BAILLIE THE COVENANTER.1 [1841.] EARLY in the seventeenth century of our era, a certain Mr. Robert Baillie, a man of solid wholesome character, lived in moderate comfort as Parish Minister of Kilwinning, in the west of Scotland. He had comfortably wedded, produced children, gathered Dutch and other fit divinity-books; saw his duties lying tolerably manageable, his possessions, prospects not to be despised; in short, seemed planted as for life, with fair hopes of a prosperous composed existence, in that remote corner of the British dominions. A peaceable, 'solid-thinking, solid-feeding,' yet withal clear-sighted, diligent and conscientious man, alas, his lot turned-out to have fallen in times such as he himself, had he been consulted on it, would by no means have selected. Times of controversy; of oppression, which became explosion and distraction: instead of peaceable preaching, mere raging, battling, soldiering; universal shedding of gall, of ink and blood: very troublous times! Composed existence at Kilwinning, with rural duties, domestic pledges, Dutch bodies of divinity, was no longer possible for a man. Till the advent of Laud's Service-book into the High Church of Edinburgh (Sunday the 23d of July 1637), and that ever-memorable flight of Jenny Geddes's stool at the 1 LONDON AND WESTMINSTER REVIEW, No. 72. The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, A. M., Principal of the University of Glasgow, 1637-1662. Edited from the Author's Manuscripts, by David Laing, Esq. 3 vols. (Vols. i. and ii.) Robert Ogle, Edinburgh, 1841. head of the Dean officiating there, with "Out, thou foul thief! wilt thou say mass at my lug?"— till that unexpected cardinal-movement, we say, and the universal, unappeasable riot, which ensued thereupon over all these Kingdoms, Baillie, intent on a quiet life at Kilwinning, was always clear for some mild middle course, which might lead to this and other blessings. He even looked with suspicion on the Covenant when it was started; and was not at all one of the first to sign it. Sign it, however, he did by and by, the heat of others heating him ever higher to the due welding pitch; he signed it, and became a vehement, noteworthy champion of it, in such fashion as he could. Baillie, especially if heated to the welding pitch, was by no means without faculty. There lay motion in him; nay, curiously, with all his broadbased heaviness, a kind of alacrity, of internal swiftness and flustering impetuosity, a natural vehemence, assiduous swift eagerness, both of heart and intellect: very considerable motion; all embedded, too, in that most wholesome, broadbased love of rest! The eupeptic, right-thinking nature of the man; his sanguineous temper, with its vivacity and sociality; an ever-busy ingenuity, rather small perhaps, but prompt, hopeful, useful; always with a good dash, too, of Scotch shrewdness, Scotch canniness; and then a loquacity, free, fervid, yet judicious, canny, — in a word, natural vehemence, wholesomely covered over and tempered (as Sancho has it) in three inches of old Christian fat,' — all these fitted Baillie to be a leader in General Assemblies and conclaves, a man deputable to the London Parliament and elsewhither. He became a prominent, and so far as the Scotch Kirk went, preëminent man; present in the thick of all negotiations, Westminster Assemblies, Scotch Commissions, during the whole Civil War. It can be said too, that his natural faculty never, in any pitch of heat or confusion, proved false to him; that here, amid revolt and its dismal fluctuations, the worthy man lived agitated indeed, but not unprosperous. Clearly enough, in that terrible jostle, where so many stumbling fell, and straightway had their lives and fortunes trodden out, Baillie did, according to the Scotch proverb, contrive to carry his dish level' in a wonderful manner, spilling no drop; and indeed was found at last, even after Cromwell and all Sectaries had been there, seated with prosperous composure, not in the Kirk of Kilwinning, but in the Principalship of Glasgow University; which latter he had maintained successfully through all changes of weather, and only needed to renounce at the coming-in of Charles II., when, at any rate, he was too old for holding it much longer. So invincible, in all elements of fortune, is a good natural endowment; so serviceable to a man is that same quality of motion, if embedded in wholesome love of rest, hasty vehemence dissolved in a bland menstruum of oil! Baillie, however we may smile at him from this distance, was not entirely a common character: yet it must be owned that, for anything he of himself did or spoke or suffered, the worthy man must have been forgotten many a year ago; the name of him dead, non-extant; or turning-up (as the doom of such) is like the melancholy mummy of a name, under the eye of here and there an excavator in those dreary mines, bewildered, interminable rubbish-heaps of the Cromwellian Histories; the dreariest perhaps that anywhere exist, still visited by human curiosity, in this world. But his copious loquacity, by good luck for him and for us, prompted Baillie to use the