but they find nothing in the clerical teaching around them which they can respect or believe. There are some men in the Scotch churches who are capable of supplying this want; but their number is too few to permit hope of a speedy change.

On the other hand, the Presbyterian Church has been powerful for much good. In the first place, it should never be forgotten that to the revolt of 1640 not only Scotland, but England likewise, owes her freedom. The subsequent influence of the Presbyterian polity has been, on the whole, in accordance with that beginning. The presence of the laity as a ruling power in the Church has been a check, more or less stringent, on clerical pretensions. The right of representation conceded to all; the gradation of church courts-synods, presbyteries, assemblies-exercising their jurisdiction according to prescribed rules, and in which freedom of discussion is unrestrained, could not fail to foster principles, favourable to liberty, or at least hostile to the despotic exercise of authority. Moreover, the long resistance to power left a feeling of independence very active within the Church. This became conspicuously manifest after the enforcement of patronage by the Tory Ministers of Anne; and since then it has broken out from time to time in those great movements of Dissent which form so marked a peculiarity in Scottish ecclesiastical history. The Dissenting bodies in Scotland hold a very different position from their brethren in England. Few Scottish churchmen would go with the clergy of the diocese of Oxford in classing together Dissenters and beershops as the great evils they have to strive against. When a country squire hears of an ape, his first feeling is to give it nuts and apples; when he hears of a Dissenter, his immediate impulse is to commit it to the county jail, to shave its head, to alter its customary food, and to have it privately whipped. This is no caricature, but an accurate picture of national feelings.' This was true when Peter Plymley wrote it sixty years ago; and something of the feeling lingers in England still. But in Scotland the Dissenter cannot be so regarded. He is too powerful. If not liked, he is at least respected, even by the lairds; and the Dissenting clergy are, as a rule, Liberals. Hence, if we include all denominations, we find that in Scotland clerical influence is, in secular politics, on the liberal side.

Moreover much of the evil we have indicated is in fairness chargeable, not against Scottish Presbyterianism, but against

* See a valuable essay on Church Tendencies in Scotland,' by Dr. Wallace of Edinburgh, in 'Recess Studies,' 1870.

those who persecuted it. At the union of the crowns it would have been easy to have given Scotland a system of church government which would have reconciled all classes, and rendered possible the harmonious development of the religious life of the country and even after the Restoration such a task would not have been beyond the reach of any statesmanlike capacity. An opposite course was taken in the very wantonness of tyranny, and those who took it are mainly responsible for the varied and long-enduring mischiefs which were inseparable from such a policy.

The general condition of the country from 1567 to 1688, the period embraced by these volumes, was deplorable. A discerning eye might even then have seen, in the growth of the middle-class, good promise for the future; but there was little of present happiness or prosperity. The ten years of the usurpation formed a brief exception; Cromwell's government of Scotland conclusively refutes Mr. Hallam's charge-that he 'never showed any signs of a legislative mind or any desire to 'place his renown on that noblest basis-the amelioration of social institutions.' It is impossible to exaggerate the benefits bestowed on Scotland by his legislation. He bridled the Highlands, he silenced the Church, he reformed the constitution. He gave her purity of justice; allowed perfect freetrade with England; opened to her enterprise the expanding field of English commerce ;* abolished private rights of jurisdiction; swept away the whole complex machinery of feudalism. He anticipated not only the union of 1707, and the reforms of 1748, but even the commercial and legal legislation of our own day. How far the great Protector was in advance of his age is strikingly illustrated by the fact that, in a Parliament elected in 1868, all the learning and power of the present Lord Advocate can hardly succeed, against professional interests and professional prejudice, in setting the law of Scotland as free from the trammels of a worn-out system as Cromwell left it. With the restoration of her native princes' came back all Scotland's miseries. The Navigation Acts of 1660 denied her any share in the trade of England; and thus, during the unprecedented advance of that country from the Restoration to the Revolution, Scotland was every day becoming poorer. When Mr. Burton's history ends we are at the nadir of the national

How rapidly Scotland thrived during this short period may be gathered from the sum subscribed to the Darien Expedition by Glasgow alone-56,000l. Such a sum would have been thought fabulous before Cromwell.

happiness and prosperity. The Revolution, of course, put a stop to persecution. But William could do little or nothing to advance her material well-being. There was, and could be, no real improvement in this respect till after the union of 1707.

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These concluding volumes of Mr. Burton's work are in every way superior to the former ones. The themes with which he has had here to deal are, for the most part, better suited to his powers, and possess a more practical interest than the purposeless, if romantic, turbulence of the early period. Accordingly, he has entered into them with zeal, and treated them with fullness and originality. Also, when occasion offers, he shows command of a richer descriptive power, and greater felicity in narrative. In his style, too, there is a marked improvement. The force and vigour remain; the harshness and inelegancies have, in great measure, disappeared. Blemishes, however, may yet be traced:--of phraseology, as in the use of such a word as the word genteel; ' of quaintness amounting to absurdity; as when a reckless policy is compared to the violent frolics of the young men who in the present day wrench off knockers and upset policemen;' of confused and even ungrammatical expression, as in the following sentence:- The unconspicuous ' and silent growth of the powers destined to come into contest in great convulsions are the most important, yet the least obtainable, portion of the history of any notable epoch in the history of a large community-and the community involved in the Scottish movements of the day was a large one, for it 'was the whole of the British Empire.' Here too, as before, the pleasure of the reader is marred by the want of method. In the treatment of the various subjects due regard is not paid to truth of historic proportion; and one topic succeeds another with an abruptness which is provoking and confusing— the reader, absorbed in some vital aspect of the great ecclesiastical strife, on turning the page, finds himself without warning plunged into the details of a miserable Highland feud. It is with greater regret that we find Mr. Burton still open to the charge of inaccuracy. It has a curious pagan effect to see the thanksgiving of the Huguenot prayer-books styled the 'Action des graces; and, if that may be looked on as a slip of the pen, no such excuse will avail for the following carelessness. Speaking of Sharp, Mr. Burton says:

