certainly it cannot be alleged by even the severest moralist, that in either abdicating a government or vacating a throne, there is the slightest shadow of moral evil involved. In Scotland the decision was different. The battle fought in the Convention was exactly that which had been previously fought between Buchanan and his antagonists. 'Paterson, Archbishop of Glasgow, and Sir George Mackenzie, asserted,' says Malcolm Laing, 'the doctrine of divine right, or maintained, with more plausibility, that every illegal measure of James's government was vindicated by the declaration of the late Parliament, that _he was an absolute monarch, entitled to unreserved obedience_, AND ACCOUNTABLE TO NONE; while Sir James Montgomery and Sir John Dalrymple, who conducted the debate on the other side, averred that the Parliament was neither competent to grant, nor the king to acquire, _an absolute power, irreconcilable with the_ RECIPROCAL OBLIGATIONS DUE TO THE PEOPLE.' The doctrines of Buchanan prevailed; and the estates declared that James VII. having, through '_the advice of evil and wicked councillors_, invaded the fundamental constitution of the kingdom, and altered it from a legal limited monarchy to an arbitrary despotic power,' he had thereby _forfaulted_ his right to the crown.' The terms of the declaration demonstrate that Baillie was quite in the right regarding the 'old maxime, that the king can do no fault,' as exclusively a 'maxime of the State of England.' By acting on the advice of 'evil and wicked councillors,' it was declared that a peccable king had forfeited the throne. The fact that there were councillors in the case did not so much even as extenuate the offence: it was the advisers of the King who then, as now, were accountable to the King's English subjects for the advice they gave; it was the King in person who was accountable to his Scottish subjects for the advice he took. This principle, hitherto little adverted to, throws, as we have said, much light on the history of the Revolution in Scotland. FIRST PRINCIPLES.