tled, "Reasons why the Tragedy of Douglas should be burnt by the hands of the Common Hangman ;" and, afterwards, he wrote another, calculated for the lower ranks, and which was hawked about the streets, under the title, " History of the Bloody Tragedy of Douglas, as it is now performed at the Theatre in the Canongate." Mr Mackenzie informs us, in his life of Home, that the latter pasquinade had the effect of adding two more nights to the already unprecedented run of the play. For this conduct Dr Carlyle was visited by his presbytery, with a censure and admonition. A person of right feeling in the present day is only apt to be astonished that the punishment was not more severe; for assuredly, it would be difficult to conceive any conduct so apt to be injurious to the usefulness of a clergyman as his thus mixing himself up with the impurities and buffooneries of the stage. The era of 1757 was perhaps somewhat different from the present. The serious party in the church were inconsiderately zealous in their peculiar mode of procedure, while the moderate party, on the principle of antagonism, erred as much on the side of what they called liberality. Hence, although the church would not now, perhaps, go to such a length in condemning the tragedy of Douglas, its author, and his abettors, neither would the provocation be now given. No clergyman could now be found to act like Home, and Carlyle; and therefore the church could not be called upon to act in so ungracious a manner as it did towards those gentlemen. Dr Carlyle was a fond lover of his country, of his profession, and, it might be said, of all mankind. He was instrumental in procuring an exemption for his brethren from the severe pressure of the house and window tax, for which purpose he visited London and was introduced at court, where the elegance and dignity of his appearance are said to have excited both admiration and surprise. It was generally remarked that his noble countenance bore a striking resemblance to the Jupiter Tonans in the capitol. Smollett mentions in his Humphrey Clinker, a work in which fact and fancy are curiously blended, that he owed to Dr Carlyle his introduction to the literary circles of Edinburgh. After mentioning a list of celebrated names, he says, "These acquaintances I owe to the friendship of Dr Carlyle, who wants nothing but inclination to figure with the rest upon paper." It may be further mentioned, that the world owes the preservation of Collins' fine ode on the superstitions of the Highlands, to Dr Carlyle. The author, on his death-bed, had mentioned it to Dr Johnson as the best of his poems; but it was not in his possession, and no search had been able to discover a copy. At last, Dr Carlyle found it accidentally among his papers, and presented it to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in the first volume of whose transactions it was published.

Dr Carlyle died, August 25, 1805, in the eighty-fourth year of his age, and the fifty-eighth of his ministry. By his wife, who was a woman of superior understanding and accomplishments, he had had several children, all of whom died many years before himself. Dr Carlyle published nothing but a few sermons and jeux d'esprit, and the statistical account of the parish of Inveresk in Sir John Sinclair's large compilation; but he left behind him a very valuable memoir of his own time, which, to the surprise of the literary world, is still condemned by his relations to manuscript obscurity.

CARSTAIRS, WILLIAM, an eminent, political, and ecclesiastical character, was born at the village of Cathcart in the neighbourhood of Glasgow, on the 11th of February, 1649. His father was Mr John Carstairs, descended of a very ancient family in Fife, and minister in the high church of Glasgow, where he had for his colleague the Rev. James Durham, well known for his commentary on the Revelation and other learned and pious works. His mother's name was Jane Muir, of the family of Glanderston in the county of Renfrew. Giving early indications of an uncommon genius, young Carstairs was by his father

placed under the care of a Mr Sinclair, an indulged presbyterian minister, who at that time kept a school of great celebrity at Ormiston, a village in east Lothian. Under Mr Sinclair, in whose school, as in all schools of that kind at the time, and even in the family, no language but Latin was used, Carstairs acquired a perfect knowledge of that language, with great fluency of expressing himself in it, and a strong taste for classical learning in general. He had also the good fortune to form, among the sons of the nobility who attended this celebrated seminary, several friendships, which were of the utmost consequence to him in after life.