pen as well as tongue. A certain invaluable Reverend Mr. Spang,' a cousin of his, was Scotch minister at Campvere, in Holland, with a boundless appetite to hear what was stirring in those days; to whom Baillie, with boundless liberality, gives satisfaction. He writes to Spang, on all great occasions, sheet upon sheet; he writes to his Wife, to the Moderator of his Presbytery, to earls and commoners, to this man and to that; nothing loth to write when there is matter. Many public Papers (since printed in Rushworth's and other Collections) he has been at the pains to transcribe for his esteemed correspondents; but what to us is infinitely more interesting, he had taken the further trouble to make copies of his own Letters. By some lucky impulse, one hardly guesses how for as to composition, nothing can be worse written than these Letters are, mere hasty babblements, like what the extempore speech of the man would be, he took this trouble; and ungrateful posterity reaps the fruit. These Letters, bound together as a manuscript book, in the hands of Baillie's heirs, grew ever more notable as they grew older; copies, at various times, were made of parts of them; some three copies of the whole, or almost the whole, whereof one, tolerably complete, now lies in the British Museum.1 Another usefuller copy came into the hands of Woodrow, the zealous, diligent Historian of the Scotch Church, whose numerous Manuscripts, purchased partly by the General Assembly, partly by the Advocates' Library, have now been accessible to all inquirers, for a century or more. Baillie, in this new position, grew ever notabler; was to be seen quoted in all books on the history of that period; had to be read and searched through, as a chief authority, by all original students of the same. Half a century of this growing notability issued at last in a printed edition of Baillie; two moderate octavo volumes, published, apparently by subscription, at Edinburgh, in 1775. Thus, at length, had the copious outpourings, first emitted into the ear of Spang and others, become free to the curiosity of all; purchasable by every one that had a few shil 1 As in this Museum transcript, otherwise of good authority, the name of the principal correspondent is not 'Spang' but 'Strang,' and we learn elsewhere that Baillie wrote the miserablest hand, a question arises, Whether Strang be not, once for all, the real name, and Spang, from the first, a mere false reading, which has now become inveterate? Strang equivalent to Strong, is still a common name in those parts of Scotland. Spang (which is a Scottish verb, signifying leap violently, leap distractedly, — as an imprisoned, terrified kangaroo might leap) we never heard of as a Christian person's surname before! The Reverend Mr. Leap-distractedly' labouring in that dense element of Campvere, in Holland? We will hope not, if there be a ray of hope! The Bannatyne Club, now in a manner responsible, is adequate to decide. - -Spang is the name, persist they (A. D. 1846). - lings, legible by every one that had a little patience. As the interest in those great transactions never died-out in Scotland, Baillie's Letters and Journals, one of the best remaining illustrations of them, became common in Scottish libraries. 6 Unfortunately, this same printed edition was one of the worst. A tradition, we are told, was once current among Edinburgh booksellers that it had been undertaken on the counsel of Robertson and Hume; but, as Mr. Laing now remarks, it is not a creditable tradition. Robertson and Hume would, there is little doubt, feel the desirableness of having Baillie edited, and may, on occasion, have been heard saying so; but such an edition as this of 1775 is not one they could have had any hand in. In fact, Baillie may be said to have been printed on that occasion, but not in any true sense edited at all. The quasi-editor, who keeps himself entirely hidden in the background, is guessed to have been one Mr. Robert Aiken, Schoolmaster of Anderton,' honour to his poor shadow of a name! He went over Baillie's manuscripts in such fashion as he could; omitted many Letters on private affairs;' copied those on public matters, better or worse; and prefixing some brief, vague Memoir of Baillie, gathered out of the general wind, sent his work through the press, very much as it liked to go. Thanks to him, poor man, for doing so much; not blame that, in his meagre garret, he did not do more! But it is to be admitted, few books were ever sent forth in a more helpless condition. The very printer's errors are numerous. Note or comment there is none whatever, and here and there some such was palpably indispensable; for Baillie, in the hurry of his written babblement, is wont to designate persons and things, often enough, in ways which Spang and the world would indeed understand at the time, but which now only critics and close investigators can make out. The narrative, watery, indistinct, flowing out in vague diffusion, at the first and best, fades now too frequently into the enigmatic, and stagnates in total obscuration, if some little note be not added. Whom does the Letter-writer, in |