er track, and began laying down, with singular
coherency, the statements of doctrine in a theological work of the old
school, which he had been recently perusing. And finally, his mind
clearing as his end approached, he died in good hope. It is not
uninteresting to look back on two such generations of Scotchmen as those
to which my uncles and grandfather belonged. They differed very
considerably in some respects. My grandfather, with most of his
contemporaries of the same class, had a good deal of the Tory in his
composition. He stood by George III. in the early policy of his reign,
and by his adviser Lord Bute; reprobated Wilkes and Junius; and gravely
questioned whether Washington and his coadjutors, the American
Republicans, were other than bold rebels. My uncles, on the contrary,
were stanch Whigs, who looked upon Washington as perhaps the best and
greatest man of modern times--stood firm by the policy of Fox, as
opposed to that of Pitt--and held that the war with France, which
immediately succeeded the First Revolution, was, however thoroughly it
changed its character afterwards, one of unjustifiable aggression. But
however greatly my uncles and grandfather may have differed on these
points, they were equally honest men.

The rising generation can perhaps form no very adequate conception of
the number and singular interest of the links which serve to connect the
recollections of a man who has seen his fiftieth birth-day, with what to
them must appear a remote past. I have seen at least two men who fought
at Culloden--one on the side of the King, the other on that of the
Prince--and, with these, not a few who witnessed the battle from a
distance. I have conversed with an aged woman that had conversed, in
turn, with an aged man who had attained to mature manhood when the
persecutions of Charles and James were at their height, and remembered
the general regret excited by the death of Renwick. My eldest maternal
aunt--the mother of Cousin George--remembered old John Feddes--turned of
ninety at the time; and John's buccaneering expedition could not have
dated later than the year 1687. I have known many who remembered the
abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions; and have listened to stories
of executions which took place on the gallows-hills of burghs and
sheriffdoms, and of witch-burnings perpetrated on town Links and
baronial Laws. And I have felt a strange interest in these glimpses of a
past so unlike the present,