ing jewels, but whose real offence was believed to be, that she had revealed some of her Majesty's secrets to the king. Her case excited great interest among the Scotch lawyers, who did not do her much good by their officious championship, although they were doubtless right in their zeal for justice. She was acquitted of theft, but found guilty of unlawful possession; and Sir Thomas joined the Privy Council in recommending the commutation of the capital sentence to banishment. More interesting were the cases of Sprott and the deceased Robert Logan of Restalrig, connected with the Gowrie Conspiracy. Sprott swore to Logan's foreknowledge of the conspiracy, and to having seen correspondence between him and the Earl of Gowrie. But he soon contradicted his own depositions, and again repeated and again retracted them, and generally gave such evidence that it was equally difficult to credit or disbelieve his statement. He was executed, and the Lord Advocate then proceeded to found upon his confessions an action for the forfeiture of Logan of Restalrig. The documentary evidence does not seem to have been of a much more satisfactory character than Sprott's admissions; and such "hard opinions formed of it by the Parliament, that, as the Lord Advocate wrote to the king, "they wroght feir and mistrust in the myndes of dyuers your Majesties weill affected seruandis." Logan's character as a loyal and peaceable subject had been but an indifferent one; and sentence of forfeiture went forth against him and his family. Another case - that of Sir James Elphinstone, Lord Balmerino, a member of the College of Justice, who had also been Secretary of State-presented even greater dif

were

ficulties. The charge was that he had surreptitiously obtained the king's signature to a letter in 1598 to Pope Clement VIII. The signature had been made use of by Roman Catholic polemics to attack the king; and Elphinstone, who had been secretary at the time, was called before the king and confessed his guilt. He was sent down to Scotland to be tried for treason, and Sir Thomas Hamilton had to appear as the prosecutor of his old friend and colleague. Great anxiety was felt as to the result, and the indictments were revised by the king himself. Had Balmerino refused to abide by his confession, had he pleaded the king's knowledge of the tenor of the letter, the prosecution would have been in a serious difficulty, and a clamour would readily have been raised that Balmerino was being made a scapegoat for the king; but the accused again owned his guilt, and was sentenced to death. He was not, however, executed, and was kept in confinement during the remaining three years of his life. James wrote the Lord Advocate a special letter of thanks for his services in the case, which, his Majesty assured him, would not be forgotten. Sir Thomas also was prosecutor in the case of the Mures, whose crime afforded Sir Walter Scott the material for his tragedy of "Auchindrane." The state of criminal jurisprudence in Scotland was illustrated by the fact that Auchindrane claimed the ordeal by combat, which was not conceded; and that the conviction of the Mures ultimately turned very much upon the corpse of one of their victims having bled at the approach of a grandchild of the elder Mure. Sir Walter Scott thinks that this phenomenon had little to do with the conviction; but it appealed to the

superstition of James, and accounts for the unusual persistency with which he clung to a belief in the Mures' guilt, when their judges were staggered by the boldness of their denial even under torture. Sir Thomas Hamilton wrote an account of the trial, in which, says Sir Walter, he " seems at a loss whether to attribute to Provi

dence or his most sacred Majesty the greatest share in bringing to light these mysterious villanies, but rather inclines to the latter opinion," a position quite explicable by the pertinacity with which James, founding upon the ancient superstition, had insisted on their guilt.

The promise made by the king to remember Hamilton was speedily redeemed, and higher rank and enlarged sphere of action were opened up to him. In 1610 he was made a member of the new court of high commission, and two years later he became Lord Clerk Register and Secretary of State, and was created Lord Binning in 1613. In this latter capacity he was much concerned with the troubled condition of the remoter parts of the kingdom: the rebellion in Orkney in 1614, and the rising of the Macdonalds of the Isles in the same year, both of which were brought to a satisfactory termination. In the case of Ker Earl of Somerset for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, Sir Thomas either went, or was sent for to Court. Ker was his brother-in-law, and Lord Binning's influence was powerfully exerted in his behalf. In the spring of 1617, at the opening of Parliament, Lord Binning, who by that time had been appointed President of the Court of Session, but still continued to hold the Secretary's office, gave a graphic picture of the condition of Scotland on his motion for a grant to

the king to defray the expenses of a visit to Scotland.

