extract from the same document: "They who are pressed with necessity at home are glad of any occasion or pretext to trouble the public quiet, and to fish in troubled waters to better their fortunes." The snare which lured his young hot-headed relative was spread in vain for the old and cautious Napier. A true Covenanter Montrose called him before the Assembly at Glasgow. He was so; he was too true to the spirit of the real Covenant to be caught by its specious copy; too true a Covenanter to trust himself or his conscience to such keepers as Rothes, Loudon, and Balmerino. A man of his experience in affairs, nor less experienced in the temper of his own countrymen and of the King, cannot but have had a shrewd suspicion whither such a movement under such guides must inevitably tend. It may then be asked why he did not use his influence to dissuade his relative from a partnership he was too prudent himself to join? We do not know that he did not. We know nothing, save that he did not sign the Covenant and that Montrose did. But it is not unreasonable in the circumstances to suppose that his advice may have been given that way, and given in vain. At no time of his life was Montrose easy to persuade against his own feelings. Confident in his own abilities, conscious of his own integrity, why may he not have thought that in him the Covenant would find a leader able to counteract the selfish view of those who were merely troubling the waters to better their own fortune, persuasive enough to guide it into the way it should go, and strong enough to keep it there? And perhaps Napier too believed him to be such a leader.