doms, accustoming the leading minds of both to the idea of their identification.

Still, even then, there were considerations that might well have made many hesitate. The two populations, with all their proximity, and all their resemblances, were not homogeneous. Even in the matter of race, which is by no means the most important element in nationality, Scotland and England were different. The difference, so far as it admits of being stated, was that, while both nations were of mixed Gothic and Celtic parentage, Scotland had drawn chiefly from the Scandinavian variety of the Gothic and the Gaelic variety of the Celtic, England more from the Saxon variety of the one, and the Cymric or British variety of the other. On this difference, paltry enough in itself, and not likely to be much thought of, the separate histories of a thousand years had piled many others far more substantial, and far more eagerly taken into account. Scotland was a poorer country than England, calling twenty pence a pound, and feeding the bony frames of her sons over her barren and hilly surface with oatmeal as their staple diet; while in the rich and fertile flats of the south, the plumper Englishman had already raised the pound to twenty shillings, and the standard of what was necessary for existence to wheat-bread and bacon. This difference would tell adversely on one side, though it might be a reason for union on the other. The two countries, however, differed not only in degree of wealth and in style of living, but also in all the solid constituents of nationality,in traditions, laws, customs, institutions, and acquired modes of thinking. The past on which an Englishman looked back, reaching to the times of Edward the Confessor, was totally different in all its main features from that narrower and fiercer vista of recollections which carried a Scotchman to the old times of the Gaelic Kenneths and Malcolms. The rights and liberties which the smaller and more savage community of the north had gathered into its national statute-book, were a far rougher bequest from antiquity than the broad though confused system of law and precedent under which Englishmen lived. The habits and humours of Scottish daily life would have been all unintelligible to the more sluggish and more cleanly Englishman. The constitution of the Scottish Parliament, and, indeed, the whole mechanism of Scottish government, were much nearer to the French than to the English type. Most important of all, the ecclesiastical forms and institutions of the two countries were different. Both originally Roman Catholic, they had since the sixteenth century diverged theologically and ecclesiastically in a most extraordinary manner. In England there had arisen, under the auspices of Henry VIII. and Cranmer, an eclectic

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theology and an eclectic ritual, devised on the express principle of the easiest possible adaptation of the general European Reformation to the medley of Anglican circumstances; and these had been vested in a national church organized on the Episcopalian or hierarchical theory. In Scotland, on the other hand, Calvinistic theology, the theology of a rigid logic, to which clime and circumstance were indifferent, had been worked by a far more vehement process into the very blood and brain of the people; and, as the external accompaniment of this theology, there had been set up by Knox and his coadjutors a church on the Presbyterian model, administered not by bishops, but by democratic assemblies of mixed clergymen and laymen. The effect of this ecclesiastical divergence in still farther differencing the two nations from each other had been immense. Always a more fervid, emphatic, opinionative, and speculative being than the Englishman, if of less rich, full, and generous a nature, the Scotchman felt these differences from his neighbour greatly increased after he had embraced Presbyterianism, and especially after he had learned to fight for it. In short, to have sprung from the same or nearly the same stock, and within the limits of the same island, there could hardly have been two types of character intellectually and morally more dissimilar than the Scotchman and Englishman of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Moreover, (and this is very important,) a considerable element in the character of each nation consisted in the idea it had formed of itself in reference to the other. The nature of an Englishman's patriotic thoughts of his noble land, even in the earlier days of Catholicism, may be gathered from Shakespeare's splendid expression of them in Richard II. :

"This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-Paradise;
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection, and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Feared by their breed, and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home

'As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry."

Observe in this magnificent passage the positive character of

the Englishman's patriotism. He quietly assumes the whole island as constituting his England; the real relations of this country being to the Continent of Europe, and the little territory in the north being hardly worth counting in any general estimate of the national activity. It was only at special moments that Scotland occurred to the Englishman's thoughts, and then only as something compelling itself to be thought of by its power of interfering with his other enterprises. Thus, in Henry V., when that monarch is preparing for his war with France, the Scot occurs to him after the following fashion:

"The Scot,

Who hath been still a giddy neighbour to us;
For you shall read that my great grandfather
Never went with his forces into France,
But that the Scot on his unfurnished kingdom
Came pouring like the tide into a breach
With ample and brim fulness of his force,
Galling the gleaned land with hot essays,
Girding with grievous siege castles and towns,
That England, being empty of defence,

Hath shook and trembled at the ill neighbourhood."

Lord Westmoreland, another of the colloquists, is even less complimentary in his style of reference to Scotland.

"There is a saying very old and true,

"If that you will France win,

Then with Scotland first begin;'

For, once the eagle England being in prey,
To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot
Comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs,
Playing the mouse in absence of the cat,

To spoil and havoc more than she can eat."

