WILLIAM AND MAItY.

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Dundee 'with deadly hatred, and was believed to be meditating chap.some act of violence. * - 1C8!I ~

On the fifteenth of March Dundee received information thatsome of the Covenanters had bound themselves together to slayhim and Sir George Mackenzie, whose eloquence and learning,long prostituted to the service of tyranny, had made him moreodious to the Presbyterians than any other man of the gown.Dundee applied to Hamilton for protection; and Hamilton ad-vised him to bring the matter under the consideration of theConvention at the next sitting.**

Before that sitting, a person named Crane arrived from^eucrFrance, with a letter addressed by the fugitive ICinar to the James to

, , , * , D ° the Con-

Estates. ihe letter was sealed: the bearer, strange to say, mention,was not furnished with a copy for the information of the headsof the Jacobite party; nor did he bring any message, writtenor verbal, to either of James’s agents. Balcarras and Dundeewere mortified by finding that so little confidence was reposedin them, and were harassed by painful doubts touching the

* See Cleland’s Poems, and the commendatory poems contained inthe same volume, Edinburgh, 1697. It has been repeatedly asserted thatthis William Cleland was the father of William Cleland, the Commissionerof Taxes, who was well known twenty years later in the literary society ofLondon, who rendered some not very reputablo services to Pope, andwhose son John was the author of an infamous book but too widelycelebrated. This is an entire mistake. William Cleland, who fought atBothwell Bridge, was not twenty eight when he was killed in August, 1689;and William Cleland, the Commissioner of Taxes, died at sixty seven inSeptember, 3741. The former therefore cannot have been the father of thelatter. See the Exact Narrative of the Battle of Dunkeld; the Gentleman’sMagazine for 1740; and Warburton’s note on the Letter to the Publisherof the Dunciad, a letter signed W. Cleland, but really written by Pope. Ina paper drawn up by Sir Robert Hamilton, the oracle of the extremeCovenanters, and a bloodthirsty ruffian, Cleland is mentioned as havingbeen once leagued with those fanatics, but afterwards a great opposer oftheir testimony. Cleland probably did not agree with Hamilton in thinkingit a sacred duty to cut the throats of prisoners of war who had beenreceived to quarter. See Hamilton’s Letter to the Societies, Dec. 7. 1685.

* Balcarras’s Memoirs.

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