High meanings in your mystic tracery;
Silent rebukings of day's garish dreams,
And warnings solemn as your own fair beams."
BOOKS BURNED BY THE COMMON HANGMAN.
(Vol. viii., p. 272.)
Your correspondent Balliolensis should remember that at the time Dr. Drake published his
Historia Anglo-Scotica, 1703, there were no bounds to the angry passions and jealousies evoked by the discussion of the projected union; consequently, what may appear to as in the present day an insufficient reason for the treatment the book met with in the northern metropolis, wore a very different aspect to the Scots, who, under the popular belief that they were to be sold to their enemies, saw every movement with distrust, and tortured everything said or written on this side the Tweed, upon the impending question, to discover an attack upon their national independence, their church, and their valour.
Looking at Dr. Drake's book, then, for the data upon which it was condemned, we find that it opens with a prefatory dedication to Sir E. Seymour, one of Queen Anne's Commissioners for the Union, and a high churchman, wherein the author distinctly ventures a blow at Presbytery when he says to his patron:
"The languishing oppressed Church of Scotland is not without hopes of finding in you hereafter the same successful champion and restorer that her sister of England has already experienced."