ir lustre. He was the last man in the world who ought to have
abused brimstone; for his soul had the Itch. A wallow in the sweet
mould--the pure mire of Cardronna Mains--on a dropping day, would have
been of service to his body, bloated with foul blood. Smeared with that
sanative soil, he might have been born again--no more a leper.

"I remember well," says Dr Kippis, "that he dressed his younger son [the
son of his wife--not of the mistress for whom he abandoned her] in a
Scottish plaid, like a little Highlander, and carried him every where in
that garb. The boy being asked by a gentleman with whom I was in company,
why he was clothed in such a manner, answered _with great
vivacity_,--'Sir, my father hates the Scotch, and does it to plague
them.'" For a father to dress up his son in the garb of a people, despised
and detested with perpetual scunner, seems an odd demonstration either of
party spite or of paternal fondness--about as sensible as, on the
anniversary of his birth-day, in compliment to his mother, to have dressed
him up like a monkey.

The Patriot Satirist! The question inevitably obtrudes itself--what is the
pointing of destiny, which singles out Churchill for the indignant
protector, in verse, of England's freedom and welfare? What calls his hand
into the van of battle, with the strong lance of justice laid in rest, to
tilt against the ill-defended breast of poor, proud, hungry, jacobinical,
place-loving, coin-attached and coin-attaching, muse-left,
gibbet-favoured, tartan-clad, sulphur-scented, and thistle-growing
Scotland? The hero of liberty, the self-offered martyr for the rights and
the wrongs of a great people, should carry on his front, one might
suppose, some evidence of the over-mastering spirit which, like a
necessity, finds him out, and throws him, as if a lot-drawn champion,
alone into the jaws and jeopardy of the war. It should be one, of whom, if
you knew him yet obscure, you might divine and say, "This is _his_
hour--_his_ is the mind that consecrates its possessor to a consecrated
cause, that discriminates, essentially as the spirits of light as divided
from the spirits of darkness, the lover of his country from the factious
partizan, and from the seditious demagogue." There should be a private
life and character that but repeat themselves in the public ones, on a
bolder and gigantic scale. Else how ready does the apprehension rise, that
the professed hostility to unjust men in power is no