"He founded his arguments for the grant requested upon the obligations which every class in the community owed to the king for his efforts to put down crime, and to give to his country the blessings of justice and peace. The speaker desired his hearers to recall to mind how the islanders oppres

sed the Highlandmen, the Highlandmen tyrannised over their Lowland neighbours, the powerful and violent in the 'in-country' domineered over the lives and goods of their weak neighbours, and the Borderers triumphed in the impunity of their violences to the very gates of Edinburgh; how treasons, murders, burnings, thefts, reifs, harrying, houghing of oxen, breaking of mills, destruction of growing corns, and barbarities of all sorts were committed in all parts of the country, no place nor person being exempted or inviolable, Edinburgh being the ordinary place of and the parish churches and churchbutcherly revenge and daily fights, yards being more frequented upon Sunday for advantages of neighbourly malice and mischief than for God's service; how noblemen, barons, gentlemen, and people of all sorts were slaughtered as it were in public and uncontrollable hostilities, merchants robbed and left for dead in daylight, going to their markets and fairs of Montrose, Wigtown, and Berwick -ministers dirked in Stirling, buried alive in Clydesdale, and murdered in Galloway; how merchants of Edinburgh were waylaid in their passage to Leith to be made prisoners for the sake of ransom; and Lord Binning asked them also to consider how that now these and all other abominations which settled by inveterate custom and impunity appeared to be of desperate remedy, had been so repressed, punished, and abolished by the king's that no nation on earth could compare wisdom, care, power, and expenses, in prosperity with Scotland."

Dr Hill Burton gives Lord Binning himself, we believe with justice, the credit of these results of the gradual work of the regulat

ing and consolidating influence of a strengthened executive, "and characterises him as a civilising and advancing statesman,' and "the chief instrument in working out the improvement of the social condition of the country."

During James's visit to Scotland in 1617, Lord Binning was naturally much about his Majesty, and we hear of one occasion when James dined with him at his residence in the Cowgate, from which the king, with his usual fondness for coining nicknames, had dubbed him "Tam o' the Cowgate." Lord Binning's great wealth had naturally excited his Majesty's curiosity, and with his usual inquisitiveness he had sought information among his gossips as to how it had been acquired, and had been told that Lord Binning was popularly believed to have found the philosopher's stone. Lord Binning promised his Majesty that if he would come to his house, he would reveal the secret of his success; and when next day he had feasted the king and courtiers right royally, he told them that his riches had been secured by the practice of two maxims "Never put off till tomorrow what can be done to-day," and "Never trust to another's hand what your own can execute."

We must quote another anecdote of the President which betrays a youthful and genial spirit rarely met with in one of his years and dignity :

"Another reminiscence connected with Lord Binning's mansion in the Cowgate may be noticed. One evening, it is said, he was seated with a friend near a window of his house, the two enjoying a flask of wine together, and the President being arrayed, for greater ease, in a robe de chambre and slippers, when he was suddenly disturbed by a great hubbub, which arose under his window in the open street. This turned out

to be one of those street disturbances common to the boys of Edinburgh, known as 'bickers. In this case the strife was between the youths of the and the latter in the full tide of vicHigh School and those of the college, tory were, notwithstanding a valiant defence, in the act of driving their antagonists before them. Lord Binning's sympathies were instantly and warmly awakened in favour of the retreating party, for he himself had and from his after-training at Paris been educated at the High School he had no reason to affect the college. He therefore sprang up, rushed into the street, rallied the fugitives, and took such an active share in the combat that the High School boys, gaintheir new leader was 'Tam o' the ing fresh courage on discovering that Cowgate,' the great judge and statesman, turned the scale of victory against the enemy, despite superior age and strength. Lord Binning, still in his robe and slippers, assumed the cite the lads to the charge, both by command, and did not hesitate to inword and action; nor was he content until he had pursued the college youths through the Grassmarket and out at the West Port, the gate of which he locked, compelling the vanquished to spend the night in the fields or suburbs beyond the walls. He then returned to finish his flask of wine with his friend."

We must merely allude to the later career of Lord Binning. He was created Earl of Melrose in 1619, and changed his title to Haddington in 1627. He was offered, but refused, the Chancellorship under James, resigned the Presidency of the Court of Session, and was superseded in the office of Secretary on the accession of Charles I., but was afterwards appointed Lord Privy Seal by the same monarch. Sir William Fraser has given a very clear and succinct account of his course of action in the troubled ecclesiastical politics of James's later years, which space forbids us attempting even abridge. Few Scottish statesmen

to

have suffered more than the first Earl of Haddington from the unpopular policy of which he was called on to be the chief agent. All through his career he had to fight against the popular party; and, amid the abuse which was levelled at him and the heat of faction, his talents and authority were either denied or slurred over by all except King James, who seems to have always entertained a just sense of his services. If we can divest our minds of prejudice, and of the fact that the ecclesiastical policy of which he was all through his career the exponent and defender was a losing cause, we shall have no difficulty in seeing that Hamilton deserved little less reputation as a Scottish statesman than his contemporary Cecil, to whom his character presents many points analogous, earned for himself in the sister country.

