epted as of the gravest import by
those who voted for the attendance of the Scotch judges at the Bar of
the House of Lords, and who carried their point by a majority of twelve.

The question of the judges being settled, the debate on the Bill went
on, and the measure was read a third time, on Wednesday, May 11th, and
passed by a majority of fifty-four to twenty-two. On the following
Monday, May 16th, {68} the Bill was sent down to the House of Commons,
where it occasioned debates even warmer than the debates in the Upper
House. The Scotch opposition was more successful in the Commons than
it had been in the Lords. So strenuously was the measure opposed that
at one time it seemed likely to be lost altogether, and was only saved
from extinction by a casting vote. When at last it was read a third
time, on June 13th, it was a very different measure, in name and in
form, from the Bill which had come down from the Peers a month earlier.
The proposal to abolish the Edinburgh city guard and to destroy the
gate of the Netherbow port disappeared from the Bill, and the proposed
punitive measures finally resolved themselves into the infliction of a
fine of two thousand pounds upon the city of Edinburgh, and the
declaration that the provost, Alexander Wilson, was incapable of
holding office. Such was the pacific conclusion of a controversy that
at one time seemed likely to put a dangerous strain upon the amicable
relations between the two countries. It may indeed be shrewdly
suspected that the memory of the Porteous mob, and of the part which
the Hanoverian Queen and the Whig Government played in connection with
it, may have had no small share in fanning the embers of Jacobite
enthusiasm in Scotland in swelling the ranks of the sympathizers with
King James and Prince Charles over the water, and in precipitating the
insurrectionary storm which was to make memorable the name of the
Forty-five. Perhaps to the world at large the most momentous result of
that wild and stormy episode is to be found in the enchanting fiction
which has illuminated, with the genius of Walter Scott, the stirring
scenes of the Porteous riots, and has lent an air of heroic dignity and
beauty to the obscure smuggler, George Robertson. It is the happy
privilege of the true romancer to find history his handmaid, and to
make obscure events immortal, whether they be the scuffles of Greeks
and barbarians outside a small town in Asia Minor, or the lynching of a