couth mercy" if they were all
saved.

A pleasant evangel was this, and peacefully was it to have been
propagated!

Scott was writing a novel, not history. In "The Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border" (1802-3) Sir Walter gave this account of the
persecutions. "Had the system of coercion been continued until our day,
Blair and Robertson would have preached in the wilderness, and only
discovered their powers of eloquence and composition by rolling along a
deeper torrent of gloomy fanaticism. . . . The genius of the persecuted
became stubborn, obstinate, and ferocious." He did not, in his romance,
draw a complete picture of the whole persecution, but he did show, by
that insolence of Bothwell at Milnwood, which stirs the most sluggish
blood, how the people were misused. This scene, to Dr. McCrie's mind, is
"a mere farce," because it is enlivened by Manse's declamations. Scott
displays the abominable horrors of the torture as forcibly as literature
may dare to do. But Dr. McCrie is not satisfied, because Macbriar, the
tortured man, had been taken in arms. Some innocent person should have
been put in the Boot, to please Dr. McCrie. He never remarks that
Macbriar conquers our sympathy by his fortitude. He complains of what the
Covenanters themselves called "the language of Canaan," which is put into
their mouths, "a strange, ridiculous, and incoherent jargon compounded of
Scripture phrases, and cant terms peculiar to their own party opinions in
ecclesiastical politics." But what other language did many of them speak?
"Oh, all ye that can pray, tell all the Lord's people to try, by mourning
and prayer, if ye can taigle him, taigle him especially in Scotland, for
we fear, he will depart from it." This is the theology of a savage, in
the style of a clown, but it is quoted by Walker as Mr. Alexander
Peden's.' Mr. John Menzie's "Testimony" (1670) is all about "hardened
men, whom though they walk with you for the present with horns of a lamb,
yet afterward ye may hear them speak with the mouth of a dragon, pricks
in your eyes and thorns in your sides." Manse Headrigg scarcely
caricatures this eloquence, or Peden's "many and long seventy-eight years
left-hand defections, and forty-nine years right-hand extremes;" while
"Professor Simson in Glasgow, and Mr. Glass in Tealing, both with Edom's
children cry Raze, raze the very foundation!" Dr. McCrie is reduced to
supposing that some of the more absurd sermons were incorrectly reported.