d editor, which
serves as a clue to guide the reader through the mazes of the
correspondence, we learn that he died three months after.

Where there is so much that is interesting, one finds it difficult to
select. The light in which the infamous Sharpe is presented in this
volume is at least curious. Prelacy, careful of the reputation of her
archbishops, makes a great deal indeed of the bloody death of the man,
but says as little as possible regarding his life and character. The
sentimental Jacobitism of the present day--an imaginative principle
that feeds on novels, and admires the persecutors because Claverhouse
was brave and had an elegant upper lip--goes a little further, and
speaks of him as the venerable Archbishop. When the famous picture of
his assassination was exhibiting in Edinburgh, some ten or twelve
years ago, he rose with the class almost to the dignity of a martyr:
there were young ladies that could scarce look at the piece without
using their handkerchiefs; the victim was old, greyhaired, reverend,
an archbishop, and eminently saintly, as a matter of course, whatever
the barbarous fanatics might say; and all that his figure seemed to
want in order to make it complete, was just a halo of yellow ochre
round the head. In Baillie's _Letters_ we see him exhibited, though
all unwittingly on the part of the writer, in his true character, and
find that the yellow ochre would be considerably out of place. Rarely,
indeed, does nature, all lost and fallen as it is, produce so
consummate a scoundrel. Treachery seems to have existed as so
uncontrollable an instinct in the man, that, like the appropriating
faculty of the thief, who amused himself by picking the pocket of the
clergyman who conducted him to the scaffold, it seems to have been
incapable of lying still. He appears never to have had a friend who
did not learn to detest and denounce him: his Presbyterian friends,
whom he deceived and betrayed, did so in the first instance; his
Episcopalian friends, whom he at least strove to deceive and betray,
did so in the second. We are assured by Burnet, that even Charles, a
monarch certainly not over-nice in the moral sense, declared James
Sharpe to be one of the worst of men. His life was a continuous lie;
and he has left more proofs of the fact in the form of letters under
his own hand, than perhaps any other bad man that ever lived.

In Baillie he makes his first appearance as the Presbyterian minister
of Crail,