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both in the animate and inanimate world, to be wild and irregular, and we must be contented to take them with the alloys which belong to them, or live without them. Genius breaks from the fetters of criticism, but its wanderings are sanctioned by its majesty and wisdom when it advances in its path: subject it to the critic, and you tame it into dullness. Mighty rivers break down their banks in the winter, sweeping away to death the flocks which are fattened on the soil that they fertilise in the summer: the few may be saved by embankments from drowning, but the flock must perish from hunger. Tempests occasionally shake our dwellings and dissipate our commerce; but they scourge before them the lazy elements, which without them would stagnate into pestilence. In like manner, Liberty herself, the last and best gift of God to his creatures, must be taken just as she is you might pare her down into bashful regularity, and shape her into a perfect model of severe scrupulous law, but she would then be Liberty no longer; and you must be content to die under the lash of this inexorable justice which you had exchanged for the banners of Freedom.

Justice and Mercy.

Every human tribunal ought to take care to administer justice, as we look, hereafter, to have justice administered to ourselves. Upon the principle on which the Attorney-general prays sentence upon my client--God have mercy upon us! Instead of standing before him in judgment with the hopes and consolations of Christians, we must call upon the mountains to cover us; for which of us can present, for omniscient examination, a pure, unspotted, and faultless course?. But I humbly expect that the benevolent Author of our being will judge us as I have been pointing out for your example. Holding up the great volume of our lives in his hands, and regarding the general scope of them, if he discovers benevolence, charity, and good-will to man beating in the heart, where he alone can look-if he finds that our conduct, though often forced out of the path by our infirmities, has been in general well directed-his all-searching eye will assuredly never pursue us into those little corners of our lives, much less will his justice select them for punishment, without the general context of our existence, by which faults may be sometimes found to have grown out of virtues, and very many of our heaviest offences to have been grafted by human imperfection upon the best and kindest of our affections. No, gentlemen; believe me, this is not the course of divine justice, or there is no truth in the Gospels of Heaven. If the general tenor of a man's conduct be such as I have represented it, he may walk through the shadow of death, with all his faults about him, with as much cheerfulness as in the common paths of life; because he knows that, instead of a stern accuser to expose before the Author of his nature those frail passages which, like the scored matter in the book before you, chequers the volume of the brightest and best-spent life, his mercy will obscure them from the eye of his purity, and our repentance blot them out for ever.

Charles James Fox (1749-1806), the great Whig statesman and orator, during his intervals of relaxation from public life, among other literary studies and occupations commenced a History of the Reign of James II., intending to continue it to the settlement at the Revolution of 1688. Introductory Chapter, giving a rapid view of our

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constitutional history from the time of Henry VII. he completed. He wrote also some chapters of his History; but at the time of his death he had brought it down only to Monmouth's execution. Public affairs, private pleasures, and a devotion, eclectic and profound, to the classics, and to works of imagination and poetry, were constantly drawing him off from historical research; furthermore, he was fastidiously scrupulous as to the niceties of language, and wished to form his plan exclusively on the model of the ancient writers, without note, digression, or dissertation. He once assured me.' reported his nephew, Lord Holland, that he would admit no word into his book for which he had not the authority of Dryden.' We need not, therefore, wonder that Fox died before completing his History. In 1808 the fragment was given to the world by Lord Holland, a History of the Early Part of the Reign of James II., with an Introductory Chapter. An Appendix of original papers was also added. The History is plainly written, without pedantry or pretence; but the style of the great statesman, spite of the care bestowed upon it, is far from perfect. It wants force and vivacity, as if graphic clearness of narrative and distinct perception of events and characters had evaporated in the process of elaboration; and there is little trace of the power of the brilliant parliamentary debater.

See two works by Earl Russell (1853-66), Sir G. O. Trevelyan's Early Life of C. J. Fox (1880), and the Life by H. O. Wakeman (1890).

George Chalmers (1742-1825), born at Fochabers in Moray, practised as a lawyer at Baltimore from 1763 until the breaking out of the American War of Independence. He then settled in London (1775), and in 1786 became Clerk to the Board of Trade. His History of the United Colonies, from their Settlement till the Peace of 1763, appeared in 1780. Among his numerous works were a Life of Sir David Lyndsay, with an edition of his works, and a Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, from the State Papers. In 1807 he commenced the publication of his Caledonia, of which three large volumes had appeared before his death. It contains a laborious antiquarian detail of the earlier periods of Scottish history, with minute topographical and historical accounts of the various provinces of the country. A reprint (Paisley, 1888-95) comprised the matter prepared for the unpublished fourth volume, and a copious and much-needed index.

