ve that, notwithstanding the
intolerant and implacable spirit too often manifested by the
Covenanters, no candid reader will read this book to the end without
acknowledging (what is, indeed, the truth) that the soul of the
Covenanting movement was a great and noble one. And that soul we here
find personified in the younger Gilhaize--a type, if there be one in
literature, of the Covenanter of the best kind.

For, whatever may have been the temper of his associates in the
aggregate, the hero of the book holds the scales between the rival
parties with admirable evenness--and this notwithstanding the strong
bias of his temper and upbringing. Indeed, until the time when he has
become, not metaphorically, but literally maddened by the wrongs and
outrages to which he has been subjected, the book, in so far as it
constitutes an expression of his personal sentiments, is a perfect
homily on fairness. And how much such fairness has to do with the
winning and retaining of sympathy, perhaps only a modern reader is
qualified to say. Gifted with the saving graces of humour and of
fellow-feeling, the supposed annalist of our chronicle is no less
prepared to make allowance for the faults of the other side than to
acknowledge the shortcomings of his own. In fact he is the pattern of a
spirit at once upright, humble, and self-respecting, whose ruling
passion is an earnest piety, and who asks no more of those set over him
than freedom to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience.
And for this little boon, so harshly and unjustly withheld, we see him
called upon to sacrifice home, kindred and estate, to know his wife and
daughters given over to death and worse than death, and finally to
surrender his liberty and his last remaining child. Unless pity and
terror in a master's hand have lost their power, surely this spectacle
is a moving one! Nor must we forget that, even in the culminating scene
of the tragedy--where Ringan makes his bold and inspired oration at the
meeting of the Cameronian leaders with Renwick in a dell near
Lasswade--the hero, for all his wrongs, remains unembittered, and
retains unimpaired the gentleness and the manliness which are his
characteristics. That there were such men as this among the Covenanters,
or that they constituted the salt which gave its savour to the movement,
we are forbidden to doubt. But, saving in the pages which follow, we
know not where to seek for the ideal presentment of one such.