meanour of the most of those who adopted them, were by many received then, and with not a few have passed ever since, as new and valuable discoveries, and there are few towns in Scotland which cannot boast of at least one church formed somewhat upon this plan of parity and supposed primeval purity. Messrs. Glass and Archibald were both suspended by the judicatories of the church, and, upon their despising this sentence, afterward deposed. They were both, however, upon an after occasion, restored to the ministry, though not to their churches.

These extremes of opinion were no doubt greatly heightened by the use that was now pretty generally made of patronage, which was already become, in many cases, the only door of entrance to the ministry. Legal doctrine, too, to the great grief of many serious and godly men, had long been prevalent in not a few of the pulpits of the church, and a species of moral harangue, introduced by several young men who aspired to the character of superior learning and politeness, was bidding fair to banish from her sabbath ministrations both law and gospel; nay, at this very time one of her divinity professors, Mr. John Simpson, was suspended by the assembly, being charged with Arian and other errors. This man's case was an ample illustration of the inspired declaration, "Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse." He had been, as we have already seen, before the assembly, charged with a long list of very dangerous errors, and, after years of litigation, dismissed with the most lenient sentence, being merely ordered to forbear teaching the offensive doctrines charged against him, which, so far from obeying, he had gone on to perfect his scheme of heresy, by impugning the most important parts of divine revelation, such as the necessary existence of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the numerical oneness of the persons of the trinity in substance or essence, &c. &c. He made a most obstinate defence before this and two following assemblies, but at last made some confessions and an orthodox declaration, which induced the assembly, 1729, to finish the affair by confirming the sentence of suspension passed by this assembly, and giving it as their judgment that

it was not fit nor safe that he should be employed in teaching divinity, and instructing of youth designed for the holy ministry.*

A most interesting account of the success of the society for propagating christian knowledge in the Highlands and Islands was laid before this assembly, and another act was passed in favour of the society, and appointed to be read from all the pulpits in Scotland.t

In the beginning of June, the king, having appointed a regency, again set out for his beloved Hanover by the way of Holland, where he arrived on the seventh. He lay that night at Vaert, and on the ninth reached Delden, between ten and eleven at night, apparently in good health. Here he supped heartily, and pursued his journey by four o'clock next morning, and between eight and nine o'clock ordered the carriage to stop, when it was observed that one of his hands lay motionless. One of his attendants attempted to quicken the circulation by chaffing the motionless hand between his own, but without any sensible benefit. His surgeon, who rode behind him, then rubbed the lame hand with spirits, but equally in vain. His majesty's tongue began instantly to swell, and he was just able to bid them hasten to Osnaburg, where he expired about eleven o'clock next morning, June the eleventh, 1727, in the sixty-eighth year of his age, and the thirteenth of his reign.

The character of George I. was of a mixed kind; having, with much that was good, somewhat that gave room for unpleasant animadversion. That in his person and address he was plain and simple, has not been disputed; and that in his deportment he was grave on all public occasions, though in his hours of relaxation familiar, easy, and facetious, has been pretty

* This very lenient sentence has been most childishly held up as an act of the most cruel and vindictive persecution, which robbed the poor man of his character and his bread at the same time. While the fact is, that the character of a heretic he probably did not consider as any way discreditable, and all the emoluments of his office he enjoyed to the day of his death, which did not arrive till the year 1744, during all which time the principal of the college performed the duties attached to it.

+ Printed Acts of Assembly, 1727.

generally conceded. He had acquired in his native dominions, long before he ascended the throne of Britain, the reputation of a cool and intrepid general, a just and a mild prince, and a calculating and cautious politician; nor did any of his after actions afford any just ground for reversing the character. That he was more strongly attached to his German dominions, than a wise policy would have dictated, has been often charged against him. But if we must allow this to have been a failing, it was one which few will deny "leaned to virtue's side." Germany was his own, his native land; and after being worn out with the conflicting passions and interests of British party spirit, which, during the whole of his reign, raged with unabating violence, it cannot be thought strange that he felt pleased and easy where his will was undisputed, and where his word was law. Nor was he the first of British kings who had cultivated an acquaintance with continental affairs, and studied to avail himself of the good-will of the continental nations. Indeed, it had been the policy of England to hold the balance among the contending and rival interests there, from the days of William II. almost down to the days of the imbecile James VI., whose successors in the direct line, becoming the dupes and the pensioners of France, were at once their own and their country's destroyers. William III. certainly the ablest politician of his day, looked for the preservation of European liberty, only through the intervention of Great Britain; and continental triumphs were the glory of his successor. It is also particularly worthy of notice, that though, for the purposes of opposition, and for embroiling and thwarting the plans of a successful rival, continental alliances have, down to this day, often been denounced as absurd and ruinous, not one individual minister has ever yet ventured to disown them in practice. The great earl of Chatham acquired much of his popularity by declaiming against them, yet, when he came to be minister of state, who ever stuck more closely to, or made a more effective use of them? The late Charles James Fox, too, was long in the habit of decrying them, and oftener than once stated, that it had been good for Britain, if Hanover had been like Sodom and Gomorrah turned into a standing lake-and the first, or among the first of his ministerial acts, was a manifesto respecting that country, in

which he laboured hard to outdo all his predecessors in magnifying its importance, and demonstrating the absolute necessity which Britain was laid under to preserve it entire for its original proprietor, the king of these realms.

