treason. He effected his escape and was outlawed. Subsequently he returned in arms as a rebel, was defeated, seized, and put to death, not, however, as a rebel, but upon the former most unjustifiable sentence. “Never,” says the historian Laing, “was a sentence productive of more execration and horror, never, perhaps, was a sentence more flagitiously obtained, than the attainder of Argyll.”
Considering, then, the exploits of his ancestors, —how much they have done and suffered in the cause of the Reformation generally, and of “Presbytery” in particular, it is not surprising that the ecclesiastical history of Scotland, independently of its own interest, should have exercised a powerful fascination upon the mind of the young nobleman who now stands at the head of the house of Argyll, and is the author of the work before us. Not that the Duke of Argyll alludes, except in the most incidental and unassuming manner, to the names of his forefathers. Still we cannot help thinking that he has been attracted to the subject by a hereditary predilection,—that he feels both warmed and warned by ancestral examples. For some years his mind has been evidently gravitating around the theme,—alternately allured and repelled by influences at once soothing and exasperating. When a mere boy, he took a turn or two in the Maelstrom of Free Church agitation—and was not swallowed up. The pamphlet he published at that time did him no discredit then—nor since. His present work is one of far higher merit. A good table of contents, exhibiting distinctly the march of his argumentative and historical positions, would have been of service to the general reader, and might have guided him to the appreciation of principles which, though implied in the essay, lie somewhat dormant, and are not brought out in sufficiently prominent relief. The Duke of Argyll anatomises his subject with considerable skill; but not with a perfectly unflinching hand. He appears sometimes to be groping in a dubious light. But whatever the defects of the book may be, they are, in our opinion, greatly counterbalanced by its merits.
Indeed, we do not pay the volume too high a compliment, when we say that it is an eminently original work—much more so than is apparent from a superficial perusal of its contents. It supplies good materials for thinking; but it requires to be fathomed with