There can be no doubt that these passages express the general feeling in those times of Englishmen as such towards Scotland. Very different was the feeling of Scotchmen respecting their own country and its relations to England. The patriotism of Scotchmen was, as we all know, quite as intense as that of Englishmen, if, indeed, it was not much more so. The famous lines of Scott apostrophizing his native land, the "land of brown heath and shaggy wood," were but the expression of a feeling hereditary for ages in the Scottish national heart. But if these lines, or any similar lines from Burns or any other Scottish poet, are compared with the corresponding passages from Shakespeare, a great difference will be perceived between the patriotism of the Scotchman and that of the Englishman. The chief point of difference is, that in Scottish patriotism reference to England is a much larger element than reference to Scotland is in the patriotism of

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the English. A small country with but few relationships to the rest of the world, the whole or almost the whole activity of Scotland as a nation had consisted in resistance to the superior force of her co-insular neighbour. To have fought and beaten back the Englishman was the one great fact in Scottish history anterior to the Reformation, and it was ever present in the thoughts of Scotchmen respecting their own nationality. In short, antiEnglish feeling was a much larger ingredient in the patriotism of the Scotch, than anti-Scottish feeling was in that of the English. Even at the present day the Scotchman, so long as he remains in Great Britain, carries about with him the perpetual consciousness, "I am not an Englishman;" whereas the corresponding thought, "I am not a Scotchman," can only by a rare combination of circumstances be made to occur to the English

man.

The Reformation, and the union of the crowns, somewhat modified this style of mutual recognition between the two countries. From that time the "weasel Scot" became a more considerable animal in the eyes of Englishmen than he had been before. The English Puritans came even to regard him with envy and respect, and to take lessons from him in theology and church-government. On the other hand, the Englishman appeared in new lights to the Scotchman. He was no longer thought of only as a powerful foe menacing the national independence of Scotland; he was thought of also as a Prelatist, an Erastian, the member of a lax and half-emancipated Church. The dastardly efforts of the Stuarts, after their removal to England, to extinguish the Presbyterianism of the land of their birth, complicated and exasperated this feeling of ecclesiastical dissension between the two countries. Persecuted and harassed by that Prelacy of which they regarded England as the seat, the Scottish Presbyterians raised the Standard of the Covenant; and in the struggle which ensued they adhered with such pertinacity to their own ecclesiastical and political tenets, as not only to widen their abhorrence from English prelacy, but also to separate themselves from those forms of Puritanism which divided with prelacy the allegiance of the English people. Add to this, that the growing intercourse between the two countries, consequent upon the union of the crowns, and the political convulsions which agitated both countries alike in the seventeenth century, had begun to produce that style of mutual portraiture of the individual Scotchman by the English, and of the individual Englishman by the Scotch, which still survives in our literature. The Scotchman was represented by English caricaturists as a hungry, greedy, cautious, treacherous, dogmatic, sycophantic creature, with a constitutional tendency southwards, and an eye

always to the main chance; the Englishman, on the other hand, figured in all Scotch allusions to him as a bluff stolid beef-eater, whose one thought was his dinner.

The lull which followed the Revolution of 1688 considerably abated the strength of these differences, and the fervour of these animosities. Both countries had entered on a career of peaceful industry and commerce in the enjoyment of a policy of toleration, which did much to reduce to a common level the heights of sentiment in each. Still the two communities remained essentially heterogeneous in a great variety of respects, with diverse interests, diverse tendencies, diverse institutions, and the elements of old feud smouldering underneath their show of reciprocal attachment. There could hardly, in fact, have been a more difficult problem than that which devolved upon the two Commissions-the one consisting of thirty-one Englishmen, the other of thirty-one Scotchmen-who, in 1706, were appointed by the Crown to go through the preliminary labour of discussing and settling the terms on which these two nations, the one of six millions of souls, the other of less than one million, would consent to unite themselves into one body-politic. Mr. Burton thus describes the difficulty of the problem :

"Small communities, thrown together in natural clusters, had, in primitive states of society, been known to come together by a sort of natural cohesion, like the Amphyctionies of Greece, the Swiss cantons, and, it may be said, the Saxon communities of England. Among full-grown European states, unions and fusions had been brought about by conquest, absorption, and the various natural operations by which communities, destitute of civil liberty, or not embued with strong feelings of nationality, become amalgamated. But two nations uniting together by a boud of partnership, representing a common consent, was a new event in political history. If those continental nations which had been for centuries accustomed to see annexations, partitions, and the enlargement of empires, by marriage and succession, had been told how many different parties and interests it was necessary to bring to one set of conclusions before the desired end could be accomplished, they would have deemed the project utterly insane; as, indeed, it would have been, if laid before two nations less endowed with practical sense and business habits. Had it been a consolidation of two arbitrary governments, the more powerful would have dictated and the other obeyed. At all events, however nearly the two powers might have approached to an equality, all would have been privately arranged in official cabinets, and the people would have been made acquainted with the terms of union only by seeing them gradually developed in the new arrangements of the joint government. In the union, however, of two constitutional states, each sensitively jealous in its own peculiar way, nothing beyond the initial steps could safely be kept secret. The whole complex operation of arrangement had to