and as one of the honest chronicler's greatest favourites.
The unhappy disputes between the Resolutioners and Protesters were
running high at the time. Baillie was a Resolutioner, Sharpe a zealous
Resolutioner too; and Baillie, naturally unsuspicious, and biassed in
his behalf by that spirit of party which can darken the judgment of
even the most discerning, seems to have regarded him as peculiarly the
hope of the Church. He was indisputably one of its most dexterous
negotiators; and no man of the age made a higher profession of
religion. Burnet, who knew him well in his after character as
Archbishop of St. Andrews, tells us that never, save on one solitary
occasion, did he hear him make the slightest allusion to religion. But
in his letters to Baillie, almost every paragraph closes with the
aspirations of a well-simulated devotion. They seem as if strewed over
with the fragments of broken doxologies. The old man was, as we have
said, thoroughly deceived. He assures his continental correspondent,
Spang, that 'the great instrument of God to cross the evil designs of
the Protesters, was that _very worthy, pious, wise, and diligent young
man_, Mr. James Sharpe.' In some of his after epistles we learn that
he remembered him in his prayers, no doubt very sincerely, as, under
God, one of the mainstays of the Church. What first strikes the reader
in the character of Sharpe, as here exhibited, is his exclusively
diplomatic cast of talent. Baillie himself was a controversialist: he
wrote books to influence opinion, and delivered argumentative
speeches. He was a man of business too: he drew up remonstrances,
petitions, protests, and carried on the war of his party above-board.
All his better friends and correspondents, such as Douglas and
Dickson, were persons of a resembling cast. But Sharpe's vocation lay
in dealing with men in closets and window recesses: he could do
nothing until he had procured the private ear of the individual on
whom he wished to act. Is he desirous to influence the decisions of
the Supreme Civil Court in behalf of his party? He straightway
ingratiates himself with President Broghill, and the court becomes
more favourable in consequence. Is he wishful to propitiate the
English Government? He goes up to London, gets closeted with its more
influential members. It was this peculiar talent that pointed him out
to the Church as so fit a person to treat with Charles at Breda.

And it is when employed in this mi