Probably the best points made by Dr. McCrie are his proof that biblical
names were not common among the Covenanteers and that Episcopal eloquence
and Episcopal superstition were often as tardy and as dark as the
eloquence and superstition of the Presbyterians. He carries the war into
the opposite camp, with considerable success. His best answer to "Old
Mortality" would have been a novel, as good and on the whole as fair,
written from the Covenanting side. Hogg attempted this reply, not to
Scott's pleasure according to the Shepherd, in "The Brownie of Bodsbeck."
The Shepherd says that when Scott remarked that the "Brownie" gave an
untrue description of the age, he replied, "It's a devilish deal truer
than yours!" Scott, in his defence, says that to please the friends of
the Covenanters, "their portraits must be drawn without shadow, and the
objects of their political antipathy be blackened, hooved, and horned ere
they will acknowledge the likeness of either." He gives examples of
clemency, and even considerateness, in Dundee; for example, he did not
bring with him a prisoner, "who laboured under a disease rendering it
painful to him to be on horseback." He examines the story of John Brown,
and disproves the blacker circumstances. Yet he appears to hold that
Dundee should have resigned his commission rather than carry out the
orders of Government? Burley's character for ruthlessness is defended by
the evidence of the "Scottish Worthies." As Dr. McCrie objects to his
"buffoonery," it is odd that he palliates the "strong propensity" of Knox
"to indulge his vein of humour," when describing, with ghoul-like mirth,
the festive circumstances of the murder and burial of Cardinal Beaton.
The odious part of his satire, Scott says, is confined to "the fierce and
unreasonable set of extra-Presbyterians," Wodrow's High Flyers. "We have
no delight to dwell either upon the atrocities or absurdities of a people
whose ignorance and fanaticism were rendered frantic by persecution."
To sum up the controversy, we may say that Scott was unfair, if at all,