John Gillies (1747-1836), born at Brechin, studied at Glasgow, and was travelling tutor to three sons of the Earl of Hopetoun. In 1793 he succeeded Robertson as Historiographer for Scotland. The monarchical spirit of his History of Ancient Greece, its Colonies and Conquests (2 vols. 1786), was scarcely less decided than that of Mitford's. The history of Greece,' he says, 'exposes the dangerous turbulence of democracy, and

arraigns the despotism of tyrants. By describing the incurable evils inherent in every republican policy, it evinces the inestimable benefits resulting to liberty itself from the lawful dominion of hereditary kings and the steady operation of wellregulated monarchy.' Dr Gillies also translated from Aristotle, and wrote a View of the Reign of Frederick II. of Prussia (1789), a History of the World from the Reign of Alexander to Augustus (1807-10), and other works.

Malcolm Laing (1762–1818), Scottish historian, was born at his paternal estate on the Mainland of Orkney, educated at Kirkwall and Edinburgh University, and called to the Scottish Bar in 1785. He appeared as an author in 1793, having completed Dr Henry's History of Great Britain. The sturdy Whig opinions of Laing formed a contrast to the tame moderatism of Henry, and his attainments and research were far superior to those of his predecessor. In 1800 he published The History of Scotland from the Union of the Crowns to the Union of the Kingdoms; with Dissertations on the Gowrie Conspiracy and on Ossian's Poems. Laing attacked the translator of Ossian with unmerciful and almost ludicrous severity; in revenge, the Highland admirers of the Celtic Muse attributed his sentiments to the prejudice natural to an Orkney man. Laing replied in The Poems of Ossian, &c., containing the Poetical Works of James Macpherson, Esq. (1805). In 1804 he published a second edition of his History of Scotland, to which he prefixed a Preliminary Dissertation on the Participation of Mary Queen of Scots in the Murder of Darnley, on the whole his acutest and ablest work. Member for Orkney and Shetland 1807-12, Laing spent the last ten years of his life on his paternal estate in Orkney, where he promoted with ardour local and agricultural improvement.

John Pinkerton (1758–1826), born in Edinburgh, and bred for the law, in 1780 settled in London as a man of letters, in 1802 in Paris. His twenty-four works include Essay on Medals (1787); Origin of the Scythians or Goths (1787), in which he fell foul of the Celts; Enquiry into the History of Scotland preceding the Reign of Malcolm III. (1790); History of Scotland, 1371-1542 (1797); Walpoliana (1799); and Modern Geography (1802-7). A vehement partisan and controversialist, he was an industrious collector of forgotten fragments of history, of Scottish Ballads (1783) and Ancient Scottish Poems (1786), but was neither a discriminating nor conscientious editor.

Joseph Ritson (1752-1803), a London conveyancer, born at Stockton-on-Tees, of Westmorland family, was indefatigable in his labours to illustrate English literature, particularly the neglected ballad-strains of the nation. He published in 1783 a valuable Collection of English Songs; in 1790, Ancient Songs, from the time of Henry III. to the Revolution; in 1792, Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry; in 1794, A Collection

of Scottish Songs; in 1795, A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads relating to Robin Hood. And he edited Minot and Ancient Metrical Romances, and produced sundry anthologies. Ritson was a faithful and acute editor, profoundly versed in literary antiquities, but of a jealous, irritable temper, and prone to an acerbity in criticism and comment which kept him in a state of constant warfare with almost all his brother-collectors, except Sir Walter Scott. He attacked Joseph Warton and Bishop Percy with ferocity, though often his objections were not without just ground; he scolded Johnson and Steevens for their text of Shakespeare, nor did Malone's escape. He was in diet a strict Pythagorean, and wrote a treatise against the use of animal food. Sir Walter Scott, who bore ample testimony to the merits of this unhappy gleaner in the by-paths of literature, wrote to his friend Ellis in 1803: 'Poor Ritson is no more. All his vegetable soups and puddings have not been able to avert the evil day, which, I understand, was preceded by madness.'

