will find fault with me for."[2]

It would be as foolish to take these witnesses too literally, as it is
foolish to call Claverhouse a blockhead because he could not spell
correctly. For many years after his death men of position and abilities
far more distinguished and acknowledged than his, were not ashamed to
spell with a recklessness that would inevitably now entail on any
fourth-form boy the last penalty of academic law. Scott says that
Claverhouse spelled like a chambermaid; and Macaulay has compared the
handwriting of the period to the handwriting of washerwomen. The
relative force of these comparisons others may determine, but it is
certain that in this respect at least Claverhouse sinned in good
company. The letters of even such men as the Lord Advocate, Sir George
Mackenzie, and the Dalrymples,--letters written in circumstances more
favourable to composition than the despatches of a soldier are ever
likely to be--are every whit as capricious and startling in their
variations from the received standard of orthography. If it is
impossible quite to agree with his staunch eulogist, Drummond of
Bahaldy, that Claverhouse was "much master in the epistolary way of
writing," at least his letters are plain and to the purpose; and the
letters of a soldier have need to be no more.

It is, of course, unlikely that he could have been, even for those days,
a cultivated man. The studies of youth are but the preparation for the
culture of manhood; and after his three quiet years at Saint Andrews
were done, his leisure for study must have been scant indeed. But all we
know of his character, temperament, and habits of life forbid the
supposition that he wasted that precious time either in idleness or
indulgence. His bitterest enemies have borne witness to his singular
freedom from those vices which his age regarded more as the
characteristics than the failings of a gentleman. The most scurrilous of
the many scurrilous chroniclers of the Covenanters' wrongs has owned in
a characteristic passage that his life was uniformly clean.[3] Gifted by
nature with quick parts, of dauntless ambition and untiring energy both
of mind and body, he was not the man to have let slip in idleness any
chance of fortifying himself for the great struggle of life, or to have
neglected studies which might be useful to him in the future because
they happened to be irksome in the present. It is only, therefore, in
reason to suppose that he managed his tim