"Old Mortality" his fancy had to wander among the relics of another age,
among the inscribed tombs of the Covenanters, which are common in the
West Country, as in the churchyards of Balmaclellan and Dalry. There the
dust of these enduring and courageous men, like that of Bessie Bell and
Marion Gray in the ballad, "beiks forenenst the sun," which shines on
them from beyond the hills of their wanderings, while the brown waters of
the Ken murmur at their feet.

Here now in peace sweet rest we take,
Once murdered for religion's sake,

says the epitaph on the flat table-stone, beneath the wind tormented
trees of Iron Gray. Concerning these _Manes Presbyteriani_, "Guthrie's
and Giffan's Passions" and the rest, Scott had a library of rare volumes
full of prophecies, "remarkable Providences," angelic ministrations,
diabolical persecutions by The Accuser of the Brethren,--in fact, all
that Covenanteers had written or that had been written about
Covenanteers. "I'll tickle ye off a Covenanter as readily as old Jack
could do a young Prince; and a rare fellow he is, when brought forth in
his true colours," he says to Terry (November 12, 1816). He certainly was
not an unprejudiced witness, some ten years earlier, when he wrote to
Southey, "You can hardly conceive the perfidy, cruelty, and stupidity of
these people, according to the accounts they have themselves preserved.
But I admit I had many prejudices instilled into me, as my ancestor was a
Killiecrankie man." He used to tease Grahame of "The Sabbath," "but never
out of his good humour, by praising Dundee, and laughing at the
Covenanters." Even as a boy he had been familiar with that godly company
in "the original edition of the lives of Cameron and others, by Patrick
Walker." The more curious parts of those biographies were excised by the
care of later editors, but they may all be found now in the "Biographia