merchand booth after the ringing of the
third bell to the sermon on the week day, to
pay six and eightpence."

At a later date, stringent laws were
enforced in Edinburgh against the wearing of
plaids by the women. The use of plaids as a
mantilla which enclosed also the head and
face, was declared immodest, and the law
declared every woman's honesty suspect, who
did not fully show her face; but to wear
hoods was to obey the law of fashion, and the
ladies defied every civil penalty and every
uncivil imputation, rather than put aside their
hoods till fashion, supreme lawgiver, revoked
the edicts that had gone forth in their favour.
The law, of course, was beset also with
protectionist devices. At one time it was unlawful
to eat lamb, because the breed of sheep
needed protection.

There were no newspapers to teach better
doctrine, and what newspapers there were
taught nothing. Two hundred years ago the
magistrates of Glasgow, feeling the need for
"ane diurnall, appoint John Fleming to write
to his man wha lies at London" to cause one to
be sent for the town's use. It was only twenty
years before that time, according to Clarendon,
that Scotland had first been found
worth mention in a London newspaper,
though the whole English nation was
solicitous to know what passed weekly in
Germany, Poland, and other parts of Europe.

Towards the close of the period illustrated
in these domestic annals, the kidnapping of
idle, vagrant, and criminal people on the
Scotch coast for transportation to the
plantations in Virginia and elsewhere, was an
occupation for which licences were granted; and
in the Edinburgh privy council records it
appears that one ship, called the Ewe and
Lamb, was particularly active on this service.
It was complained, however, that "the
master and merchants of the ship called
Herculus, bound for the plantations, had
apprehended some free persons, and put them
aboard the said ship, upon pretext that they
were vagabonds, or given their consent thereto."

In addition to this was the liability to
capture by the descents of the Barbary rovers
upon all our coasts. In those days men who
could see unmoved a murder in the street,
might be afllicted perhaps by a dream about
a toothache. In the days of Charles the
First, Sir Thomas Hope, a devout man, and a
leader among the Covenanters, enters
incidents like these into his diary:

"June 24, 1643.—This night I thought that
a tooth (whilk was loose) fell out of my gums,
and that I took it up in my hands, and kep
it; and it seemed so real that while I awakit,
I thought it really true, and could scarcely
believe it otherwise when I had awakit. Thir
repeated dreams portends some calamity to
me or mine; but I have resolved to submit
myself to my good Lord, and to adere his
providence, and the Lord give me grace to
bear it patiently.  June 25.—At night I
dreamed that while I was pulling on my left
buit, both the tongues of it brake. This fell
out really on the 26 September thereafter.
. . . . God prepare me. The Lord prepare
me, for I look certainly to suffering in such
way as my Lord pleases."

It is at the close also of the period
illustrated by the research of Mr. Robert
Chambers that we find note of the low civilisation
of the Scotch in the statement of Fountainhill,
that "plumbers cannot subsist in Scotland
as a distinct trade, there being so little
to do; only our curiosity is daily increasing."
And, at the same time, the Edinburgh privy
council records show that the first four miles
of the road from the capital of the country,
leading towards London, were so ruinous that
passengers were in danger of their lives
"either by their coaches overturning, their
horses falling, their carts breaking, their
loads casting, and poor people with the
burdens on their backs sorely grieved and
discouraged." Moreover, it was said, "strangers
do often exclaim thereat."

But, whatever might be the shortcomings
of Scotland, it was not, on all occasions, safe
for strangers to exclaim thereat. In the days
of James the Sixth, John Stercovius, a Pole,
had come among the Scotch, wearing the
dress of his country, which, exciting much
vulgar attention, he was hooted at in the
streets and treated altogether so ill that he
was forced to make an abrupt retreat.
Naturally enough, when he got home, he did not
give a favourable account of his reception, but
published a Legend of Reproaches against the
Scottish Nation;—and the Scotch were then
pouring exorbitant numbers of miserable,
debauched, weakly people into Poland,
besides merchants and pedlars. The Legend
is set down in the privy council records as
"ane infamous book against all estates of
persons in this realm."  King James, hearing
of this sharp criticism on the Scotch,
employed Patrick Gordon, his agent at Danzig
—himself a man of letters—to raise a
prosecution against Stercovius in his own country,
and had influence enough to cause him to be
beheaded for his offence! The persecution
cost six thousand marks, and a convention
of burghs was called, to consider means
of raising the sum by taxation. Taxation
failed, and the king sought aid in
the payment of the money from Patrick
Gordon.

In the early part of the same king's reign,
an Act was passed by the estates, which
inflicted sharp penalties on "sic as make
themselves fules, and are bards," and against
"vagabond scholars of the universities of
Saint Andrew's, Glasgow, and Aberdeen." A
month or two before the passing of the Act,
two poets had been hanged. So much for the
advancement of learning.

A notable example of the punishment of
death for a faint cause, occurred in the reign of