Your correspondent BALLIOLENSIS should remember that at the time Dr. Drake published his {347} _Historia Anglo-Scotica_, 1703, there were no bounds to the angry passions and jealousies evoked by the discussion of the projected union; consequently, what may appear to as in the present day an insufficient reason for the treatment the book met with in the northern metropolis, wore a very different aspect to the Scots, who, under the popular belief that they were to _be sold_ to their enemies, saw every movement with distrust, and tortured everything said or written on this side the Tweed, upon the impending question, to discover an attack upon their national independence, their church, and their valour. Looking at Dr. Drake's book, then, for the data upon which it was condemned, we find that it opens with a prefatory dedication to Sir E. Seymour, one of Queen Anne's Commissioners for the Union, and a high churchman, wherein the author distinctly ventures a blow at Presbytery when he says to his patron: "The languishing oppressed Church of Scotland is not without hopes of finding in you hereafter the same successful champion and restorer that her sister of England has already experienced." He farther calculated upon Sir Edward inspiring the neighbouring nation "with as great a respect for the generosity of the English as they have heretofore had to dread their valour." Now the Scots neither acknowledged the Episcopacy which Seymour is here urged to press upon them, nor had they any such slavish fear of the vaunted English prowess with which Dr. Drake would have them intimidated; without going farther, therefore, into the book, it appears to me that the Scots parliament had a right to consider it written in a bad spirit, and to pacify the people by condemning it. Defoe, in his _History of the Union_ (G. Chalmers' edition, London, 1786), says: "One Dr. Drake writes a preface to an abridgment of the _Scots History_, wherein, speaking something reflecting upon the freedom and independence of Scotland, the Scots parliament caused it to be burned by the hangman in Edinburgh." In his _Northern Memoirs_, 1715, Oldmixon observes: "They (the Jacobites) therefore put Dr. Drake, author of the _High Church Memorials_, upon publishing an antiquated Scotch history, on purpose to vilify the whole nation in the preface, and create more ill blood. This had the desired effect. The Scots parliament highly resented the affront, and ordered it to be burnt by the common hangman at Edinburgh." D'Israeli, in his _Calamities of Authors_, has the following interesting notice of Drake: