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The brutal and unfeeling martyrdom of Margaret Wilson and Margaret M'Lauchlan on the eleventh of May 1685 will remain for ever in the minds of the Scottish people, as a memorial of that perverse and pig-headed generation of crowned formalists, who employed themselves for more than a ccntury in forcing Episcopacy upon a people essentially Presbyterian. See Macaulay, ch. iv. I have followed Wodrow.

James Renwick, the last of the noble Scottish band of protesters for liberty of conscience, suffered martyrdom in the Grassmarket of Edinburgh in the month of February 1688. This pure-minded, generous, and intrepid youth, of whom the then world of hirelings and time-servers was not worthy, publicly declared and subscribed the great principle of the Revolution of 1688, at a time when the majority of the best public men of that day were only beginning to dream of its possibility. Eternal honour to his name, the brave, the heroic, the unsullied! When our petty squabbles of Church politics shall have passed away from the hearing of Time, as a shallow din of tinkling cymbals, the name of Renwick shall live in the thoughts of the philosophical historian, as one of the greatest of the great.

The churchyard of Wigton is beautifully situated on a rising ground overlooking the lovely bay of Wigton. Immediately south of the town the river Bladnoch flows into the bay, at the mouth of which the two Margarets were drowned by the brutal dragoons of James II. The inscription on the tombs of the martyrs still exhibits the old inscription in characters particularly fresh and clear. On a rising ground behind the town an obelisk has very recently been erected in memory of the martyr maidens.

—See Knox's History, vol. i. p.173, whom I have closely followed. The deed celebrated in the text took place in the year 1546. That it was not a murder in the criminal sense of the word, but a just retribution for wicked deeds, besides being politically a wise act, no impartial thinker can doubt. Beaton was a man who intruded into the Church of Christ, as his greatest admirers admit, from purely ambitious and worldly motives; and being seated in the seat of the Holiest, this godless and cruel man used his unsanctified power for the purpose of persecuting and annihilating the only men then existing who were faithfully preaching the truth of God in this land. In the eye of Heaven, Beaton was a traitor and a murderer. He murdered Wishart; and if he was murdered himself afterwards, he had no more right to complain than any other mortal who has been made to feel the eternal justice of that text, “Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed”. The talk about Law and Legitimate authority in such cases may amuse the shallow and console the coward; but it has no meaning to the consistent thinker. Those who talk with a pious horror of assassination ought to bear in mind, that when wolves in sheep's clothing exercise open force over the sheep, there is nothing for the faithful shepherd but to use secret force, when opportunity offers. The magistrate has no right to bear the sword in support of injustice; nor do Cardinals enjoy any sacred privilege to dye their stockings purple in the blood of just men. As to the policy of the act there can be no doubt. Beaton was the most talented and the most energetic captain of injustice and advocate of lies in those days; and his death gave the Reformation room to breathe and to grow, which otherwise might have been crushed under the squelch of his ruthless foot.

I recommend all persons who visit Abbotsford and Melrose To go on to Selkirk, from whence a pleasant pastoral walk of some twenty miles will take them up to the mountain church of Ettrick, where the famous theologian Thomas Boston lies buried. The scenery is full of green, quiet beauty, of a character very similar to the lovely vale of Newlands, between Buttermere and Derwentwater, in the Lake country.

I took this story from Simpson's Traditions of the Covenanters, a well-known book, which, notwithstanding some faults of literary execution, gives the reader, by mere accumulation of similar cases, a more vivid idea of the bloody times of tyrannous Episcopacy in Scotland than the most elegant pages of Macaulay. The farm of Dalquhairn is beautifully situated in the mountain solitude, on the hill road between Sanquhar and Carsphairn. The whole of that country is sacred to the memory of our brave peasants, the untitled heroes of

The title of this song suggests to me the propriety of stating, in a few short sentences, the grounds on which, as a philosophical student of history—for no one will suspect me of partizanship—I am convinced that the Covenanters, who have been so liberally abused by all sorts of fashionable writers, are the only true heroes of the Scottish history of the seventeenth century; and that all attempts to put the Cavaliers in their place must issue in ridiculous discomfiture.

(1.) It is quite certain, according to the New Testament and the practice of the first centuries, that the Church of Christ does not mean the clerical order, but it means emphatically and prominently the Christian people, the assembly, the congregation, the body of the faithful.

(2.) The Christian people, as such, have an inherent, divine, and inalienable right to act in religious matters according to the free verdict of their conscience, and not to be coerced into creeds or forms of worship by any extrinsic power, clerical or secular.

(3.) Any distinct association of human beings, composing what we call a nation, and professing Christianity, is entitled to follow the conscience of the majority in making a national confession of faith, and to resist dictation in this matter, whether from priests or politicians, who, in so far as they attempt to debauch the free national conscience, are usurpers, and ought to be cast down.

(4.) The Scottish people did, by many very manifest and indubitable acts, declare and profess their faith in Presbytery as the most scriptural form of church government, according to the best of their insight; and this their declaration was formally confirmed by the Act of Parliament 1560.

(5.) Notwithstanding this public and constitutional declaration, King James VI., Kings Charles I. and II., and James II., did, in a most false and treacherous way, form a conspiracy to rob the Scottish people of this their freely chosen faith; and did, during a period of more than one hundred years, proceed to the execution of this conspiracy in a series of public acts, characterised by falsehood, fraud, force, and cruelty of the most atrocious description.