Having completed his course at the school, Mr Carstairs entered the college of Edinburgh in his nineteenth year, where he studied for four years under Mr, afterwards Sir William Paterson, who in later life became clerk to the privy council of Scotland. Under this gentleman he made great proficiency in the several branches of the school philosophy then in vogue; but the distracted state of the country determined his father to send him to study divinity in Holland, where many of his brethren, the persecuted ministers of the church of Scotland, had already found an asylum. He was accordingly entered in the university of Utrecht, where he studied Hebrew under Leusden and Divinity under Herman Witsius, at that time two of the most celebrated professors in Europe. He had also an opportunity, which he carefully improved, of attending the lectures of the celebrated Grævius, who was at this time in the vigour of his faculties and the zenith of his reputation. The study of theology, however, was what he made his main business, which having completed, he was licensed as a preacher of the gospel, but where or by whom seems not to have been known by any of his biographers. In all probability, it was by some of the classes of Holland. Being strongly attached to the presbyterian system, in which he had been educated, and for adherence to which his father was a sufferer at home, and himself in a limited sense a wanderer in a strange land, for it was to avoid the taking of unnecessary or unlawful oaths imposed by the bishops that he had been sent by his father to study at Utrecht, he naturally took a deep interest in the affairs of his native country, and was early engaged in deliberating upon the means of her deliverance. On sending him to Holland by the way of London, his father introduced him by letter to an eminent physician of that city, who kindly furnished him with a letter to the physician of the prince of Orange. This latter gentleman, upon the strength of his friend's recommendation, introduced Carstairs to the Pensionary Fogel, who finding him so much a master of every thing relative to the state of parties and interests in Great Britain, introduced him to a private interview with his master, the prince, who was at once struck with his easy and polite address, and with the extent of his political knowledge. This favourable opinion was heightened by subsequent interviews, and in a short time nothing of consequence was transacted at his court relative to Great Britain, till Carstairs had been previously consulted. Holland had, from the first attempts of the court after the Restoration to suppress the presbyterians, been the general resort of such of the Scottish clergy as found it impossible to retain their stations, and they were soon followed by numbers of their unhappy countrymen who had vainly perilled their lives on the fatal fields of Pentland and Bothwell, with the principal of whom Carstairs could not, in the circumstances in which he was placed, fail to become acquainted. Being well connected, and in no way obnoxious to the government, he seems to have been selected both by his expatriated countrymen and by the agents of the prince of Orange to visit Scotland on a mission of observation in the year 1682.

Nothing could be more hopeless than the condition of Scotland at this time.

Her ministers where every where silenced: Cargill and Cameron, the only two that remained of the intrepid band that had so long kept up the preached gospel in the fields, had both fallen, the one on the scaffold by an iniquitous sentence, the other on the open heath by the hand of violence. Her nobles were either the slaves of arbitrary royalty, or they had already expatriated themselves, or were just about to do so, while the body of her people, Issachar-like, were crouching beneath their burdens in the most hopeless dejection. Finding no encouragement in Scotland, where the few individuals that felt any of the true aspirations of liberty, were seriously engaged in a project for purchasing lands and transporting themselves, their families, and their friends to Carolina in North America, Mr Carstairs determined to return to Holland, where, under a rational and indulgent government, he had enjoyed a liberty which he found to his grief was not to be obtained at home. He, however, probably not without instructions, took London in his way, where he arrived in the month of November, 1682, at the very time when Shaftesbury, Monmouth, Sydney, Essex, Russell, Hampden, and Howard were engaged in what has been called Shaftesbury's plot, or more generally, from a forged story of a design to murder the king and the duke of York at a farm called the Rye, possessed by colonel Rumbold, the Ryehouse plot. These gentlemen were actuated by very different views. Monmouth had probably no object but the crown; Russell and Hampden were for restraining the prerogative and securing the nation's liberties, civil and religous; Sydney and Essex were for restoring the republic, while Howard, a man without principle, seems to have had nothing in view, but to raise a tumult, whereby he might by accident promote his private interest. All of them, however, agreed in soliciting the co-operation of those Scotsmen, who, no longer able to subsist under the impositions of a government whose sole object seemed to be not the protection, but the entire ruin of its subjects, were about to transport themselves to a distant and desert country. Most of the conspirators having some previous knowledge of Carstairs, he was employed to negotiate between the parties; and he was empowered by a letter from Sir James Stewart, afterwards lord advocate for Scotland, to assure the English conspirators that, upon furnishing a certain sum of money for the purchase of arms and ammunition, the Scottish refugees in Holland were ready to co-operate with them by an immediate descent upon the west coast of Scotland. This letter he communicated to Russell and Sydney, seconding its contents by a fervent eulogium upon the influence, the talents, and the particular merits of Argyle, whose numerous vassals, extensive jurisdictions, as well as his past sufferings, pointed him out as the most proper person to head an insurrection in that country. this must have been self-evident to the whole party; yet they do not seem to have been so cordial as might have been expected. Though Carstairs ceased not to press the object of his mission, he was put off from time to time till he was at length told by Shepherd, an eminent wine-merchant in London, who was one of the subaltern conspirators, that he had heard Sydney declare that he would have nothing to do with Argyle, being well aware that, whatever his present circumstances might prompt him to undertake, he was too strongly attached to the reigning family and to the present government, both in church and state, to unite cordially with them in the measures they had determined to pursue. At the same time, he was told both by Shepherd and Ferguson that the party were jealous of Sydney as driving a secret design of his own, and Ferguson took the opportunity to hint to Mr Carstairs, that there might be an easier method of attaining their point than by an open rebellion, as by taking the lives of at most two men, they might spare the lives of thousands, evidently, hinting at what must have been spoken of among the inferior members of this

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