exaggerated; but when everything has been said it is unfortunately impossible to doubt that many monstrous crimes were perpetrated. Irregular levies, serving rascally captains and under the control of an unstable and unwise Government, are not the best executors of harsh if necessary measures. No doubt to most of the crimes a legal justification can be attached; but in most there is some incident of barbarity, and in such a tragedy as the drowning of Margaret Wilson at Wigtown there is a brutality which her countrymen have never forgotten. At the same time, it must be remembered that the bulk of the ministers were preaching flat flat treason and anarchy, and that to follow such leaders might reasonably be interpreted as rebellion by a Government perplexed with English plots and Dutch invasions. The blood of the innocent victims, as Mr Lang truly says, is "on the heads of the casuists as well as of the Council." It is a curious point how far Claverhouse was ever consciously guilty of the cruelty of ruffians like Lag and Bonshaw. In many of his letters he shows compunction at the pain which he held it his duty to inflict. Some of the charges against him, such as the murder of Christian Fyfe, can be proved to be late inventions. As Constable of Dundee, he secured the abolition of hanging for petty thefts-a remarkable reform in its way, and not significant of a cruel mind. The worst thing against him

is the manner of the death of John Brown, if indeed any detail of that difficult story can be accepted as certain. If Claverhouse's commission was legal, the execution was legal enough, for it was well within it; but the mind revolts at the picture of a gentleman pistolling

an

honest peasant in the presence of his wife. The truth seems to be that John Graham was one of those men who are born with a natural sense of order, a natural talent for quelling insurrection and making crooked things straight, but who lack the finer qualities of mind and spirit. When his duty was clear to him, he would do it at all costs; but he had no subtle instinct to harmonise conflicting obligations. If he served his King, the gentleness and graces of life must go to limbo. The man who on his wedding-day left his bride to scour the mosses for Whigs was an invaluable officer, but scarcely a man of the moral calibre of his great kinsman. It is impossible, however, to deny the justice of his policy in the abstract. He wished to have the ministers clapped in jail, certain that if the leaders were removed the people would recover their political sanity. "In the greatest crimes," he wrote, "it is thought wisest to pardon the multitude and punish the ringleaders." And again: "I am as sorry to see a man die, even a Whig, as any of themselves. But when one dies justly, for his own faults, and may save a hundred to fall in the like, I

have no scruple." It was the creed of another and more famous political philosopher. "Leaders of a commotion," wrote Hobbes, "should be punished-not the poor seduced people. To be severe to the people is to punish that ignorance which may in great part be imputed to the sovereign, whose fault it was that they were no better instructed."

The strife, however, was nearing its end. Honest men were disgusted alike with the ways of the Stuarts and the ways of the preachers, and asked nothing save a tolerably honest and efficient government, and peace and liberty to go about their own business. The spiritual fires which had raged so hotly for a century were burning themselves down, and the day was dawning of that recoil from enthusiasm and devotion to the practical and the reasonable which characterised eighteenthcentury Scotland, and stamped for good the national character. Fanaticism had isolated itself, as always happens in the longrun, and in its isolation flamed to a wilder height. Two incidents remain, which may be taken as the last sign-posts of the old disorders. In February 1688 Renwick, the last "martyr," suffered in the Grassmarket, having been prosecuted by a Whig Lord Advocate, Sir James Dalrymple. Considering his views on the legality of murder, there could be no other result, and indeed towards the end this unfortunate young man had gone to strange lengths, having

excom

among other things municated the whole of the ministers of Scotland. It is a mark of the growing change of atmosphere that many of his opponents interceded for his life. No one of the Covenanters was of purer or more courageous spirit, and even the prosaic Wodrow cannot dim the attractions of his memory. That such a man should have suffered at twenty-six, having been driven into a kind of madness by a foolish tyranny and an impossible creed, is the most serious indictment of both Government and Covenant. In 1685 Argyll, the son of Gillespie Gruamach, was beheaded for his invasion of the West in Monmouth's interest. He is a nobler and more interesting figure than his father, though it is odd that one who voted for Cargill's death should be remembered by his countrymen as a Covenanting hero. His expedition was ill-planned and ill-led; but as a great Highland chief he had aforetime shown some capacity, and it is probable that the side he took was rather the result of his ill-treatment at Court than any serious conviction. He died worthily, for, like Lochiel on a later day, his thoughts were all for the protection of his clansmen.

