nions, to have traced the beginnings and after progress of that miserable career of doubt which ended in his taking up a position of open and unreserved hostility to Christianity. But now we must make one or two cursory notices suffice. The home of his childhood was anything but favourable to the development of a reverential spirit. That is to say, it is no wonder he should have so soon lost faith in the Bible, since he saw his parents bow to or disregard it, just as it suited themselves. His father and mother were Unitarians, and both apparently very "broad," even as such. "In religious matters," we are told, "old Mr Parker thought for himself, and hated Paley and Jonathan Edwards. He did not believe in eternal damnation, nor in the more extravagant of the miracles of the Old and New Testaments, but he was a great reader of the Bible, and taught the younger children the ten commandments every Sabbath evening, and Sunday prayers and hymns." The mother, again, "took great pains with the religious training of her children, but cared little for doctrines—no bigotry, no cant, no fear. Religion was love and good works. . . . The dark theology of the times seems not to have blackened her soul at all." The influence of a home where these were the ruling spirits can be easily imagined. Parker "remembered with horror and a quivering of the flesh the torments he underwent when he first found, in a copy of the Westminster Catechism, the doctrine of eternal damnation and a wrathful God. He was little over six when he fell out with them. But before he was nine years old, the fear went away, and he saw clear light in the goodness of God." Thus early did he display his dislike to orthodoxy, and the alienation so soon awakened strengthened with his years. Even when he first began to preach he was a free-thinker of a very advanced type, but after his ordination the descent continued with greatly increased rapidity. To this various causes contributed. Among others, Dr Channing was then in Boston, employing his eloquence to demonstrate the all-sufficiency of reason as a guide in religion, and a freer and less reverent spirit of inquiry began to display itself within the body to which he belonged. Then the study of the German language and literature became the rage, and the rising divines of New England turned from older springs to drink at the charmed fountains of such men as Strauss and De Wette. And to add to the confusion, a transcendental school arose, with Coleridge for its remote and R. W. Emerson for its immediate originator, in which the doctrine was taught that the Christian element in humanity is something incidental and transient, and that the permanent and absolute is only to be found in a sort of sentimental pantheism. In such a place, and during such a time, a man of the most stedfast principle might have wavered; and we need not wonder that

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Mr Parker, who was trained in a school of doubt from his infancy, failed to withstand such powerful currents. The remarkable thing about him was that he stuck to the pulpit after all his friends, who had gone over to infidelity, had deserted it. The truth was, certainly, that the rostrum in the Melodeon was only a pulpit in name. But there is this much to be said in explanation of his continuing even nominally in the ministry he had a mind that was far too strong and broad and unethereal to admit of his becoming a transcendentalist, he was too honestly concerned about helping forward the various social movements into which he threw himself to make him think of becoming a mere litterateur, and retaining the conviction, amid all his enmity to the religion of the Bible, that the true God was to be served and worshipped, and that he himself was meant to be a sort of latter-day prophet, to proclaim in the wilderness of the world the faith which, as the highest and last result of science and civilisation, was destined to triumph over all its rivals, he adhered firmly and persistently to the forms of a profession in which, according to our notions, he seemed exceedingly out of place.

ART. IV.-Napier's Claverhouse.

Memorials and Letters illustrative of the Life and Times of John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee. By MARK NAPIER. 3 Vols. Edinburgh : Thomas G. Stevenson, 22 Frederick Street. 1859, 1862.

THE avowed object of this work is to dissipate the odium and disgrace which have enveloped the memory of Claverhouse, or, to quote the author's own words, "to redeem the history of Scotland from the vulgar calumny implied in the general recognition of that mythical béte noir, Bloody Clavers."" The author had obtained, from the liberality of the Duke of Buccleuch, unlimited access to the Queensberry Papers, and the result was "the discovery of thirty-seven important letters, all in the handwriting of Graham of Claverhouse, and addressed to the first Duke of Queensberry, throughout a series of years immediately preceding the revolution of 1688, the existence of which was hitherto absolutely unknown to history and the public." These, with various other letters from the leading Scottish statesmen of the day, from the same repository, are his only original materials for the present undertaking. Besides these documents, he has given his readers, in extenso, the collection of Claverhouse's letters printed for the Bannatyne Club in 1826, most of which are addressed to the Earl of Linlithgow, commander-in-chief of the forces in Scotland. Prior to the appearance of that volume," not a letter from the pen of Cla

verhouse himself was known to exist, or at least had appeared." The work has assumed the form of illustrative memorials, and letters," not that of a regularly written biography, for the author bids defiance to anything like order or arrangement.

To tell the plain truth, we have in these volumes the life of a blood-stained persecutor, and a defence of persecution, a vindication of the intolerant government of Charles II. and James VII., and of everything done by Claverhouse in oppressing the Presbyterians during that dismal period of Scottish history. The persecutors are invariably eulogised. Charles II. was "the most good-natured of monarchs," and the Duke of York is described as "his equally humane brother." With the same uniformity King William, the hero of the Revolution, is stigmatised with every opprobrious epithet. The only instance in which we meet with anything like liberality or humaneness of sentiment is when the author condemns the practice of torture as an instrument for extracting judicial evidence; but, to make up for this unwonted touch of feeling, he is careful to inform us that such "had been the arbitrary practice in England during the reign of Elizabeth," that "the covenanting kirk and its king, Argyle, have to answer" for the same crime, and that King William, "so far from abrogating, retained and ordered its use in Scotland.

