of their rulers to interfere with the supremacy of the Kirk. The other
class of counsellors were such gentlemen of small fortune, and
substantial farmers, as a sense of intolerable oppression had induced to
take arms and join the insurgents. These also had their clergymen with
them, and such divines, having many of them taken advantage of the
indulgence, were prepared to resist the measures of their more violent
brethren, who proposed a declaration in which they should give testimony
against the warrants and instructions for indulgence as sinful and
unlawful acts. This delicate question had been passed over in silence in
the first draught of the manifestos which they intended to publish, of
the reasons of their gathering in arms; but it had been stirred anew
during Balfour's absence, and, to his great vexation, he now found that
both parties had opened upon it in full cry, Macbriar, Kettledrummle, and
other teachers of the wanderers, being at the very spring-tide of
polemical discussion with Peter Poundtext, the indulged pastor of
Milnwood's parish, who, it seems, had e'en girded himself with a
broadsword, but, ere he was called upon to fight for the good cause of
presbytery in the field, was manfully defending his own dogmata in the
council. It was the din of this conflict, maintained chiefly between
Poundtext and Kettledrummle, together with the clamour of their
adherents, which had saluted Morton's ears upon approaching the cottage.
Indeed, as both the divines were men well gifted with words and lungs,
and each fierce, ardent, and intolerant in defence of his own doctrine,
prompt in the recollection of texts wherewith they battered each other
without mercy, and deeply impressed with the importance of the subject of
discussion, the noise of the debate betwixt them fell little short of
that which might have attended an actual bodily conflict.

Burley, scandalized at the disunion implied in this virulent strife of
tongues, interposed between the disputants, and, by some general remarks
on the unseasonableness of discord, a soothing address to the vanity of
each party, and the exertion of the authority which his services in that
day's victory entitled him to assume, at length succeeded in prevailing
upon them to adjourn farther discussion of the controversy. But although
Kettledrummle and Poundtext were thus for the time silenced, they
continued to eye each other like two dogs, who, having been separated by
the authorit