Within the compass of 120 pages it was impossible for me to cover every event in this period. The "Forty-Five" itself would have provided enough material to fill a volume of double the size. I have therefore concentrated on the four events which seemed to me most important--namely, the Darien scheme, the Union of the Crowns, and the risings of 1715 and 1745. For the rest, I have endeavoured to illustrate, however briefly, the religious, social, and industrial activities of the time.
of zeal which betrayed the cause of it, the Duke of Hamilton demeaned himself to act the part of a clerk; reading, at the ordinary place of proclamation, the act of convention aloud to the mean multitude, who found even their own vanity hurt in the sacrifice which was made to it by the first man in the nation. With more dignity the parliament accompanied the offer of the crown with such a declaration of rights as laid open all the invasions upon the constitution, not of the late King alone, but of his brother, and ascertained every disputed pretension between the crown and the subject; for, accustomed either to trample upon their sovereigns, or to be trampled upon by them, the Scottish nation chose to leave nothing to be adjusted afterwards by the vibration between the executive and legislative powers, which had kept the English constitution almost continually in a just medium between the imperiousness of the crown and the licentiousness of the subject. The Earl of Argyle for the peers, Sir James Montgomery