e single-minded and not unheroic Wilson, resolved to take
all possible precautions to insure the carrying out of the sentence of
the law. To do this the more effectively they ordered out nearly the
whole of their own city guard under the command of Captain Porteous,
and in doing so made one of the greatest mistakes recorded in their
annals.

Captain John Porteous was in his way and within his sphere a remarkable
man. He belonged to that large crew of daring, resolute, and
unscrupulous adventurers who, under happy conditions, become famous
free companions, are great in guerilla wars, make excellent explorers,
and even found colonies and lay the foundations of States, but who,
under less auspicious stars, are only a terror to the peaceable and an
example to the law-abiding. To the romancist, to the dramatist, the
character of such a man as John Porteous is intensely attractive; even
in the graver ways of history he claims the attention imperatively, and
stands forward with a decisive distinctness that lends to him an
importance beyond his deserts. {59} His life had been from the
beginning daring, desperate, and reckless. He was the son of a very
respectable Edinburgh citizen, who was also a very respectable tailor,
and whose harmless ambition it was to make the wild slip of his blood a
respectable tailor in his turn. Never was the saying "Like father,
like son" more astonishingly belied. Young John Porteous would have
nothing to do with the tailor's trade. He was dissipated, he was
devil-may-care; there was nothing better to be done with him than to
ship him abroad into the military service of some foreign State, the
facile resource in those days for getting rid of the turbulent and the
troublesome. John Porteous went into foreign service; he entered the
corps known as the Scotch-Dutch, in the pay of the States of Holland,
and plied the trade of arms.

Time went on, and in its course it brought John Porteous back to
Edinburgh. Here his military training served the city in good stead
during the Jacobite rising of 1715. He disciplined the city guard and
got his commission as its captain. But, if wanderings and foreign
service had turned the tailor's son into a stout soldier, they had in
no degree mended his morality or bettered his reputation. Edinburgh
citizenship has always been commended for keeping a strict eye to the
respectabilities, and the standard of public and private decorum was
held puritanically