"I must add one more striking example of a political author in the case of Dr. James Drake, a man of genius and an excellent writer. He resigned an honorable profession, that of medicine, to adopt a very contrary one, that of becoming an author by profession for a party. As a Tory writer he dared every extremity of the law, while he evaded it by every subtlety of artifice; he sent a masked lady with his MSS. to the printer, who was never discovered; and was once saved by a flaw in the indictment, from the simple change of an _r_ for a _t_, or _nor_ for _not_, one of those shameful evasions by which the law, to its perpetual disgrace, so often protects the criminal from punishment. Dr. Drake had the honor of hearing himself censured from the throne, of being imprisoned, of seeing his _Memorials of the Church of England_ burned at (the Royal Exchange) London, and his _Hist. Angl. Scot._ at Edinburgh. Having enlisted himself in the pay of the booksellers, among other works, I suspect, he condescended to practise some literary impositions; for he has reprinted Father Parsons famous libel against the Earl of Leicester, under the title of _Secret Memoirs of Robert Dudley, E. of L._, 1706, with a preface pretending it was printed from an old MS." The same instructive writer adds: "Drake was a lover of literature; he left behind him a version of Herodotus, and a system of anatomy, once the most popular and curious of its kind. After all this turmoil of his literary life, neither his masked lady nor the flaws in his indictments availed him; government brought a writ of error, severely prosecuted him; and abandoned, as usual, by those for whom he had annihilated a genius which deserved a better fate, his perturbed spirit broke out into a fever, and he died raving against cruel persecutors, and patrons not much more humane." Another book before me, and one which shared the fate of Drake's in Edinburgh, is _The Superiority and Direct Dominion of the Imperial Crown of England over the Crown and Kingdom of Scotland, the true Foundation of a compleat Union reasserted_; 4to. London, 1705. This had appeared the year before, but was reproduced to answer the objections to it from the other side. It was written by William Attwood, Esq. If it required a nice discrimination to discover the offence of Drake, there was no such dubiety about this book, which goes the whole length of Scottish vassalage; and Mr. Attwood would lead us to believe that he knocks over the arguments of Hodges and Anderson[6] for Scottish independence with as much ease as he would ninepins. {348} Unfortunately these subjects are again forced upon us, and a reference to some of the books I have cited will enable gentlemen who are curious upon the point to judge for themselves in the matter of the present agitation of "Justice to Scotland." J. O.