Later on, the Covenant was quietly allowed to drop, and the Seceders relaxed their strict aloofness. Matthew Moncrieff, it seems, was of a cheerfully social disposition counteracting his hereditary fanaticism. There is a tradition that he had worn a red coat for a short time, fighting, as his father preached, for King George. He had a worldly turn for sport, and though he did not dare to shoot, he kept a couple of greyhounds, to the scandal of his congregation. The English parson reports a tale of him as well known. One Sunday, as he was riding across the Ochils to preach, a hare started up, at which he flicked with his whip, and even forgot himself so far as to gallop a little way after poor puss. For this offence he was delated by his own servant before the Presbytery, that rebuked him to contrition; then it would long be cast up against him how he had broken the Sabbath. When his name came up among the more severe, heads were gravely shaken: “He is a man that would gar anybody like him--but oh! that beast”--to which less strait-laced admirers would respond, “Hoot! he’s no’ a wrang man, for a’ the beast.” This phrase, “for a’ the beast,” Mr. Hall declares to have become proverbial in that part of the country as denoting a fly in the amber of character. Matthew’s wife had a disintegrating effect on the body, a Miss Scott from Fife, who, if we may believe Hall’s informants, was only a Seceder skin-deep, and turned a natural bent for wit and raillery to making fun of her husband’s congregation. She did not scruple to be close friends with the parish minister, Dr. Gray, and his wife; then, while the dissenting laird still thumped his pulpit every Sabbath against the errors of Erastianism, the rival spiritual authorities lived on the best of terms through the week, as could not but go to temper sectarian bitterness, though for a time the more zealous Seceders frowned on this compromising intimacy, as Mr. Pickwick at Sergeant Buzfuz exchanging salutations with his own advocate. So, by and by, acrimonious zeal cooled down all round, dying out altogether in my own family, as “Sandemanianism” did among their neighbours the Sandemans. Some members of our line seem, indeed, to have backslidden far from ancestral austerity. A descendant of the Abernethy ministers became a London tradesman--landlord of the “Rainbow” in Fleet Street by some accounts--whose son, William Thomas Moncrieff, put on the stage _Tom and Jerry_, with other once popular plays that did not keep him from dying at the Charterhouse, a fellow-pensioner of Colonel Newcome. About the same time as John Home scandalised even the lukewarm Establishment by coming out as a playwriter, a tragedy less famous than _Douglas_ had been published by John Moncrieff, who seems not to have long survived it; and nothing else is known of him but that he was a dominie of sorts at Eton, apparently private tutor to some sprig of nobility.