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Making all allowances for the many over-coloured pictures, nay, often one-sided statements of such apologetic chroniclers as Knox, Melville, Calderwood, and Row, it is yet difficult to divest the mind of a strong leaning towards the old Presbyterians and champions of the Covenant; probably because we believe them to have been sincere, and know them to have been persecuted and oppressed. Nevertheless, the liking is as often allied to sympathy as to approbation; for a sifting of motives exhibits, in but too many instances, a sad commixture of the chaff of selfishness with the grain of principle—an exhibition of the over and over again played game, by which the gullible many are made the tools of the crafty and designing few. Be it allowed that, both in their preachings from the pulpit and their teachings by example, the Covenanters frequently proceeded more in the spirit of fanaticism than of sober religious feeling; and that, in their antagonistic ardour, they did not hesitate to carry the persecutions of which they themselves so justly complained into the camp of the adversary—sacrificing

in their mistaken zeal even the ennobling arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting, as adjuncts of idol-worship—still it is to be remembered that the aggression emanated not from them; and that the rights they contended for were the most sacred and invaluable that man can possess—the freedom of worshipping God according to the dictates of conscience. They sincerely believed that the principles which they maintained were right; and their adherence to these with unalterable constancy, through good report and through bad report; in the hour of privation and suffering, of danger and death; in the silence of the prison-cell, not less than in the excitement of the battle-field; by the blood-stained hearth, on the scaffold, and at the stake,—forms a noble chapter in the history of the human mind—of man as an accountable creature.

Be it remembered, also, that these religious persecutions were not mere things of a day, but were continued through at least three entire generations. They extended from the accession of James VI. to the English throne, (testibus the rhymes of Sir David Lindsay, and the classic prose of Buchanan,) down to the Revolution of 1688—almost a century, during which many thousands tyrannically perished, without in the least degree loosening that tenacity of purpose, or subduing that perfervidum ingenium, which, according to Thuanus, have been national characteristics.

As in almost all similar cases, the cause of the Covenanters, so strenuously and unflinchingly maintained, ultimately resulted in the victory of Protestantism—that victory, the fruits of which we have seemed of late years so readily inclined to throw away; and, in its rural districts more especially, of nothing are the people more justly proud than—

—“The tales
Of persecution and the Covenant,
Whose echo rings through Scotland to this hour.”

So says Wordsworth. These traditions have been emblazoned by the pens of Scott, M`Crie, Galt, Hogg, Wilson, Grahame, and Pollok, and by the pencils of Wilkie, Harvey, and Duncan, —each regarding them with the eye of his peculiar genius. In reference to the following stanzas, it should be remembered that, during the holding of their conventicles—which frequently, in the more troublous time, took place amid mountain solitudes, and during the night—a sentinel was stationed on some commanding height in the neighbourhood, to give warning of the approach of danger.