in producing this feeling as any
other.

English churchmen boasted that with any such Union would come the
restoration of Episcopacy north of the Tweed, and the abolition of the
Church of Scotland. The latter retaliated by pushing an Act of Security
through the Scottish Legislature, which demanded an oath to support the
Presbyterian Church in its integrity from every sovereign on his
accession. The Scottish Whigs and the Scottish Jacobites, despite
political differences wide as the poles, joined hands in resistance to
what they considered the funeral obsequies of Scottish nationality. For
a time the horizon looked so lowering that preparations actually were
begun in Scotland to accumulate munitions of war.

But the genius, the patience, and withal the firmness, of Lord Somers,
the great Whig Richelieu of his time, gradually overcame all
difficulties, though he was reduced to wholesale bribery of the Scottish
peers to effect his end. As Green puts it: 'The Scotch proposals of a
federative rather than a legislative Union were set aside by his
firmness: the commercial jealousies of the English traders were put by;
and the Act of Union, as finally passed in 1707, provided that the two
Kingdoms should be united into one under the name of Great Britain, and
that the succession to the crown of this United Kingdom should be ruled
by the provisions of the English Act of Settlement. The Scotch Church
and the Scotch Law were left untouched, but all rights of trade were
thrown open, and a uniform system of coinage adopted.'

Of all the negotiations for the consummation of the Union, Ramsay,
doubtless, was an interested spectator. Patriotic to his heart's core,
and sympathising as a Jacobite with the chivalrous feeling of his nation
for the dynasty they had given to England, and which, after only
eighty-six years of alternate loyalty and revolt, the Southrons had
driven into exile, the keenly observant lad would follow every detail in
the closing chapter of Scotland's history as an independent nation, with
a pathetic and sorrowful interest. Undoubtedly, while yet an apprentice,
with a few months of his time unexpired, he must have watched the last
observance of that ancient and picturesque spectacle, annually
recurring, but now to be abolished for ever--the 'Riding of the
Parliament,' or the procession of members to the opening of the sittings
in the old Parliament House. Perhaps he may even have secretly gained
admission to ove