Richard Porson was born on Christmas Day 1759 at East Ruston in Norfolk, son of the parish clerk. He was sent to a village school, and was afterwards taken in hand by the curate; and a neighbouring squire sent the precocious boy to Eton. In 1778 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, was elected a scholar, won the Craven Scholarship and the first chancellor's medal, and in 1782 was elected a Fellow. He now began to contribute to reviews; his Nota brevis ad Toupii Emendationes in Suidam (1790) carried his name beyond England. In 1787 appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine his three sarcastic letters on Hawkins's Life of Johnson; and during 1788-89 his far more famous letters to Archdeacon Travis on the spurious verse 1 John v. 7, which brought him no little odium, and were reprinted as a volume in 1790. In 1792 he was appointed regius professor of Greek at Cambridge; in 1795 he edited schylus, and in 1797-1801 four plays of Euripides; and in 1806 he was appointed librarian of the London Institution, but sadly neglected his duties. Struck down with apoplexy on the 19th of September 1808, he died six days later. Porson possessed a stupendous memory, unwearied industry, great acuteness, fearless honesty, and masculine sense, but was hampered and hindered all his life by poverty, ill-health, dilatoriness, and fits of intemperance. He achieved little, besides the works already named, but a few bon-mots, some brilliant emendations, and the posthumous Adversaria (1812), notes on Aristophanes (1820), Pausanias (1820) and Suidas (1834), and the lexicon of Photius (1822). His love of drink amounted to a passion, or rather disease; Byron describes him as hiccuping Greek like a helot at the evening parties at Trinity College. But his company was irresistibly charming to his intimates; when at night he was in his glory, he poured out torrents of various

literature, the best sentences of the best writers, and sometimes the ludricous beyond the gay; pages of Barrow, whole letters of Richardson, whole scenes of Foote, favourite pieces from the periodical press.' And this marvellous miscellany of remembered literature was set in a framework of his own admirable sense (sometimes, however, highly paradoxical) and trenchant wit and humour. Many of his pointed sayings were remembered. Being on one occasion informed that Southey considered his poem Madoc as likely to be a valuable possession to his family, Porson answered, 'Madoc will be read-when Homer and Virgil are forgotten.' The ornate style of Gibbon was his aversion. There could not,' he said, 'be a better exercise for a schoolboy than to turn a page of The Decline and Fall into English. Unhappily he is even better remembered for such Facetiæ Cantabrigienses as:

I went to Frankfort and got drunk

With that most learn'd professor, Brunck;
I went to Worms and got more drunken
With that more learn'd professor, Ruhnken.
When Dido found Eneas would not come,
She mourned in silence and was di do dum.

From the Letters on Hawkins's 'Johnson.' Mr URBAN,-Two canons of criticism are undisputed : that an author cannot fail to use the best possible word on every occasion, and that a critic cannot chuse but know what that word is. And if these rules hold good in words, why not in sentences? These points being granted, it follows that whenever Sir John Hawkins, in quoting any part of Johnson's works, adopts a reading different from the editions, it is to be replaced in the text, and the other discarded. Now to apply. We read in the vulgar editions of London, vol. xi. p. 319, ' And fix'd on Cambria's solitary shore.' But how much better is Sir John's reading (56)! And fix'd in Cambria's soli. tary shore.' I would not believe that Johnson wrote otherwise, though Johnson himself should affirm it. Again, in the last number of The Rambler, vol. vii. p. 395, Johnson says, or is made to say, 'I have endeavoured to refine our language to grammatical purity.' How tame, dull, flat, lifeless, insipid, prosaic, &c. is this, compared to what the Knight has substituted (291) -grammar and purity! A fine instance of the figure Hen dia duoin! like Virgil's pateris et auro; or like— but I will not overpower you with my learning; or, more properly speaking, with my lettered ignorance; for that is the statutable phrase, and so it ought to have been printed in the verses on Levett, vol. xi. p. 366, upon the authority of the Knight (555), instead of lettered arrogance Lettered ignorance is a beautiful oxymoron, and hints that people who affect to be men of learning may be very ignorant notwithstanding. Examples, I suppose, will occur to every reader. Here I cannot help hazarding, though somewhat out of its place, a conjecture of my own upon a passage in Sir John's work (311), 'Among men of real learning there is but one opinion-' Ought it not to be, Among us men of real learning-'? . . . Critics in a dead language, when they dislike the common text, quarrel with the careless or faithless transcribers. My spleen is not less moved by those negligent,

