ed by the king's advocate,
Sir George Mackenzie, that "noble wit of Scotland," as he was styled
by Dryden, but whom the Scotch people have branded as the "bluidy
Mackenzie" of the popular rhyme. This same advocate who secured the
sentencing of the two young girls for expressions of opinion upon
a question which was purely one of casuistry wrote in one of his
_Essays_: "Human nature inclines us wisely to that pity which we may
one day need; and few pardon the severity of a magistrate, because
they know not where it may stop."

During the period intervening between their condemnation and their
execution, they were visited by kindly disposed ministers of the
Established Church and others, who sought to persuade them out of
their beliefs. But to no purpose; even the promise of a full pardon
failed to move either of them from the steadfastness of their
expressed convictions. In order to surround their execution with
as much of ignominy as possible, it was ordered that five women,
convicted of the murder of their illegitimate children, should be
hanged along with them. In their last hour upon earth, the young women
were sustained by the fortitude of their faith. The attempt to make
them hear the ministrations of a curate was frustrated by the two
young women singing together the Twenty-third Psalm. Upon the scaffold
they continued their religious devotions; and in the midst of their
calm, confident declarations of faith in Christ and of their innocence
of any real wrong, they perished.

The transit from religion to pleasure is, after all, but a short
passage from one department of life to another, and the story of the
women of Scotland and of Ireland would not be complete without notice
of some of that group of famous Irish women who were conspicuous upon
the stage of Great Britain in the eighteenth century--women whose
excellence served to raise the dramatic art to the point of prominence
and dignity which it attained during that period. One of the earliest
of that group who gave lustre to the stage was Margaret Woffington.
The story of her life is a record of high achievement in the
histrionic profession, although it is as well a record of frailty--a
fact unfortunately too often true of actresses in the eighteenth
century, when the standards of their art were supposed to absolve them
to an extent from the ordinary demands of circumspection in conduct.
She had all the susceptibility of the Celtic temperament, and her warm