heard-" promising and swearing, by "the great name of the Lord their God, "that they would continue in the obe"dience and discipline of this Kirk, and "defend the same, according to their "vocation and power, all the days of their "lives, under the pains contained in the "law, and danger both of body and soul "in the day of God's fearful judgment" -who, does the English reader think, were those original Scottish Covenanters ? A mob of crack-brained plebeian enthusiasts, a wild herd of ploughmen and shepherds in plaids and blue bonnets, led by a few wily burgesses and a few Kettledrummles of parsons? By no means so. That document was signed not only by the clergy, by burgesses, and the people, but, first of all, by "all "the nobles who were then in Scotland,

except the lords of the Privy Council "and four or five others," and, after them, by lairds or lesser barons in number sufficient to represent the flower of the Scottish proprietary next in rank to the great nobles, as well as by many leading men at the Edinburgh bar, never to be forgotten among whom, by any historian of Presbyterianism, was Archibald Johnstone of Warriston. And when, a few months later-in November, 1638there met that famous Glasgow Assembly, presided over by Henderson as moderator, which called the Bishops to account, abolished Episcopacy in Scotland, and established Presbytery on the basis on which, with the interruption of the period between the Restoration and the Revolution, it has continued ever since to exist in Scotland, who, does the English reader think, were present in that Assembly, as lay deputies, along with the deputies of the clergy, joining in their deliberations and consenting to their acts? Repeat nearly all of the foregoing list of nobles, adding that of Montrose as a Covenanter for the time being; fancy a gathering of other nobles, present not as members, but as assessors or sympathising spectators-in which category was Argyle; and, among the other lay members, to the number of ninety-six in all, reckon such of the Scottish gentry of that day as Douglas

of Cavers, Stirling of Keir, Bailie of Lamington, Ramsay of Balmain, Fergusson of Craigdarroch, Agnew of Lochaw, Lyon of Auldbar, Graham of Fintray, Fraser of Philorth, and others whose names and designations are still familiar, not in Scotland alone, through their living descendants. Assuredly, had Mr. Buckle thought of it, he might have made out as strong a show of aristocratic influence in the Scottish Presbyterian movement of 1638 as in that prior movement of the Scottish Reformation from Papacy which he alleges to have been nothing but aristocratic. But this was not in his brief.

I will be candid, however. I will help Mr. Buckle to one consideration which, should he ever revise this part of his summary, he may find available for patching up the rent which the foregoing facts may have made in his general theory. It is not impossible that there may have been peculiar reasons of selfish policy leading the Scottish aristocracy in 1638 to attach themselves to Presbyterianism, although, for the same or similar reasons, their forefathers had rather taken to Prelacy. There were, as I have said, new causes at work at the time of this movement of 1638. The historical conditions were different. The Prelacy which was then being enforced in Scotland was not the kind of Prelacy which hitherto the Scottish nobles and gentry had found convenient. No; whatever may be said and thought of Laud now (and he is not the kind of man that the present generation is likely to exalt into a hero), this, at least, must be said for him that, as a champion of Ecclesiasticism, he was bold, unfaltering, tenaciously true to his ideal. No truncated Church for him; no beggarly figment of a Prelacy in lieu of the reality; no cession of aught that belonged to the Church to peer or proprietor or any league of such! And so, as he gazed at the Tulchan Prelacy of Scotland, there was that in his gaze which the aristocratic patrons of such a form of Prelacy did not half like. Compulsory resumption by the Church of the revenues which had been

alienated from her; restoration of abbacies; the milk of the cow henceforth to the cow's own proper progeny-all this was, or seemed to be, in the Laudian scheme for the ecclesiastical regeneration of Scotland. What more natural than that the Scottish aristocracy should take the alarm in time, and, though they had abetted Episcopacy hitherto, now go over to a system of Presbyterianism under which they could keep what they had got? This, I say, is a consideration quite to Mr. Buckle's taste. Though I will not say that there is absolutely nothing in it, I do not care much for it myself; nor do I think it would prove of much value when brought in contact with the facts of the Covenanting movement. There is, therefore, the less liberality in my making Mr. Buckle welcome to it.