The Revolution cleared the air by showing all parties their real desires. Toleration, political and ecclesiastical, which all had come to wish for, was established in substance by law, or at least such persecution as remained was practised

"on the line of least resistance." It was the turn of the Episcopalians now, but they lacked the vates sacer to chronicle their sufferings. The corrupt and incompetent Government was upset, and, what was far more important, the despotism of the Kirk was broken beyond hope of restoration. "The long war," says Mr Lang, "of one hundred and thirty years' duration between Kirk and State closed with the restored prominence of the Kirk without the Covenants, and with а saner conception of the powers and duties of the preachers. The two divine rights, that of sacred hereditary monarchy and that of the apostolic privileges of

preachers, had clashed so long and fiercely that they destroyed each other." The lion and the serpent were both dead of their wounds. The chronicle of that dreary century ends, if not with contentment, at least with substantial peace, since moderate men had come to their own again. Meanwhile the irreconcilables, the King's friends and the the Covenant's friends, followed each their own paths. The Cameronians retired to brood in the western moorlands over ecstatic visions of an approaching Armageddon; and Claverhouse, called at last to a man's task, rode north under the star of Montrose to find a hero's death at Killiecrankie.

A FEW minutes before the curtain fell on the second act of "Other Men's Shoes," Loder rose from his seat and made his apologies to Lillian.

At any other moment he might have pondered over her manner of accepting them, the easy indifference with which she let him go. But vastly keener issues were claiming his attention,-issues whose results were wide and black.

He left the theatre, and, refusing the overtures of cabmen, set himself to walk to Chilcote's house. His face was hard and emotionless as he hurried forward, but the chaos in his mind found expression in the unevenness of his pace. To a strong man, the confronting of difficulties is never alarming, and is often fraught with inspiration; but this applies essentially to difficulties evolved through the weakness, the folly, or the force of another: when they arise from within, the matter is of another character. It is in presence of his own soul, and in in that presence alone, that a man may truly measure himself.

As Loder walked onward, treading the familiar length of traffic-filled streets, he realised for the first time that he was standing before that solemn tribunal-that the hour had come when he must answer

The

to himself for himself. longer and deeper an oblivion, the more painful the awakening. For months the song

of Self had beaten about his ears, deadening all other sounds. Now, abruptly, that song had ceased; not considerately, not lingeringly, but with a suddenness that made the succeeding silence very terrible.

who

He walked forward, keeping his direction almost without volition. His bearing was quiet, his demeanour calm, but he was passing through the fire as surely as though actual flames rose about his feet; and, whatever the result-whatever the fibre of the man emerged from the ordeal—the John Loder who had hewn his way through the past weeks was destined to exist no more. The triumphant egotist—the strong man who, by his own strength, had kept his eyes upon one point, refusing to see in other directions-had ceased to be.

Keen observer though he was, his realisation of this crisis in his life had come with characteristic slowness. When Lillian Astrupp had given her dictum, when the music of the orchestra had ceased, and the curtain risen on the second act of the play, nothing but a sense of stupefaction had filled his mind.

In that moment the great song was silenced; not silenced by any portentous episode, any incident that could have lent dignity to its end, but by a trivial social commonplace. In the first blank sensation of loss his faculties had been numbed; in the quarter of an hour that followed the rise of the curtain he had sat staring at the stage -seeing nothing, hearing nothing-filled with the enormity of the void that suddenly surrounded him. Then, from habit, from constitutional tendency, he had begun slowly and perseveringly to draw one thread and then another from the tangle of his thoughts; to forge with doubt and difficulty the chain that was to draw him towards the future.

And it was upon this incomplete and yet tenacious chain that his mind worked as he traversed the familiar streets, and gained the house he had so easily learned to call home.

As he inserted the latchkey and felt it move smoothly in the lock, a momentary revolt against his own judgment, his own censorship, swung him sharply towards reaction. But it is only the blind who can walk without a tremor upon the edge of an abyss and there was no longer a bandage across his eyes. Like a strip of lighted paper, the reaction flared up; but like the strip of paper it dropped back to ashes. He pushed the door open and slowly crossed the hall.

The mounting of a staircase is often the index to a man's state of mind. As Loder

VOL. CLXXVI.—NO. MLXVIII.

ascended the stairs of Chilcote's house, his shoulders lacked their habitual stiffness, his head was bent; he moved as though his feet were weighted. He was no longer the man of achievement, whose smallest opinion compels consideration. In the privacy of solitude, he was the mere human flotsam to which he had once compared himself-flotsam that, dreaming it has found a harbour, wakes to see itself the prey of the incoming tide.

It

He paused at the head of the stairs to rally his resolutions; then, still walking heavily, he passed down the corridor to Eve's room. was suggestive of his character that, having made his decision, he did not dally over its performance. Without waiting to knock, he turned the handle and walked into the room.

It looked precisely as it always looked; but to his eyes the subdued colouring of books and flowers-the bronzes, the lamps, the whole air of culture and repose that the place conveyed-seemed to hold a deeper meaning than before. And as his glance, crossing the inanimate objects, rested on the face of their owner, the true force of his position-the enormity of the task before himrose suddenly and overwhelmingly to his mind.

Eve was standing by the mantelpiece. She wore a beautiful and elaborate gown; a long string of diamonds was twisted about her neck, and her soft black hair was coiled high after a foreign fashion, and 2 G