The spirit in which the volumes are written is in strict keeping with the barbarous object which the author ever has in view. The most prominent characteristics of his style are its supercilious tone, and the bitterness and coarseness of its vituperation, a species of rhetoric for which he evinces a strong predilection. He is never so much in his element as when bandying terms of contempt and execration, for choice varieties of which he seems to have ransacked the vocabularies of Billingsgate, not to mention that of the bagnio. He cannot even mention the names of the Presbyterian martyrs without an epithet of insult, often derisive of their piety, such as "Saint Brown," "Saint Cargill," "Saint Peden," &c. For the Presbyterian ministers his least contemptuous appellation is that of "dominie." Thus he quotes their historians as "Dominie Wodrow," "Dominie Kirkton," "Dominie Law." William Veitch is "a fanatical dominie of the covenant;" and the Presbyterian clergy in general are "the low-minded, low-mannered dominies of the covenanting kirk." Indeed, were his volumes pruned of these rank and rabid exuberances, they would be very dull reading. It is by marching on, à tue tête, like one in a frenzy, with open mouth and distended nostrils, foaming, gesticulating, and screaming at the loudest pitch of his voice, that he expects to gain attention, if not credit, to what he has got to say. Every page, unless where letters are given, is fraught with misrepresentation. He is constantly perverting facts, and all the while ostentatiously parading him

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self as the rectifier of all preceding historians, boasting of his great historical discoveries, and holding up his own performance as the pink of biographies. The letters are, in sober truth, the only part of the volumes of any historical value; and brought out with a few explanatory remarks, they would have formed a very spare volume. Such, however, is the author's turn for expansion, that he has spun out his work to three large octavos. This is managed somewhat in this way: The most of Claverhouse's letters are printed twice, and some of them thrice. Other documents are reproduced more than once. Then he had to write down the covenanters while he was writing up Claverhouse; and the larger he made his book, the greater, he seems to have imagined, would be the pith of his argument. Hence the copious streams of personal abuse to which we have alluded.

But besides all this, many ugly facts, which exhibit in dark colours the character of Claverhouse, stand recorded in our histories. It was necessary for Mr Napier to get over this difficulty, which met him at the outset. In the first part of volume first, he applies himself to this task, which he accomplishes by pronouncing all these facts, however well attested, to be falsehoods.

He especially labours to destroy the credibility of the Rev. Robert Wodrow, author of the "History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, from the Restoration to the Revolution." Wodrow has doubtless done more than any other writer to expose the proceedings of the Government and their instruments, including Claverhouse, during that dark period. Every effort is therefore made to destroy the trustworthiness of this historian; and for this purpose every epithet of scorn and contumely which the English language could supply, has been hurled at his honest head. He is described as "this vulgar glutton of coarse and canting gossip;" "this purblind fanatic;"" this mean and mendacious writer;" "that idiot Wodrow," "that fanatical dominie;" "the low-minded Wodrow," whose "honesty can only be defended at the expense of his intellect."

In reply to this torrent of abuse, it is hardly necessary to say that Wodrow's credibility as a historian has long been tested and admitted by the most competent judges of historical evidence, and that it has never been successfully assailed. A large proportion of his history, including, in fact, all its leading statements, is derived from official documents of Government itself, the Acts of Parliament, the Records of the Privy Council and of the Justiciary Court. It is equally true, that for many of the details of his history, he was indebted to "a multitude of other authentic papers" to which he had access. And it is the truthfulness of these papers which Mr Napier denies, describing them as "absolutely rank with calumny," as "generally gathered in its loosest manner from the most tainted sources, and utterly

unworthy of credit." Before furnishing grounds upon which we have good reason to believe that the contents of these papers are in the main true narratives, we may allow Wodrow to inform us of the method which he took for obtaining them. In the preface to the first volume of his history, after acknowledging his obligations to the public records, he adds, "The rest of the history is made up of particular well-vouched instances of severities through several parts of the kingdom, which cannot be looked for in the records; some of them are attested upon oath; others came from the persons concerned, their relations, or such as were present at the facts narrated. In this part I have taken all the care I could to get the best information, and have been reckoned by some a little over nice as to my vouchers." Now, we have to state that these attested documents are still preserved among the Wodrow manuscripts in the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh; that they are very numerous, having been received from all parts of Scotland; and that they evince the extreme care taken by the historian to have every statement well authenticated. There is strong prima facie evidence of their truth. They were received from men in the most respectable positions in the church and in society; men who held the highest reputation for integrity in their day. Synods, presbyteries, and kirk-sessions interested themselves in gathering these informations. The parties from whom they were received were spread over the whole country, and there could be no collusion between them. These papers entirely agree with the records of the Privy Council regarding many of the facts, and in the impression which they convey as to the character of the times; and when all put together, they hardly depict them in more dismal colours than those in which they appear in the records of the Privy Council themselves. All this is confirmatory of their truth. If, as Mr Napier oracularly asserts, these alleged facts are gathered "from the most tainted sources, and are utterly unworthy of credit," what a set of vile scoundrels must the Presbyterians of Scotland have been in the days of Wodrow! All the parties concerned in the concoction of these documents must have been liars and calumniators. And what is more, a wide-spread conspiracy must have existed among Presbyterians all over Scotland, having for its object the fabrication of documents for blackening and blasting for ever the reputation of the best of governments, and the best deserving of men in Scotland. This wholesale imposture was practised upon Wodrow, and Wodrow has imposed these forgeries upon all succeeding historians! Mr Napier, no doubt, believes all this; at all events, he manifestly lays it down as one of his historical axioms, that all Presbyterians are liars, and that their testimony is in every instance to be set aside, unless perchance it agrees with that of the Cavaliers, who were the