But the main objection to Mr. Buckle's summary of Scottish History from the Reformation to the Revolution is that, by its rapidity, by the levity with which it skims along the period, and especially its later portion, it fails to do justice to the acts of the Scottish people at a time when, if at any, they were conspicuously creditable, and to the importance of the services which, by these acts, Scotland rendered to England and to the common cause of British civilization.

For illustration, I will fix on one brief but eventful portion of the period -that which elapsed between the rising of the Scotch for their ecclesiastical liberties in 1637, as described above, and the outbreak of the great Civil War in England in 1642. I might go a little farther than this latter year and include a year or two of the Civil War itself; but I prefer to stop at 1642. Now, knowing the English and Scottish history of this period pretty intimately, having studied it almost literally day by day, having passed through my hands every State-paper connected with it now kept in our State-Paper Office (at least from July 1638, as I find from my notebooks), I venture to affirm, trying from my very soul to avoid prejudice and overstatement, that, if ever a nation behaved really and even splendidly well, the

credit of having done so must be given to the Scottish nation during those five particular years. I believe that such would be the verdict of every impartial Englishman who should duly inform himself of the facts-always supposing, of course, that he were an Englishman true at heart to the main course of his country's noble traditions, and not one of those creatures of small peculiar instinct, still to be found in corners, who pule over the wrongs of Charles I. as the one pitiful thing they know, and, out of sympathy with his melancholy face as Vandyke has painted it, would denounce and reverse the whole activity of that grand generation which, with the melancholy face in the midst of it, and knowing it better than we do, established, in spite of it, the liberties of England. Mr. Buckle, at least, does not belong to this class of feeble antiquarians. Nor does his philosophy, ast he gives us to understand, exclude the right of an occasional hearty feeling of admiration towards energetic conduct in past times. If so, I do not see why the conduct of the Scotch during the particular years above named should not have had the benefit of as strong a sentiment of admiration as it may be in his constitution to give, and of as eloquent an expression of it as it was in his power of language to put forth. For, in the first place, the cause for which they were contending was, as things went, a very respectable one. It was not certainly for the Buckleian system of philosophy that they were contending; but, if Mr. Buckle reserves his admiration for those cases where, in the past history of nations, he can yield it only on this absolutely satisfying ground, I am afraid he will have to keep it bottled up altogether. At the least it was, for that time, a fair cause of intellectual and spiritual, as well as national liberty. As such it is now recognised by all liberal Church-ofEngland men-who, though they may value Episcopacy highly as an institution, value freedom of conscience more, and would, in any struggle, past or present, between the two interests, let

their sympathies go at once and manfully with the larger and more vital. Moreover, it was, as history clearly demonstrates, but the northern or Scottish phase of a cause then common to the whole island. Finally, if there is any truth in the notion of some that Protestantism, as the cause of modern intellectual and political liberty, has necessarily passed through Prelacy, Presbyterianism, Independency, and what not, as successive variations of Church-organisation, all leading to the grand triumph of Individualism, or the system of Every man his own Church and the Devil take the Hindmost, why then, perhaps, after all, Mr. Buckle, if he would look well into the matter, might find some remote beginnings of his own philosophy brewing even in the contest of the old Scotch Presbyterians. Take it any way, and the cause was, as the phrase is, a cause of progress. Pass, then, to the proceedings in that cause-to the manner in which it was conducted. Here I really do not know that any bounds need be set to one's admiration, if one is given to the effusion of that sentiment. For myself, following the proceedings of the Scotch step by step during the time in question-observing them, after the first outbreak, forming themselves into Tables or Committees, and establishing a system of communication by which the whole country might hav intelligence with these centres, and might act by one matured advice; studying their negotiations with Charles and with the Scotch Privy Council, which still tried to represent his policy among them; watching them in that moment of almost phrenzied inspiration when, all other hope failing them, they registered their Covenant with heaven, and swore by the name of the Lord their God that neither threat, nor force, nor loss, nor charge of treason, nor death, nor chicanery, nor insidious mystification of private thinkings, should break their unanimous resolve, or make one man of them desert another; beholding them still, month after month, negotiating with patience and organising with zeal, till, on the march against them of that army of un