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or worse than negligent, rogues, the printers, who have given us, in the preface to Johnson's Dictionary, vol. ix. p. 221, the following paragraph: In gathering the authorities, I forbore to copy those which I thought likely to occur whenever they were wanted. It is remarkable that in reviewing my collection, I found the word sea unexemplified.' Now would you believe, Mr Urban, that not a word of this is genuine? No. The true reading, or nearly the true reading (for the Knight (344) has not favoured us with the exact words) runs thus: So near perfection have I brought this Dictionary, that, upon a review of it, previous to my drawing up the preface, I am unable to detect the casual omission of more than one article, the appellative ocean.' You, I dare say, Mr Urban, and many others, had no more wit than to imagine that Johnson was rather confessing his weakness than exulting in his strength; that he meant to show how the most common things may escape our notice, and therefore says, 'In reviewing my collection, I found the word sea unexemplified.' See, Sir, how griev ously you were mistaken. Johnson, in the sentence we have retrieved, boasts of the perfection to which he has brought his work, in the modest style of Exegi monumentum-: and it was not the word sea unexemplified that made the single fault, but the appellative ocean omitted.

The next part of my task I would gladly decline, of proposing some corrections in Sir John's work. I shudder at my own rashness; but, since I have begun, it is too late to retreat. P. 384, I once travelled with Richardson in the Fulham stage-coach.' Tell me the truth, Mr Urban, is there not something in this sentence that grates upon your round and religious ears? If the date of the fact were settled, I should pronounce at once that Sir John wrote, My own coach being out of order, I once travelled.'-A like omission has happened (419), 'I retired and staid in the outer room to take him home.' Read boldly, 'To take him home in my own coach.' Whoever is well acquainted with the Knight's writings knows that he never misses an opportunity of using the pronoun of the first person. It was on this ground I offered my first conjecture. Thus we find, from the beginning of the volume to the end, not only my own coach, but also my servants. My servant. My lands. My countryhouse. My gate in the country. My gardener. While I was chairman. Intelligence in my judicial capacity. Kelly practised under me. A bill found before me. I have discharged debtors [i.e. as judge, not as creditor). My discourse with Lord Rochford. My conversation with a nobleman. Bishop Hoadley himself told me [what he had told all the world before]. Sir John (386) has given a list of the books in ana, but has forgotten one of the most famous, called Jomilleriana. This is the more extraordinary, because he is indebted to it for two of his best stories in pages 192 and 348; and the Knight is a man of such nice honour that he never borrows from an author without acknowledging the obli gation. Witness Mr Boswell, Mrs Piozzi, the Gentle man's and European Magazines, &c.

Did I tell you, Mr Urban, that Sir John has a delicate hand at a compliment? If I told you so, I told you nothing but the truth. Out of fifty proofs I shall produce two. P. 211, Dr Hill obtained from one of those universities (St Andrews), which would scarce refuse a degree to an apothecary's horse, a diploma. The civil things that Johnson said of Scotland were highly

grateful and honourable to the natives, or Mr Boswell would not have recorded them. But, in my mind, the Knight is far superior to his model both in sentiment and language.

Porson's Tracts and Criticisms were collected by Kidd (1815). See Selby Watson's Life of him (1861), and his Correspondence edited by Lugard (1867).

Sharon Turner (1768–1847), a London solicitor, London-born but of Yorkshire extraction, commenced in 1799 the publication of a series of works on English history. The first was a History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799-1805); the second, a History of England (1814-29), ultimately brought down to the end of the reign of Elizabeth; the whole series being comprised in twelve volumes, and containing much new and interesting information on the government, laws, literature, and manners, as well as on the civil and ecclesiastical history, of the country. From an ambitious attempt to rival Gibbon in loftiness of diction, Sharon Turner disfigured his History, especially in the later volumes, by pomp of expression and involved intricacy of style. The early part of his History, the labour of sixteen years, may be said to have revealed their ancestors to modern Englishmen, and gave a vast impulse to historical study and research; and though his work is now somewhat antiquated, it may safely be said that he made a much greater advance on his predecessors than his more fully equipped successors have done on him. He also wrote a very orthodox Sacred History of the World, in two volumes, and so late as 1845 published an historical poem, Richard III.

