till
midnight, frequently beating drums, and raising more people; when my
Lord Commissioner being informed, there were a thousand of the seamen
and rabble come up from Leith; and apprehending, if it were suffered to
go on, it might come to a dangerous head, and be out of his power to
suppress, he sent for the Lord Provost, and demanded, that the Guards
should march into the city.

The Lord Provost, after some difficulty, yielded; tho it was alleged,
that it was what was never known in Edinburgh before. About one o clock
in the morning, a battalion of the Guards entered the town, marched up
to the Parliament Close, and took post in all the avenues of the city,
which prevented the resolutions taken to insult the houses of the rest
of the treaters.

The rabble were intirely reduc'd by this, and gradually dispers'd, and
so the tumult ended....

The author of this[29] had his share in the danger of this tumult, and
tho unknown to him, was watch'd and set by the mob, in order to know
where to find him, had his chamber windows insulted, and the windows
below him broken by mistake. But, by the prudence of his friends, the
shortness of its continuance, and GOD'S providence, he escaped.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Of Hamilton. An opponent of the Union.

[28] The Lawn Market.

[29] De Foe was known to be staying in Edinburgh as the emissary of the
English Government.

D. "AN END OF AN OLD SONG" (1707).

+Source.+--_The Lockhart Papers: containing Memoirs and Commentaries
upon the Affairs of Scotland from_ 1702 _to_ 1715, vol. i., p. 222,
by George Lockhart, Esq., of Carnwath. (London: 1817.)

It is not to be doubted, but the Parliament of England would give a kind
reception to the articles of the Union as passed in Scotland, when they
were laid before that House, as was evident from the quick dispatch in
approving of and ratifying the same; and so the Union commenced on the
first of May 1707, a day never to be forgot by Scotland; a day in which
the Scots were stripped of what their predecessors had gallantly
maintained for many hundred years, I mean the independency and
soveraignty of the kingdom, both which the Earl of Seafield so little
valued, that when he, as Chancellor, signed the engrossed
exemplification of the Act of Union, he returned it to the clerk, in the
face of Parliament, with this dispising and contemning remark, "Now
there's ane end of ane old song."

"THE WEE, WEE GERMAN LAIRDIE"[