(6.) That for these acts resistance to the government of these kings, so far from being criminal, was to be regarded as the highest heroism; and to the men who practised this heroism, in days of gross selfishness and cowardice, the Scottish people owe their independence, and all that is manly and worthy of admiration in their character.

(7.) The Scottish Cavaliers, whatever might have been the personal virtues of some of them, or the brilliant qualities of others, were, as a body, engaged in the cause of falsehood, injustice, tyranny, and oppression, and therefore are justly regarded by all true Scotsmen with hatred, and by all philosophical thinkers with pity or contempt.

(8.) The principles for which the Covenanters fought and bled, are the very principles which were established by the Revolution of 1688, and which lie at the bottom of the whole political constitution and social philosophy of Britain at the present hour.

(9.) Any offensive peculiarities of doctrine or manners exhibited by individual Presbyterians, are no more to be made a ground of reproach against the whole body, than the licentiousness and corruption of the Court of Charles II. are to be set down to the accountof the whole body of the Cavaliers who supported him.

(10.) Those who are fond to object to the Covenanters that they were intolerant, ought to bear in mind that toleration in matters of state-religion is an innovation only of yesterday, unknown alike to Plato, the greatest philosopher of ancient times, and to Calvin, one of the greatest theologians of modern times. Besides, toleration, which is a very pretty phrase in times of peace, can have no meaning in times of war. Soldiers do not tolerate one another; they cut one another's throats. So, in times of religious warfare, there can be no toleration, so long as the struggle lasts. We are learning to tolerate Popery only now; and even now not altogether. If the Covenanters were intolerant in those days of a life and death struggle, so were the Episcopalians; only the Covenanters, so long as they remained on Scottish ground, were in the right, and the Episcopalians in the wrong. If a man uses violence in word or deed, it is by no means a matter of indifference of what cause he is the champion, and whether he stands in a defensive or an aggressive position. To be over-zealous in a good cause may often be pardonable; while even a little zeal in the service of falsehood, fraud, and force, is a great sin.

In this ballad I have followed very closely the account given by our genial Reformer in his History, vol. I. p. 260, Laing. The word marmoset, signifying a sort of monkey, is applied by Knox to the idol. I put it into the mouth of the mob.

See Chambers' Annals of Scotland, vol. ii. p. 103, year and date as in the text. The learned author says, on the authority of Wodrow, that the name of this mettlesome dame was not Geddes, but Mean. But, however this be, Fame has baptized her into Geddes, and with that appellation she must live through the ages, and will be famous as long as Scotland and Scotsmen are remembered.

—The wood-sorrel, oxalis acetosella, very abundant in our Scottish woods. From this plant oxalic acid is extracted.

—By the liberality for which the Free Church is so famous, very few of these cottage vicarages are now to be seen; but the verses in the text refer to a period shortly after the Disruption, when Free Church manses were not known.

—The farm of Ellisland, occupied by Burns before he took up the gauger trade, lies on the west bank of the Nith, about six miles north of Dumfries. The whole country is passing beautiful, and well worthy of more frequent visits than it receives from our English tourists. To them, also, I recommend a trip into the neighbouring counties of Kirkcudbright and Wigton, districts full of unfrequented and unsuspected beauty.

—This famous lyric stands single, within the compass of my reading, as a composition combining a great philosophical principle and accuracy of scientific detail with the highest poetical beauty. The measure of the original is elegiac; for which I agree with Bulwer (see his translations from Schiller) that our ballad measure of fourteen syllables is the best substitute. On Goethe's botanical philosophy, generally, the reader will consult the poet's Life, by Lewis, a work which will be long remembered as one of the great biographical masterpieces of the present age. My admiration of this poem of Goethe is so great, that I was induced to try another version of it in Latin, which the reader will find at the end of the present volume.

—The hero of this little descriptive song is Sir Andrew Halliday, a native of Annandale, to the poetical aspect of whose character I was introduced by Dr Carlyle, when hospitably entertained by him in his snug little cell near Ecclefechan. About Sir Andrew's youth, see particularly “Poems by John Johnstone. Edinburgh, 1857;” a little work containing some interesting notices of Scottish peasant life, in the latter half of the last century.

With regard to the evils of the one-sided large farm system, and the wholesale expatriation of the Highlanders, I have seen no reason to change the opinions expressed by me in the Notes to my Lays and Legends, p. 360. The articles on this subject which appeared in the Edinburgh Review and elsewhere, merely played dexterously with the accidents of the question, and left the essence untouched. The impolicy of the large farm system is ad-mitted by a late practical writer, “Mackay on the Management of Landed Property in the Highlands of Scotland. Blackwood, 1858.”

—The bird here referred to is one of the Caprimulgus or goatsucker tribe, well known to naturalists.

The cricket on the tree is the Latin Cicada, Italian Cicala, and the old Greek τεττιξ. I heard it whirring away most musically in a very hot day in June, as I was wending up from the plain of Marathon, by the hill road, across to the Cephissus. It will be observed that all Greek words in κος—shortened into κο by the modern Greeks—have the full accent on the last syllable, like our word engineer; though the Oxonians, perversely pronounce such words with the Latin accent on the antepenult.