HUGH MILLER 81 



Eminently clear-headed and politically sound were the 

 men of 1638, worthy compeers of the great men that 

 sat in England's Long Parliament. The Jacobite 

 Rebellions are a mere extraneous incident in the 

 history of Scotland, and the events of 1638, 1698, and 

 1843 w itt show the peculiar spirit of the people in a 

 fairer flowering. How curiously illusory are the gene- 

 ralisations of philosophers ! Calculation, shrewdness, 

 pawkiness these are the traditional marks of the stage- 

 Scotchman from the days of Smollett. But Buchanan's 

 perfervidum ingenium is surely much truer, and mere 

 calculation is just what is not the national mark. If her 

 poverty and pride were seen in Darien, no less truly was 

 her religious and political side seen in these other 

 events. But the question of the Headship still awaits 

 us. On the accession of William, the shattered rem- 

 nants of the kirk were gathered together by Carstares 

 after twenty-eight years of persecution : nee tamen con- 

 sumebatur. Perhaps, in the circumstances under which 

 both king and country found themselves, no other 

 compromise could so well have been come to as that of 

 1690. The election was left in the hands of elders and 

 the heritors, to be approved of by the people, leaving 

 an appeal to the Presbytery. At the Union, Scotland 

 seeing the danger to which she was exposed by her 

 scanty band of forty-five members being swamped in the 

 English or Tory phalanx a danger to which every year 

 subsequent has added but too evident a commentary 

 had exacted the most strenuous obligations for the 



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