willing Englishmen which Charles had levied, they, too, took the field under that "little crooked old soldier," FieldMarshal Lesley, whom they had already looked out for their general, and to whom, "with an incredible submission, from the beginning to the end," they all, from the highest noble downwards, "gave "themselves over to be guided by him, "as if he had been the great Solyman ;" considering them, as they lay encamped on Dunse Hill, not venturing to invade England, but only keeping in sight of the English army on the other side of the Tweed, in case it should invade Scotland, till Charles, not liking the look of them through his prospect-glass, reopened negotiations, and consented to a peace; viewing them, finally, on that second occasion when, the peace having been broken, they did invade England, spreading proclamations of their motives before them, and received as welcome allies rather than as enemies by the people, till, first by their acts against Charles's new army, and then by their mere continued presence, they gave the shock that was wanted to the fabric of rule which Charles and Laud and the genius of Strafford had reared in England, and enabled the Long Parliament to enter on their work-following, I say, the proceedings of the Scotch step by step during these stages of their struggle, I find in them throughout a combination of courage, sustained fervour, business talent, integrity, intellectual inventiveness, firmness, and, withal, courtesy, good sense, and forbearance, such as, I believe, has not, in like circumstances, been often paralleled. Rushworth, I perceive, is not one of the numerous historical authorities to which Mr. Buckle refers. If he were to do so, I think I can promise that, in the Scottish Statepapers given in Rushworth's collection, as having been put forth by the Covenanting leaders, he would find a richer literary interest, greater proof of speculative capacity, than in the corresponding English State-papers of the same period. Whatever Strafford writes is, indeed, excellent; there is that stamp of genius, that vigour of mind, in his letters which

makes reading them an intellectual pleasure, apart from any sympathy with his policy; but I could point to one or two of those Scottish State-papers which beat even Strafford's in depth of reason and general vividness of expression, and I think I know the particular man among the Covenanters who wrote them. At all events, the cause which those papers pleaded is a cause in which modern Englishmen ought to feel an interest, if only from its relation to the history of freedom in England. When the Scotch rose for their ecclesiastical liberties, England was lying bound and lethargic under the despotism of Laud and Charles. It was the period of "Thorough." There had been no parliament in England for nearly ten years, and it was sedition to speak of a parliament. The Pyms, the Hampdens, and the Cromwells, were walking moodily by English waysides and along fieldpaths and hedgerows, hardly seeing any hope, and almost making up their minds to emigrate to America. That there would have come an outburst in England itself that the valiant Puritanism there kept down would, ere long, have gathered strength of itself for effective action of some kind or other-need not be doubted. But, as it happened, the initiative did. come from Scotland; and the contribution of force lent by nearly a million of insurgent Scots may really have been such as not only to accelerate and facilitate an English movement which would have occurred at any rate, but actually to make the movement possible in the substantial form in which it did occur, and to determine the course of that movement for a considerable way onwards. Such was the impression, at least, of Englishmen at that time. They not only, in their pamphlets, in the speeches of their Puritan chiefs in the Long Parliament, and in their talk at their firesides, acknowledged the service which Scotland had done them; but, for a time, there was a large and powerful body among them who could conceive of no better way of proceeding for themselves as Englishmen than by taking the successful Scottish movement for

their model, and completing an ecclesiastical reorganisation of England in exact accordance with it. All this is now forgotten, more than it is perhaps for the good of Englishmen that it should be.

