_Kir._--Secret and True History of the Church of Scotland, from the Restoration to the year 1678. By the Rev. James Kirkton. 4to. Edin. 1817 _Pat. Walker._--Biographia Presbyteriana. [Lives of Alexander Peden, &c., by Patrick Walker.] 2 vols. Edin. 1827 [Illustration: Edinburgh Castle, _restored_ as in 1573.] DOMESTIC ANNALS OF SCOTLAND. INTRODUCTORY. Our attention lights, a few years after the middle of the sixteenth century, on a little independent kingdom in the northern part of the British island--a tract of country now thought romantic and beautiful, then hard-favoured and sterile, chiefly mountainous, penetrated by deep inlets of the sea, and suffering under a climate not so objectionable on account of cold as humidity. It contains a scattered population of probably seven hundred thousand:--the Scots--thought to be a very ancient nation, descended from a daughter of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and living under a monarchy believed to have originated about the time that Alexander conquered India. A very poor, rude country it is, as it well might be in that age, and seeing that it lay so far to the north and so much out of the highway of civilisation. No well-formed roads in it--no posts for letters or for travelling. A printing-press in the head town, Edinburgh, but not another anywhere. A regular localised court of law had not yet existed in it thirty years. No stated means of education, excepting a few grammar-schools in the principal towns, and three small universities. Society consisted mainly of a large agricultural class, half enslaved to the lords of the soil: above all, obliged to follow them in war. Other industrial pursuits to be found only in the burghs, the chief of which were Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stirling, Perth, Dundee, and Aberdeen.