in the interval which divided them from the tent, or temporary pulpit, the arms of the men present, pikes, swords, and muskets, were regularly piled in such order as is used by soldiers, so that each man might in an instant assume his own weapons.”--_Tales of a Grandfather._ We know what rampagious Tories were John Wilson [Illustration: A HIGHLAND VIEW] and James Hogg, but one was a west-countryman by birth, and the other a son of moorland hillsides; and even they are found testifying to the cause of their kin. “The ancient spirit of Scotland,” exclaims the shepherd at _a Noctes_, “comes on me from the sky; and the sowl within me re-swears in silence the oath of the Covenant. There they are--the Covenanters--a’ gathered thegither, no in fear and tremblin’, but wi’ Bibles in their bosoms, and swords by their sides, in a glen deep as the sea, and still as death.... When I think on these things--in olden times the produce o’ the common day--and look aroun’ me noo, I could wush to steek my e’en in the darkness o’ death, for, dearly as I love it still, alas! I am ashamed of my country.” Alas! alas! indeed, for this rhapsody makes part of a fulmination against Catholic emancipation, a question on which such whiskified Protestants proved themselves too true sons of the Covenanters. The proscribed Whigs were not less hot in testifying against all other creeds than in asserting their own spiritual liberty. When the Government offered their consciences some measure of relief, the “Black Indulgence” proved as hateful as persecution, which, indeed, they would willingly have directed against other sects, as against “right-hand deflections and left-hand way-slidings” in their own body. The only sect of that day that would not persecute was the Quakers, whose turn did not come; and Quakerism, as judged by Wodrow, seemed but “a small remove from Popery and Jesuitism,” or from what one of his heroes styled that “stinking weed,” Prelacy. On the other side of the Atlantic Roger Williams for the first time had begun to preach religious toleration; but there the prevalent sentiment was expressed by a Puritan divine who denounced “Polypiety as the greatest impiety in the world.” Puritan or Prelatist, it was the party in power on which rested the guilt and the shame of spiritual tyranny. On the other hand, the suffering party may have entered into a renown of virtues beyond their desert. A generation that hardly knows the _Fourfold State_ even by name, sees little in those martyrs but their wrongs, their harshness and narrowness forgot, their own occasional crimes, their misspent zeal for “dogmas long since dead, pious vituperation on antagonists long buried in dust and forgetfulness; breathless insistence on questions which time has answered with a yawn.”