difficulties and trials than in cleansing myself from the old
habitudes of office. For I must in verity confess, that I myself
partook, in a degree, at my beginning, of the caterpillar nature;
and it was not until the light of happier days called forth the
wings of my endowment, that I became conscious of being raised into
public life for a better purpose than to prey upon the leaves and
flourishes of the commonwealth. So that, if I have seemed to speak
lightly of those doings that are now denominated corruptions, I hope
it was discerned therein that I did so rather to intimate that such
things were, than to consider them as in themselves commendable.
Indeed, in their notations, I have endeavoured, in a manner, to be
governed by the spirit of the times in which the transactions
happened; for I have lived long enough to remark, that if we judge
of past events by present motives, and do not try to enter into the
spirit of the age when they took place, and to see them with the
eyes with which they were really seen, we shall conceit many things
to be of a bad and wicked character that were not thought so harshly
of by those who witnessed them, nor even by those who, perhaps,
suffered from them. While, therefore, I think it has been of a
great advantage to the public to have survived that method of
administration in which the like of Bailie M'Lucre was engendered, I
would not have it understood that I think the men who held the
public trusts in those days a whit less honest than the men of my
own time. The spirit of their own age was upon them, as that of
ours is upon us, and their ways of working the wherry entered more
or less into all their trafficking, whether for the commonality, or
for their own particular behoof and advantage.

I have been thus large and frank in my reflections anent the death
of the bailie, because, poor man, he had outlived the times for