*

'We are told how, presiding at a witch-trial, he was confounded and showed symptoms of terror when the victim asked him who was with him in his closet on Saturday night last betwixt twelve and one o'clock.

* Vol. vi. p. 472.

He confessed to Rothes, who was inquisitive on the matter, that it was "the muckle black devil."

This of course implies, either that Sharp shared the popular belief in a compact between himself and the Prince of Darkness, or that he was amusing himself at the expense of his colleague with a grim humour of which we have no other trace. But the story, as really told by Wodrow, relieves us from this puzzling alternative. Rothes did not make his inquiries of Sharp, but of the prisoner; and the confession came, not from the Archbishop, but from the witch.

It is impossible to deny that this inaccuracy, even in the more modified form in which it appears in these volumes, seriously detracts from Mr. Burton's reputation as an historian. Taken together with his love of paradox, it shakes our faith in his guidance. He is incapable of wilfully misleading; his impartiality is beyond question; his research is great; yet he seems to want that craving for truth, that impatience of any chance of error, which is the first virtue of an historian. He comes under the censure of Thucydides-οὕτως ἀταλαίπωρος τοῖς πολλοῖς ἡ ζήτησις τῆς ἀληθείας, καὶ ἐπὶ τὰ ἑτοῖμα μᾶλλον péπovτaι; with, perhaps this qualification, that Mr. Burton's «ταλαιπωρία throws him back not so much on the ἑτοῖμον, as on the paradoxical and the fanciful.

We much regret that Mr. Burton should not have included in his work some account of the development of Scottish jurisprudence during the seventeenth century. Amidst the convulsions of civil war and the storms of religious persecution -even in spite of the blighting influence of judicial corruption-the municipal law of Scotland was then undergoing a course of improvement, both in form and substance, unexampled either before or since. Statutes of prescription were passed; the law of tithes was settled; sound principles of bankrupt law were recognised; valuable enactments were made for the encouragement of agriculture; in the process of ranking and sale' some of the most advanced principles of modern land legislation were anticipated. The men who devised these measures the lawyers of the seventeenth century-we know to have been men of learning and accomplishment, sound jurists, good scholars, eloquent rhetoricians. Looking at their legislation we cannot but believe that they must also have been animated by a desire to improve the jurisprudence and advance the prosperity of their country. On the other hand they were, many of them, cruel bigots, subservient tyrants, faithless, and corrupt. Nor did this side of their characters fail to leave its mark. They pressed upon the people a

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criminal law, in which regulations sometimes strangely favourable to the accused were nullified by vicious practice; they administered, without remorse and without thought of change, the Scots law of treason, which Mr. Hallam justly stigmatises as one of the most odious engines that tyranny ever devised against public virtue;' they introduced a rigid system of entails exactly four hundred years after the English nobles had inflicted this evil on their country, and more than two hundred years after the boldness of the English judges had, in Taltarum's case, found out a remedy. The strange combination, in those men, of culture and barbarism; of sagacity, patriotism, and statesmanship, with bigotry, cruelty, and oppression; and the result of all, not only on the law, but on the whole national development, would have afforded material for an interesting and instructive page of history.

We regret even more Mr. Burton's silence as to matters academical. Education has always been, as it were, a specialty of Scotland; and no history of that country can be regarded as complete in which her peculiar and long-established system, both of school and university training, is disposed of in some half dozen pages. As a mere question of art some detailed account of the origin of the older universities might have afforded a picturesque relief to the gloom of early Scotch history. How effectively, for example, Mr. Motley varies his sombre story by his description of the pompous ceremonial which attended the foundation of the university of Leyden. Of yet higher historical value would have been a clear account of the great educational scheme of Knox-what was its scope, how, and by whom, it was frustrated. For Knox's wide designs, though much talked about, are not generally known; and an exposition of them would, at this particular time, have been signally opportune.

With all its faults and shortcomings, which we have not been slow to indicate, Mr. Burton's work is now, and will probably continue to be, the best history of Scotland. So far as matters ecclesiastical are concerned, it has, and need fear, no rival. So far as regards the War of Independence, it holds the same position of superiority. If on minor points he has been less successful; if his narrative sometimes fails to attract, or his argument to convince; if we can mark omissions which mar the completeness of the work; we may yet feel justly grateful to the historian who has for the first time placed before us in the light of truth those aspects of Scottish history which are most worthy of study and best calculated to reward it.