SCOTI^AND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 3I 



least, to the Act of Union.* The Act threw the two 

 nations into closer contact, and the great industrial 

 revolution which was going on in England was thus 

 enabled to act in no small degree upon Scottish 

 affairs. The movement once started, conditions 

 changed with the most remarkable rapidity. Even 

 the landscape took on a new appearance, due to the 

 liberal planting of trees and building of hedges, and 

 in place of the vast barren stretches, unbroken save 

 by masses of purple heather and yellow whin, there 

 were now great fields of verdant crops. 



Paisley has been the birth-place of not a few men 

 of note. Good old Christopher North and his less 

 distinguished brother, James Wilson, — a rare, sweet 

 nature, by the way, and no bad writer, — were both 

 born there, and the poet Robert Tannahill was but 

 a few years their junior, while quite a school of very 

 minor writers, now forgotten, flourished there 

 about this same period. At the close of the previous 

 century, not only did the town lack nearly all the 

 virtues that were later to give it the name of "the 

 Paradise of Scotland," but it was also deep in the 

 darkest superstitions of the day. Even as late as 

 the reign of their most enlightened Christian majes- 

 ties, William and Mary, in 1697, when the ministers 

 of Paisley Presbytery were directed to settle certain 

 religious matters, they were too busy at trying the 

 Renfrewshire witches to do so, "preferring to con- 

 tend with the devil in Paisley rather than with the 

 schismatics of Forfar."t Even in 1770 misdemean- 

 ors were still punished with revolting cruelty. Hec- 



* See Mackinnon's "The Union of England and Scotland." 

 tree's "Paisley Abbey," p. 193. 