William Roscoe (1753-1831) was the only son of a Liverpool innkeeper and market-gardener. He was articled to an attorney in 1769, and began to practise in 1774. In 1777 he published a poem, Mount Pleasant, and another in 1787, The Wrongs of Africa, a protest against the slave-trade. Having in youth acquired a competent knowledge of Latin, French, and Italian, he applied himself about 1789 to the great task he had long meditated, a Life of Lorenzo de Medici, called the Magnificent (2 vols. 1796). The work ranked its author among the most popular of the day; a second edition was soon called for, and Cadell & Davies purchased the copyright for £1200. About the same time Roscoe relinquished practice as an attorney, and studied for the Bar, but in 1799 became partner and manager in a Liverpool bank. His next literary appearance was as the translator of The Nurse (1798), a poem from the Italian of Luigi Tansillo. His second great work, The Life and Pontificate of Leo X. (4 vols. 1805), though carefully prepared, and also enriched with new information, had not the success of his Life of Lorenzo. 'The history of the reformation of religion,' it was truly said, 'involved many questions of subtle disputation, as well as many topics of character and conduct; and, for a writer of great candour and discernment, it was scarcely possible to satisfy

either the Papists or the Protestants.' Roscoe's liberal views and his accomplishments recommended him to his townsmen as a fit person to represent them in Parliament, and he was accordingly elected in 1806. He spoke in favour of the abolition of the slave-trade, and of the civil disabilities of the Catholics, thereby exciting against him a powerful and violent opposition; and on the dissolution in the following spring he was not again returned. But he still took a warm interest in passing events, and published several pamphlets on the topics of the day. A projected History of Art and Literature was not carried out. Pecuniary embarrassments came to cloud his latter days. The banking establishment of which he was a partner was forced in 1816 to suspend payment, and Roscoe had to sell his library, pictures, and other works of art; but his love of literature continued undiminished. The Butterfly's Ball (1807), the bestknown of his poems, was written for the entertainment of his youngest child; the earliest (1777) was a descriptive poem, Mount Pleasant. He gave valuable assistance in the establishment of the Royal Institution of Liverpool. He edited an edition of Pope, which showed but little research or discrimination; and in his best work De Quincey detected 'the feebleness of the mere belles-lettrist.' See the Life by his son Henry (1833), the Memoir by J. S. Traill (1853), and Espinasse's Lancashire Worthies (2nd series, 1877).

Archibald Alison (1757-1839), the son of a Provost of Edinburgh, studied at Glasgow University and Balliol College, Oxford, received Anglican including a prebend of Salisbury and the perpetual orders in 1784, and had held several preferments, curacy of Kenley, Shropshire, when in 1800 he returned to his native city, and till 1831 served there as an Episcopal minister. In 1790 he published his Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, designed to prove that material objects appear beautiful or sublime in consequence of their association with our moral feelings and affections; the objects presented to the eye generate trains of thought and pleasing emotion, and these constitute our sense of beauty. This theory, referring all our ideas of beauty to the law of association, was long maintained and disputed. Alison's too simple æsthetic theory was subsequently maintained by Jeffrey, but has been superseded by the modified associationist doctrines of Bain and Herbert Spencer, and is now mainly of historic interest. His two volumes of sermons (1814-15) were, like Blair's, 'elegant' in language, non-doctrinal and non-controversial. The following extracts are from his Essays:

Historic Association.

Even the peasant, whose knowledge of former times extends but to a few generations, has yet in his village some monuments of the deeds or virtues of his forefathers, and cherishes with a fond veneration the memorial of those good old times to which his imagination

returns with delight, and of which he loves to recount the simple tales that tradition has brought him. And what is it that constitutes the emotion of sublime delight which every man of common sensibility feels upon his first prospect of Rome? It is not the scene of destruction which is before him. It is not the Tiber, diminished in his imagination to a paltry stream, flowing amidst the ruins of that magnificence which it once adorned. It is not the triumph of superstition over the wreck of human greatness, and its monuments erected upon the very spot where the first honours of humanity have been gained. It is ancient Rome which fills his imagination. It is the country of Cæsar, of Cicero, and Virgil which is before him. It is the mistress of the world which he sees, and who seems to him to rise again from her tomb to give laws to the universe. All that the labours of his youth, or the studies of his maturer age, have acquired with regard to the history of this great people, open at once on his imagination, and present him with a field of high and solemn imagery which can never be exhausted. Take from him these associations-conceal from him that it is Rome that he sees, and how different would be his emotion !

Sound coloured by Association.

