The popular writers of this period of Scottish history do not advert sufficiently to those hard measures of the time of the Solemn League which may be said, in the way of reaction or retaliation, to have led to the severities now in the course of being practised upon the more uncompromising Presbyterians. The many petitions of the persecuted men of 1638-60 for redress are only slightly alluded to in a few sentences by Wodrow, while he fills long chapters with those sufferings of proscribed Remonstrators which would never probably have had existence but for their own harsh doings in their days of power. He dwells with much feeling on the banishment passed upon Mr John Livingstone, a preacher high in the esteem of the more serious people, and deservedly so. All must sympathise with such a case, and admire the heroic constancy of the sufferer; but it is striking, only a few months after his sentence to exile (February 2, 1664), to find a Mr Robert Aird coming before the Privy Council with a piteous recital of the distresses to which he and his family had been subjected since 1638, in consequence of his being then thrust out of his charge at Stranraer, merely for his affection to the then constituted Episcopal government, the clergyman put into his place being this same John Livingstone! Aird tells us that, being then ‘redacted to great straits, he was at last necessitat to settle himself in Comray, in the diocese of the Isles, where his provision [patrimony] was,’ that being ‘so little that he was not able to maintain his family.’ During the usurpation, ‘by reason of his affection to his majesty, he was quartered upon and otherwise cruelly abused, to his almost utter ruin.’ The Lords recommended that Mr Aird should have some allowance out of vacant stipends in the diocese of the Isles. Another of the zealous clergy whose resistance to the new rule and consequent troubles and denunciation are brought conspicuously forward by Wodrow, was Mr James Hamilton, minister of Blantyre. He was compelled to leave his parish, and not even allowed to officiate peaceably in his own house at Glasgow. Much to be deplored truly; but Wodrow does not tell us of a petition which was about the same time addressed to the Council by the widow of Mr John Heriot, the former minister of Blantyre, upon whom, in 1653, ‘the prevailing party of Remonstrators in the presbytery of Hamilton had intruded one Mr James Hamilton,’ by whom the whole stipend had been appropriated, so that Heriot, after a few years of penury, had left his widow and children in absolute destitution. So impressed were the Council by the petitioner’s case, that they ordered her to receive the whole stipend of the current year. To any candid person who would study the history of this period, it appears necessary that these circumstances should be told, not in justification of the cruel and most unwise measures of the government and the heads of the new church, but as a needful