.

The battle now raged immediately in front of the closes leading to the
Black Bull; the small body of Whig gentlemen was hardly bested, and it
is likely would have been overcome and trampled down every man, had
they not been then and there joined by the young Cavaliers; who, fresh
to arms, broke from the wynd, opened the head of the passage, laid
about them manfully, and thus kept up the spirits of the exasperated
Whigs, who were the men in fact that wrought the most deray among the
populace.

The town-guard was now on the alert; and two companies of the
Cameronian Regiment, with the Hon. Captain Douglas, rushed down from
the Castle to the scene of action; but, for all the noise and hubbub
that these caused in the street, the combat had become so close and
inveterate that numbers of both sides were taken prisoners fighting
hand to hand, and could scarcely be separated when the guardsmen and
soldiers had them by the necks.

Great was the alarm and confusion that night in Edinburgh; for everyone
concluded that it was a party scuffle, and, the two parties being so
equal in power, the most serious consequences were anticipated. The
agitation was so prevailing that every party in town, great and small,
was broken up; and the lord-commissioner thought proper to go to the
Council Chamber himself, even at that late hour, accompanied by the
sheriffs of Edinburgh and Linlithgow, with sundry noblemen besides, in
order to learn something of the origin of the affray.

For a long time the court was completely puzzled. Every gentleman
brought in exclaimed against the treatment he had received, in most
bitter terms, blaming a mob set on him and his friends by the adverse
party, and matters looked extremely ill until at length they began to
perceive that they were examining gentlemen of both parties, and that
they had been doing so from the beginning, almost alternately, so
equally had the prisoners been taken from both parties. Finally, it
turned out that a few gentlemen, two-thirds of whom were strenuous
Whigs themselves, had joined in mauling the whole Whig population of
Edinburgh. The investigation disclosed nothing the effect of which was
not ludicrous; and the Duke of Queensberry, whose aim was at that time
to conciliate the two factions, tried all that he could to turn the
whole fracas into a joke--an unlucky frolic, where no ill was meant on
either side, and which yet had been productive of a great deal.

The greater par