Yet

The howl of the wolf is little distinguished from the howl of the dog, either in its tone or in its strength; but there is no comparison between their sublimity. There are few, if any, of these sounds so loud as the most common of all sounds, the lowing of a cow. this is the very reverse of sublimity. Imagine this sound, on the contrary, expressive of fierceness or strength, and there can be no doubt that it would become sublime. The hooting of the owl at midnight, or amid ruins, is strikingly sublime; the same sound at noon, or during the day, is very far from being so. The scream of the eagle is simply disagreeable when the bird is either tame or confined; it is sublime only when it is heard amid rocks and deserts, and when it is expressive to us of liberty and independence, and savage majesty. The neighing of a war-horse in the field of battle, or of a young untrained horse when at large among mountains, is powerfully sublime. The same sound in a cart-horse or a horse in the stable is simply indifferent, if not disagreeable. No sound is more absolutely mean than the grunting of swine. The same sound in the wild boaran animal remarkable both for fierceness and strength -is sublime. The low and feeble sounds of animals which are generally considered the reverse of sublime are rendered so by association. The hissing of a goose and the rattle of a child's plaything are both contemptible sounds; but when the hissing comes from the mouth of a dangerous serpent, and the noise of the rattle is that of the rattlesnake, although they do not differ from the others in intensity, they are both of them highly sublime. . . . There is certainly no resemblance, as sounds, between the noise of thunder and the hissing of a serpent-between the growling of a tiger and the explosion of gunpowder-between the scream of the eagle and the shouting of a multitude: yet all of these are sublime. In the same manner, there is as little resemblance between the tinkling of the sheep-fold bell and the murmuring of the breeze-between the hum of the beetle and the song of the lark-between the twitter of the swallow and the sound of the curfew; yet all these are beautiful.

John Howie (1735–93), a farmer at Lochgo.n near Eaglesham in Renfrewshire, was sprung of a family which claimed descent from an Albigensian refugee of the name of Huet in the thirteenth century, and which had certainly suffered persecution and forfeiture for its adherence to the Covenant in the reign of Charles II. He was as keen and devout a Presbyterian as his ancestors, and his leisure was employed in the collection of a number of Covenanting relics still shown in the house at Lochgoin, and also in the editing of Presbyterian tracts and sermons, and the composition of the Scots Worthies (1774), a series of biographies of Presbyterian saints and martyrs from Patrick Hamilton down to James Renwick. The information which these biographies contain is taken chiefly from Knox, Calderwood, Wodrow, Patrick Walker, and other similar sources; but their pages are sometimes enriched (notably in the interesting life of Captain Paton) from the stories of local and family tradition. Howie was a workmanlike compiler, and wrote a simple and not ineffective style, and his book well deserved the national popularity it long enjoyed as a Presbyterian hagiography. Of the recent reprints, the great majority, like that by Rev. W. H. Carslaw (1870), omit the curious and characteristic Appendix containing a short Historical Hint of the Wicked Lives and Miserable Deaths of some of the most Remarkable Apostates and Bloody Persecutors in Scotland, from the Reformation to the Revolution.' The extract which follows is from the life of Captain Paton:

The Captain, with a few more, being one night quartered in the fore-mentioned house of Lochgoin, with James Howie, who was one of his fellow-sufferers; at which time one Captain Ingles, with a party, lay at the Dean of Kilmarnock's, who sent out parties on all hands to see what they could apprehend: and that night a party, being out in quest of some of the sufferers, came to Meadowhead, and from thence went to another remote place in the muirs of Fenwick, called Croilburn; but finding nothing there, they went next to Lochgoin, as apprehending they would not miss their design there; and that they might come upon this place more securely, they sent about five men with one Serjean: Rae by another way, whereby the main body could not come so well up undiscovered.

The sufferers had watched all night, which was very stormy, by turns; and about day-break the Captain, on account of his asthmatical disorder, went to the far-end of the house for some rest. In the meanwhile, one George Woodburn went out to see if he could observe any (but it seems he looked not very surely); and going to secret duty instead of this, from which he was but a little time returned, until, on a sudden, ere they were aware, Serjeant Rae came to the inner door of the house, and cried out, Dogs! I have found you now. The four men took to the spence-James and John Howie happened to be then in the byre, among the cattle. The wife of the house, one Isabel Howie, seeing none but the serjeant, cried to them to take the hills, and not be killed in the house. She took hold of Rae as he was coming boldly forward to the door of the place in which

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