of such other Scots as
the English saw fit to favour, Incidents of this kind, much noted at
the time, had been the ejection of some Professors from the
Universities by the English Visitors in 1653, and the appointments
by the same visitors of men of their own choice to University
posts--e.g. Mr. Robert Leighton, minister of Newbattle, to the
Principalship of Edinburgh University, and Mr. Patrick Gillespie to
that of the University of Glasgow. But even Baillie, whose complaints
on such grounds had been bitter in 1654, and to whom the appointment
of Gillespie to the Glasgow Principal-ship had been a particular
private grievance, was in better spirits before 1656. Glasgow, he
then reports, was flourishing. "Through God's mercy, our town, in its
proportion, thrives above all the land. The Word of God is well loved
and regarded; albeit not as it ought and we desire, yet in no town of
our land better. Our people has much more trade in comparison than
any other: their buildings increase strangely both for number and
fairness." Burnet's account is that the whole country partook of this
growing prosperity, which he attributes to the excellent police of
the English, the trading they introduced, and the money they put in
circulation. "A man may ride over all Scotland with a switch in his
hand and a hundred pounds in his pocket, which he could not have done
these five hundred years," was Mr. Samuel Desborough's summary
account afterwards of the state of the country which he had helped to
administer under the Protectorate; and Cromwell's own reference to
the subject is even more interesting and precise. Acknowledging that
the Scots had suffered much, and were in fact "a very ruined nation,"
yet what had befallen them had introduced, he hinted, a very
desirable change in the constitution of Scottish society. It had
enfranchised and encouraged the middle and lower classes. "The
_meaner_ sort in Scotland," he said, "love us well, and are
likely to come into as thriving a condition as when they were under
their own great lords, who made them work for their living no better
than the peasants of France;" and "The _middle_ sort of people,"
he added, "do grow up there into such a substance as makes their
lives comfortable, if not better than they were before." Of course,
in neither of these classes, any more than from among the
dispossessed nobles and lairds, can the sentiment of Scottish
nationality and the pain of its abolition have been