It would be too much to affirm, that either George or his ministers had any very clear or determinate views of constitutional liberty; but he was naturally averse to tyranny, and seems never to have entertained the smallest desire to stretch, or to enlarge his prerogative. The circumstances, too, in which he was placed with respect to the exiled family of the Stuarts, necessarily led him and his advisers to the adoption of views, and, though not perhaps altogether of principles, of measures highly favourable to the progress of free inquiry, and the development of the national resources. The foundation was indeed laid in the glorious revolution of 1688, of an order of things more perfect, and a career of improvement more general in its objects, more extensive in its effects, and more permanently progressive, than the world had yet seen; and during this reign, amidst all the violence of the tories, and the intrigues of the Jacobites, the glorious superstructure was insensibly so far advanced, as to be equally beyond the reach of individual hostility, or the combined influence of ignorant and fanatical faction.

In his private character, George I. was much less amiable than in his regal. To the external parts of devotion he seems to have been sufficiently attentive, but gave no very decisive evidences of being deeply imbued with its spirit. His treatment of his wife,* upon, for aught that has hitherto appeared,

* George I. was married to the princess Dorothea, only child to the duke of Zell, who brought him two children, George II. and Dorothea Sophia, who died queen dowager of Prussia. Some suspicious circumstances having occurred between count Koningsmark, a Swedish nobleman then at the court of Hanover, and the princess Dorothea, the wife of George, then elector, she was shut up, and died the year previous to this in the castle of Athlen, which had been her prison for many years. The count disappeared, and was generally supposed to have been murdered, and buried in the electoral palace; a supposition which seems to have been afterwards confirmed, by the body being found under the floor of the princess's dressing-room. This was by far too good a story to be overlooked by the Jacobites, who were always on the watch for any thing that could be improved to the injury of his majesty's cha

move.

a mere suspicion, was, to say the least that can be said of it, severe; and the affair of count Koningsmark leaves a heavy imputation upon his memory, which no length of time will reHis indelicate attachment to his German mistresses, Madame Schulemberg, and Madame Kilmansegge, the former afterward created dutchess of Kendal, and the latter countess of Darlington, was also a source of pain to his best friends, and afforded much merriment to his enemies, who were disposed to lay hold upon whatever tended to his disadvantage; and, no doubt, gave it to the world with every aggravation they could think of. After having made every allowance, however, for the exaggerations of party and of prejudice, it must be acknowledged, that his conduct in this respect shed a darkening tinge

racter; and, on his death, it served as a foundation to the following absurd story, which was handed about at all the courts of Europe, and which Lockhart translated from the French, and left to his friends with as much care as if it had been a fifth gospel. The following is his edition of the story:— "The circumstances of king George's death are terrible, and worth the knowledge of all our friends. They are kept as much concealed as possible, even in Germany, so probably will be secret both in England and France. What was told me lately by a person of superior rank, and of great esteem in these parts, I had heard imperfectly before from a lady of quality. It seems, when the late electress was dangerouslie ill of her last sickness, she delivered to a faithful friend a letter to her husband, upon promise that it should be given into his own hands. It contained a protestation of her innocence-a reproach for his hard usage and unjust treatment-and concluded with a summons or citation to her husband, to appear within the year and day at the divine tribunall, and there to answer for the long and many injuries she had received from him. As this letter could not with safety to the bearer be delivered in England or Hanover, it was given to him in his coach on the road. He opened it immediately, supposing it came from Hanover: He was so struck with these unexpected contents, and his fatal citation, that his convulsions and apoplexy came fast on him: After being blooded, his mouth turned awry, and they then proposed to drive off to a nearer place than Osnaburg, but he signed twice or thrice with his hand to go on, and that was the only mark of sense he shewed. This is no secret amongst the catholicks in Germany, but the protestants hush it up as much as they can."-Lockhart Papers, vol. ii. pp. 352, 355.

The reader who has a taste for this kind of reading, will find abundance of it in the works of the late lord Orford. Fortunately, his lordship was not a presbyterian any more than Lockhart; of course the narrating, or the believing, or wishing to believe such absurd stories, reflects no discredit upon their understandings!