overstate the ferocity of the High Flyers' conduct and creed. Thus
Wodrow, a witness not quite unfriendly to the rigid Presbyterians, though
not high-flying enough for Patrick Walker, writes "Mr. Tate informs me
that he had this account front Mr. Antony Shau, and others of the
Indulged; that at some time, under the Indulgence, there was a meeting of
some people, when they resolved in one night . . . to go to every house
of the Indulged Ministers and kill them, and all in one night."
This anecdote was confirmed by Mr. John Millar, to whose father's house
one of these High Flyers came, on this errand. This massacre was not
aimed at the persecutors, but at the Poundtexts. As to their creed,
Wodrow has an anecdote of one of his own elders, who told a poor woman
with many children that "it would be an uncouth mercy" if they were all
saved.

A pleasant evangel was this, and peacefully was it to have been
propagated!

Scott was writing a novel, not history. In "The Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border" (1802-3) Sir Walter gave this account of the
persecutions. "Had the system of coercion been continued until our day,
Blair and Robertson would have preached in the wilderness, and only
discovered their powers of eloquence and composition by rolling along a
deeper torrent of gloomy fanaticism. . . . The genius of the persecuted
became stubborn, obstinate, and ferocious." He did not, in his romance,
draw a complete picture of the whole persecution, but he did show, by
that insolence of Bothwell at Milnwood, which stirs the most sluggish
blood, how the people were misused. This scene, to Dr. McCrie's mind, is
"a mere farce," because it is enlivened by Manse's declamations. Scott
displays the abominable horrors of the torture as forcibly as literature
may dare to do. But Dr. McCrie is not satisfied, because Macbriar, the