A bill was prepared and brought into Parliament for the punishment of the city of Edinburgh, in a very vindictive spirit, proposing to abolish the city charter, demolish the city walls, take away the town-guard, and declare the provost incapable of holding any office of public trust. A long investigation took place on the occasion, in which many persons were examined at the bar of the House of Lords, without throwing the least light on the subject of the Porteous Mob, or the character of the persons by whom it was conducted. The penal conclusions of the bill were strenuously combated by the Duke of Argyle, Duncan Forbes, and others, who represented the injustice of punishing with dishonour the capital of Scotland for the insolence of a lawless mob, which, taking advantage of a mo ment of security, had committed a great breach of the peace, attended with a cruel murder. As men's minds cooled, the obnoxious clauses were dropped

leave of your Majesty, and go down to my own country to get my hounds ready.' The import of the reply had more than met the ear."-Heart of Mid-Lothian.]

["Abolish the city-guard-rather a Hibernian mode of enabling them better to keep the peace within burgh in future." "The Lord Provost was ex officio commander and colonel of this corps, which might be increased to 300 men when the times required it. No other drum but theirs was allowed to sound on the High Street, between the Luckenbooths and the Netherbow. This ancient corps is now [in 1817] entirely disbanded. Their last march to do duty at Hallow Fair, had something in it affecting. Their drums and fifes had been wont, on better days, to play on this joyous occasion, the lively tune of Jockey to the Fair; but on this final occasion, the afflicted veterans moved slowly to the dirge of The Last Time I came ower the Muir.'"-Notes, Heart of Mid-Lothian.]

out of the bill, and at length its penal consequences were restricted to a fine of L.2000 sterling on the city, to be paid for the use of Captain Porteous's widow. This person, having received other favours from the town, accepted of L.1500 in full of the fine; and so ended the affair, so far as the city of Edinburgh was concerned.

But, as if some fatality had attended the subject, a clause was thrown in, compelling the ministers of the Scottish church to read a proclamation from the pulpit, once every month during the space of a whole year, calling on the congregation to do all in their power for discovering and bringing to justice the murderers of Captain Porteous, or any of them, and noticing the reward which Government had promised to such as should bring the malefactors to conviction. Many of the Scottish clergy resented this imposition, as indecorously rendering the pulpit a vehicle for a hue and cry, and still more as an attempt, on the part of the state, to interfere with the spiritual authorities of the kirk, which amounted, in their opinion, to an Erastian heresy. Neither was it held to be matter of indifference, that in reading the proclamation of the Legislature, the clergymen were compelled to describe the bishops as the "Lords Spiritual in Parliament assembled ;" an epithet seemingly acknowledging the legality and the rank of an order disavowed by all true Calvinists. The dispute was the more violent, as it was immediately subsequent to a schism in the church, on the fruitful subject of patronage, which had divided from the

communion of the Established Church of Scotland that large class of dissenters, generally called Seceders. Much ill blood was excited, and great dissensions took place betwixt those clergymen who did, and those who did not, read the proclation. This controversy, like others, had its hour, during which little else was spoken of, until in due time the subject was worn threadbare and forgotten.

The origin of the Porteous Mob continued long to exercise the curiosity of those by whom the event was remembered, and from the extraordinary mixture of prudence and audacity with which the purpose of the multitude had been conceived and executed, as well as the impenetrable secrecy with which the enterprise was carried through, the public were much inclined to suspect that there had been among its actors men of rank and character, far superior to that belonging to the multitude who were the ostensible agents. Broken and imperfect stories were told of men in the disguise of women and of common artisans, whose manner betrayed a sex and manners different from what their garb announced.1 Others laughed at these as unauthorized exaggerations, and contended that no class were so likely to frame or execute the plan for the murder of the police officer, as the populace to whom his official proceedings had rendered him obnoxious, and that

["The clothes which appeared under their different disguises, as well as the conduct and deliberation with which their plan was executed, bespoke many among them to be superior to the vulgar; and that the violence they committed proceeded not from the rash and unpremeditated concert of a rabble."- -ARNOT. p. 207.]

the secrecy so wonderfully preserved on the occasion arose out of the constancy and fidelity which the Scottish people observe towards each other when engaged in a common cause. Nothing is, or probably ever will be, known with certainty on the subject; but it is understood, that several young men left Scotland in apprehension of the strict scrutiny which was made into that night's proceedings; and in your grandfather's younger days, the voice of fame pointed out individuals, who, long absent from that country, had returned from the East and West Indies in improved circumstances, as persons who had fled abroad on account of the Porteous Mob. One story of the origin of the conspiracy was stated to me with so much authority, and seemed in itself so simple and satisfactory that although the degree of proof, upon investiga tion, fell far short of what was necessary as full evidence, I cannot help considering it as the most probable account of the mysterious affair. A man, who long bore an excellent character, and filled a place of some trust as forester and carpenter to a gentleman of fortune in Fife, was affirmed to have made a confession on his death-bed, that he had been not only one of the actors in the hanging of Porteous, but one of the secret few by whom the deed was schemed and set on foot. Twelve persons of the village of Path-head-so this man's narrative was said to proceed-resolved that Porteous should die, to atone for the life of Wilson, with whom many of them had been connected by the ties of friendship and joint adventure in illicit trade, and

for the death of those shot at the execution. This vengeful band crossed the Forth by different ferries, and met together at a solitary place near the city, where they distributed the party which were to act in the business which they had in hand; and giving a beginning to the enterprise, soon saw it undertaken by the populace of the city, whose minds were precisely in that state of irritability which disposed them to follow the example of a few desperate men. According to this account, most of the original devisers of the scheme fled to foreign parts, the surprise of the usual authorities having occasioned some days to pass over ere the investigations of the affair were commenced. On making enquiry of the surviving family of this old man, they were found disposed to treat the rumoured confession as a fiction, and to allege that although he was of an age which seemed to support the story, and had gone abroad shortly after the Porteous Mob, yet he had never acknowledged any accession to it, but on the contrary, maintained his innocence when taxed, as he sometimes was, with having a concern in the affair. The report, how

ever, though probably untrue in many of its circumstances, yet seems to give a very probable account of the origin of the riot in the vindictive purpose of a few resolute men, whose example was quickly followed by the multitude, already in a state of mind to catch fire from the slightest spark.

This extraordinary and mysterious outrage seems to be the only circumstance which can be interesting to you, as exclusively belonging to the history