rresponding from time to time
with Cromwell and his officers, and with Charles and his courtiers, both
about public and private affairs. Brodie was one of the ablest men of
his day in Scotland, and he should have stood in the very front rank of
her statesmen and her saints; but, as it is, he falls very far short of
that. We search the signatures of the National Covenant in vain for the
name of Alexander Brodie, and the absence of his name from that noble
roll is already an ill-omen for his future life. David Laing, in his
excellent preface to Brodie's _Diary_, is good enough to set down the
absence of Brodie's name from the Covenant to his youth and retired
habits. I wish I could take his editor's lenient view of Brodie's
absence from Greyfriars church on the testing day of the Covenant. It
would be an immense relief to me if I could persuade myself to look at
Brodie in that matter with Mr. Laing's eyes. I have tried hard to do so,
but I cannot. Far younger men than the laird of Brodie were in the
Greyfriars churchyard that day, and far more modest men than he was. And
I cannot shut my eyes to what appears to me, after carefully studying his
life and his character, a far likelier if a far less creditable reason.
After the Restoration Brodie's life, if life it could be called, was
spent in a constant terror lest he should lose his estates, his liberty,
and his life in the prelatic persecution; but, with his sleepless
management of men, if not with the blessing of God and the peace of a
good conscience, Alexander Brodie died in his own bed, in Brodie Castle,
on the 17th of April, 1680.

There were some things in which Alexander Brodie ran well, to employ the
apostle's expression; in some things, indeed, no man of his day ran
better. To begin with, Brodie had an excellent intellect. If he did not
always run well it was not for want of a sound head or a sharp eye. In
reading Brodie's diary you all along feel that you are under the hand of
a very able man, and a man who all his days does excellent justice to his
excellent mind, at least on its intellectual side. The books he enters
as having read on such and such a date, the catalogues of books he buys
on his visits to Edinburgh and London, and the high planes of thought on
which his mind dwells when he is at his best, all bespeak a very able man
doing full justice to his great ability. The very examinations he puts
himself under as to his motives and mainsprings