excused seizing upon the nearest suspicious person, on the

principle happily expressed by Claverhouse, in a letter to the Earl of Linlithgow. He had been, it seems, in search of a gifted weaver, who used to hold forth at Conventicles: "I sent to seek the webster (weaver), they brought in his brother for him: though he maybe cannot preach like his brother, I doubt not but he is as well principled as he, wherefore I thought it would be no great fault to give him the trouble to go to jail with the rest.

* [About this time there had appeared a silly story in the American newspapers of Sir Walter's brother, Thomas Scott, then with his regiment in Canada, having acknowledged himself to be the author of Waverley. There is much jesting on the subject in Sir Walter's correspondence with his brother.-See Introduction to Waverley, p. xxxiii.]

MISCELLANEOUS CRITICISM.

ON THORNTON'S SPORTING TOUR.*

[Edinburgh Review, January, 1805.]

Ir is well known that the patriarch of Uz exclaimed, in the midst of his afflictions, "Oh that mine adversary had written a book!" This ardent exclamation of the man of patience has led the learned Rabbin Menachem-el-Rekenet, in the treatise entitled Bâvra Báthra, to suggest that the

*"A Sporting Tour through the Northern Parts of England, and great Part of the Highlands of Scotland, including Remarks on English and Scottish Landscape, and General Observations on the State of Society and Manners. Embellished with Sixteen Engravings. By Colonel T. THORNTON, of Thornville-Royal in Yorkshire. London, 1804."t

+[Lieutenant-Colonel Thornton (formerly of the West-York Militia) was the first sportsman of his day, in point of science, and one of the most convivial companions of the festive board. He revived falconry on a very extensive scale. After the peace of Amiens he went to France for the purpose of examining the state of sporting in that country. He was said to have been materially assisted in his publication by the Reverend Mr. Martyne, and subsequently to his Sporting Tour in Scotland, there appeared, under the colonel's name, A Sporting Tour through various parts of France in 1802, 2 vols. 4to. 1806. And A Vindication of Colonel Thornton's conduct in his Transactions with Mr. Burton. Having been obliged to relinquish residence on his magnificent estate in Yorkshire, he spent the latter years of his life entirely at Paris, where he established a weekly dinner party, under the name of the Falconer's Club. For some months his health was visibly on the decline, yet he would lie in bed till the hour of five, then rise and go to the club, sing a better song, and tell a better story than any of the other members. He died at Paris in 1823.]