The Privy Council had before them the case of Mr Thomas Blackwell, student of theology, lately chaplain to Lady Inglis of Cramond at Barnton House. He seems to have felt his spirit galled by some circumstances of his situation, his poor garret-lodging and attendance, the lady’s pedantry in criticising his prayers, the necessity of courting the parish clergyman, and so forth, and thus was provoked to pen a long and sorry pasquil in verse, purporting to be _The Humble Advice of a Weel-wisher to all Dominies_, in which he discharged his bile in sufficiently scurrilous terms. This libel he sent circuitously by the Glasgow carrier to Lady Cramond, who soon discovered his authorship, and taxed him with it. At first he made a solemn denial, but he afterwards owned his offence; and the lady now came for redress to the Privy Council. The young satirist made the most humble professions of penitence for his offence, but in vain. He was ordained by the Council to be banished from Scotland! [Sidenote: 1694.] We find on the 20th February that Lady Cramond had forgiven Thomas Blackwell, and he on his petition was consequently absolved from his former sentence.[116] [Sidenote: FEB. 1.] Matthew Forsyth, cook and innkeeper in Edinburgh, represented to the Privy Council that he had been apprehended in September 1691, under cloud of night, by order of Bailie Robert Blackwood, and along with his wife thrown into the Tolbooth, ‘for what he knew not,’ and was detained there till the 11th of May 1692, ‘in a most miserable, penurious, and starving condition, he being put in the Iron House, and his wife in the Woman House.’ Though ‘the cold of the winter’ was well known to be ‘most violent,’ ‘they did not see any fire except a candle;’ and during the whole time ‘they never got a bed, but lay on the cold floor,’ ‘Having no mean of subsistence, they were necessitat to sell the clothes off their backs to maintain them, and all they got in the day was two plack-loaves betwixt them [a plack being the third of a penny].’ Meanwhile, the officers who apprehended them took from their house everything they had ‘for back, bed, or board,’ leaving nothing but ‘two great raxes [spits], a dropping-pan, and some chests and bedsteads.’ The entire value of what was taken away was not less than two thousand pounds Scots. Matthew had called on the magistrates to say what was at his charge; but they turned him over to the Privy Council, which again turned him to the Lords of Justiciary. These afterwards, finding that the magistrates would not proceed, ordered his liberation and that of his wife. Being reduced by this treatment to ‘extreme poverty,’ he was now unable to prosecute for redress, unless the Court of Session should put him upon their gratis-roll. At his petition, the Privy Council recommended the Court to extend to him this benefit.