Sir William Fraser's narrative changes, but does not lose in, interest, when he comes to deal with the Earl's successors. But over these we must not linger. Not one of them played the same part in history as the founder of the house. Of the second Earl we shall only mention that he inclined to the Covenant, and was killed at the explosion of Dunglas, along with two brothers and other gentlemen of the name of Hamilton. His son Thomas, who also enjoyed the title but for a short time, was the husband of clever, though eccentric and fantastic, Henrietta de Coligny, better known from her second marriage as the Comtesse de la Suze, who, as Christina of Sweden said, became a Roman Catholic " pour ne voir son mari ni en ce monde ni en l'autre." We may pass over his immediate successors until we come to Charles, Lord Binning, who,

though he did not live to succeed to the family honours, was a prominent figure in the society of his day. He was the son of the sixth Earl, and of Helen Hope of the Hopetoun family. This spirited and clever young nobleman took no small part in the revival of letters which sprang up in Scotland after the Revolution had given peace to the country; and one of his pastorals, "Ungrateful Nanny," has still its place among the poetry of the period. Lord Binning's name figures in the Lady Wardlaw controversy about the authorship of "Hardyknute," for it was to him that Sir John Bruce of Kinross, her brother-inlaw, sent an early copy of "Hardyknute," which professed to be taken from the ancient original. Sir John writes: "To perform my promise, I send you a true copy of the manuscript I found some weeks ago in a vault at Dunfermline. It is written on vellum, in a fair Gothic character, but so much defaced by time, as you will find, that the tenth part is not legible." Sir John was of course in the secret, and this letter was designed to disseminate the mys tery in which the authorship was involved. We are astonished that Sir William Fraser deprives Lord Binning of the authorship of the well-known pasquin, "Argyll's Levee," on no better authority than that of a silly letter in the

Edinburgh Magazine,' which seems to have been written to save his lordship's memory from the holy reprobation with which satire was regarded by the serious society of the day. By the common consent of his contemporaries, as well as of posterity, Lord Binning has been regarded as the author of this clever jeu d'esprit, and we see no reason to discredit

the belief. The verses, which Sir William Fraser regards as "a composition of very doubtful merit," but which were a favourite with Sir Walter Scott, give a very amusing picture of a grandee's reception in the early part of last century. The attendants on the levee are all very happily hit off, and the verses on Cunningham of Boquhan are in in themselves a picture :

"Six times had Harry bow'd unseen Before he durst advance :

The Duke then turning round well pleased,

Said, 'Sure you've been in France; A more polite and jaunty mien

I never saw before.'

active in the defence of the country during Bonaparte's threatened invasion, and took a considerable share in the politics of his time. With his near relative Lady Hester Stanhope he kept up a close correspondence, and several interesting letters, written while she lived in Mr Pitt's household, are printed by Sir William Fraser. Among his friends were Sir Walter Scott, "Jupiter" Carlyle, George Chalmers, and Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, and indeed most Scotsmen eminent in art and literature in his generation; and he himself had inherited much of the wit and humour that had distinguished his immediate predecessors. Sir Walter Scott describes his conversation as being as witty as a comedy, and his anecdote as correct as a

parish register. He died in 1828. Thomas, the ninth Earl, took a greater part in public affairs than any of his predecessors since the first Earl. As Lord Binning he had attached himself to Mr Canning's policy, and had interested himself a good deal in tariff questions and other economics. He was from the outset opposed to Parliamentary Reform, and voted for its rejection in October 1831, though he supported the Bill when brought in a second time in a slightly different form, in the hope that Earl Grey's Government

would not be able to hold its ground, and that the reform movement might fall to be wrought out by the Tory party. He took a very decided stand in favour of Catholic Emancipation, and his speeches on this subject were features in the debates in the Upper House. In 1834, when Sir Robert Peel became Premier, Lord Haddington was sent to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant; and as the condition of Ireland is