they cannot be succinctly proved. It is unlikely that Claverhouse himself wasted over-much time on sifting every case that was brought in to him by his spies; and where he was not himself present--and it must be remembered that he was not the only officer engaged in this service, and also that his own soldiers were often employed under his lieutenants on duties he was personally unable to attend to--it is hard to doubt that much wild and brutal work went on. The whole case, in short, except in a very few instances (which will be examined elsewhere), is one solely of hearsay and tradition; and it is no more than common justice in any attempt to define Claverhouse's share in it, to give him the benefit of the doubt where it is not directly contrary to the proved facts and the evidence of his despatches. For Claverhouse, it should be also and always remembered, may be implicitly trusted to speak the truth in these matters, for the simple reason that he was not in the least ashamed of his work. We may well believe that it was not the work he would have chosen; but it was the work he had been set to do; and his concern was only to execute it as completely as possible. He was a soldier, obeying the orders of his superiors, for which they and they only were responsible. That their orders matched with his feelings, religious as well as political, for Claverhouse was as thorough in his devotion to the Church as he was in his devotion to the Crown, mattered nothing. The whole question was to him one of military obedience. Sorely as he may have chafed at the order, he halted his troopers on the banks of the Clyde when Monmouth's trumpets sounded the recall, with the same readiness and composure that he showed in leading them to the charge down the slopes of Drumclog; and he would have led them against his brothers-in-arms Ross or James Douglas, had they turned rebels, as straightly and keenly as he led them against Hamilton and Burley. At the same time both his letters and his actions show that he did his best to discriminate between the ringleaders and the crowd: between the brawling demagogues or the meddlesome priests and the honest ignorant peasants, whose only crime was that they wished to worship God after a fashion the Government chose to discountenance. It is not necessary to assume that he was moved thereto by any softness of heart: common-sense, and a sense, too, of justice, would suffice to show him where to strike. And it will hereafter be seen that, where his commission was large enough, he more than once exercised a discretion not entirely to the taste of the more thorough-going zealots of the Edinburgh Council-board.