rs, were languishing and must soon
perish. The booksellers had been half ruined: they found that the whole
profit of their business would not pay the rent of their shops, and were
preparing to emigrate to some country where letters were held in esteem
by those whose office was to instruct the public. Among the ministers
of religion no purchaser of books was left. The Episcopalian divine was
glad to sell for a morsel of bread whatever part of his library had
not been torn to pieces or burned by the Christmas mobs; and the only
library of a Presbyterian divine consisted of an explanation of the
Apocalypse and a commentary on the Song of Songs, [782] The pulpit
oratory of the triumphant party was an inexhaustible subject of mirth.
One little volume, entitled The Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed,
had an immense success in the South among both High Churchmen and
scoffers, and is not yet quite forgotten. It was indeed a book well
fitted to lie on the hall table of a Squire whose religion consisted in
hating extemporaneous prayer and nasal psalmody. On a rainy day, when
it was impossible to hunt or shoot, neither the card table nor the
backgammon board would have been, in the intervals of the flagon and the
pasty, so agreeable a resource. Nowhere else, perhaps, can be found, in
so small a compass, so large a collection of ludicrous quotations and
anecdotes. Some grave men, however, who bore no love to the Calvinistic
doctrine or discipline, shook their heads over this lively jest book,
and hinted their opinion that the writer, while holding up to derision
the absurd rhetoric by which coarseminded and ignorant men tried to
illustrate dark questions of theology and to excite devotional feeling
among the populace, had sometimes forgotten the reverence due to sacred
things. The effect which tracts of this sort produced on the public mind
of England could not be fully discerned, while England and Scotland were
independent of each other, but manifested itself, very soon after the
union of the kingdoms, in a way which we still have reason, and which
our posterity will probably long have reason to lament.

The extreme Presbyterians were as much out of humour as the extreme
Prelatists, and were as little inclined as the extreme Prelatists to
take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary. Indeed, though the
Jacobite nonjuror and the Cameronian nonjuror were diametrically opposed
to each other in opinion, though they regarded eac