Be it observed that I have restricted my claim of English admiration for the Scotch, in the respect under notice, to a definite number of years. I do so advisedly, because I cannot honestly prolong the claim without much abatement. The initiative having been given by Scotland, England began to move on in her own larger way. Her mighty and complex bulk could not be compressed so as to rest in the bed of Calvinism, Kirk-sessions and General Assemblies; and, after a period of would-be Presbyterianism, there came forth, out of the seething wealth of thought and tendency which had long been restrained in her, those various theories of Independency, Anabaptism, Latitudinarianism, Anti-Trinitarianism, and even pure natural Theism and Sceptical Secularism, which struggled with each other and with what remained of Roman Catholicism, Laudian Prelacy, Calvinistic Episcopacy, and Prebyterianism, until at last the nation devised for itself that double-bedded system, which it still retains, of an Established Church sufficiently broad for a moiety of the discordant elements and a tolerated Nonconformity for all the rest. Very early in this course of things England and Scotland parted company; and Scotland became intellectually and politically obstructive to her larger neighbour. This showed itself before the end of the Civil War, but more particularly after the death of Charles I., when the Scottish Kirk threw itself into the reaction and thought to set things right by making a Covenanter of Charles II. and then rallying round him. you know, sir," I once heard Dr. Chalmers say, speaking of this very period of Scottish History, "I think the Scotch "showed at that time a great deal of "what I have often found in them my"self-what I call a kind of caper"noitedness?" The phrase is that of a man who knew his countrymen well

"Do

and, if Mr. Buckle cares to have it, and can make out what it means, it is very much at his service. The Scotch are liable to fits of" capernoitedness ;" and, from the time when they were disappointed in seeing Presbyterianism in the ascendant in England, onwards through Cromwell's rule, they were in one of these fits.

Dearly they paid the penalty. After an interval of distracted, but on the whole peaceful and useful, submission to Cromwell, they came once more under the government of the Stuarts. There ensued, from the Restoration to the Revolution, that period of revived Episcopacy and of relentless persecution of Presbytery in all its forms, which is remembered as the dreariest period in the annals of Scotland, and which, indeed, by those who forget that the Covenant dates from 1638 and that the Scotch impulse in British affairs which it represented had been exhausted of its best strength while as yet the Long Parliament was in its early days, is erroneously thought of as the sole and special period of the Scottish Covenanters. This too was a period of heroism, and of heroism in the name of the Covenant. But it was of passive heroism, of the determination of a resolute remnant among the pastors and of the poor men and women of an afflicted land, in enduring cold and hunger, and a wild life in the moors, and imprisonment, and banishment, and torture by boot and thumbscrew, and death by carbine or drowning or gibbet, rather than yield the doctrine and worship dear to them, or speak the word their souls thought false. It was a period of zeal driven wild by cruelty, of human nature maddened to extremes beyond sense and reason, but noble in their extremity. Whether it could be shown that the spectacle presented to the English during those twenty-eight years of so much suffering by the little nation with which they were connected, or that, in any more positive way, the actual conduct of the Scotch during those twenty-eight years, contributed to the Revolution which followed, and so that

here again some meed of respect might be owing to the Scotch from Englishmen of the present day, if only from their relation to English constitutional history, I need not inquire. Of this I am sure, that, on the higher ground of a belief that no heroic action perishes, that no human soul was ever nerved to the transcendent test of death for the poorest shred of supposed truth or right, but there passed a thrill of new power from that soul into the whole will and thought of the world, that philosophy is but a wretched and drivelling one, base itself on what array of science it will, that shall teach Scotchmen to think more lightly than hitherto of the worth of their native land in that age of her humble agony.

Why should there not have been some adequate appreciation of all this in a work professing to estimate Scotland and her history in their full relations to British civilization? If, for the sake of brevity, it had been impossible to accomplish it in the way of sufficientlydetailed narrative, there might at least have been the compensation of incidental assertion and remark There is but a miserable allowance of such in Mr. Buckle.

In following for a time, indeed, the course of the first struggle, after the Reformation, between Melville and the rest of the Presbyterian clergy on the one hand, and King James and the Scottish nobility on the other, he is caught by the spectacle of the democratic boldness of the clergy, the audacity with which they criticised the conduct of their rulers, attacked them to their faces, and stirred up a popular and insurrectionary spirit against them. In this, as a loosening by any means of that principle of reverence for authority which he regards as everywhere, and at all times, the bane of mankind, and the bar to all social progress, he takes abundant delight. There is an eloquent passage in his text, in which, after speaking of the dislike, and even disgust, which the reader of the lives and proceedings of the Presbyterian clergy of those days must feel at finding him