innumerable evils have we been freed, under the help of that God who woundeth and maketh whole, by our most valiant prince and king, Lord Robert, who, like a second. Maccabeus or Joshua, hath cheerfully endured all labour and weariness, and exposed himself to every species of danger and privation, that he might rescue from the hands of the enemy his ancient people and rightful inheritance; him, Divine Providence, and the right of succession, according to those laws and customs which we will maintain to the death, as well as the common consent of us all, have made our prince and king. To him are we bound, both by his own merit and by the law of the land, and to him as the saviour of our people, and the guardian of our liberty, are we determined to adhere.

"But if he should desist from what he has begun, and should show an inclination to subject us, or our kingdom, to the king of England, or to his people, then we declare that we will use our utmost effort to expel him from the throne as our enemy, and the subverter of his own and of our right, and we will chuse another king to reign over us, who will be able to defend us. For as long as a hundred will never be subject to the

Scotsmen are left alive, we dominion of England. It is not for glory, riches, or honour, that we fight, but for that liberty, which no good man will consent to lose but with his life.

Wherefore, most reverend father, we humbly pray, and from our hearts beseech your Holiness to consider that you are the vicegerent of Him, with whom there is no respect of persons, Jews or Greeks, Scots or English; and, turning your paternal regard upon the tribulations brought upon us

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and upon the Church of God by the English, to admonish the king of England that he should be content with what he possesses, seeing that England of old was enough for seven, or more, kings, and not to disturb our peace in this small country, lying on the utmost boundaries of the habitable earth, and whose inhabitants desire nothing but what is their own

"If your Holiness do not sincerely believe these things, giving too implicit faith to the tales of the English, and, on this ground, shall not cease to favour them in their design for our destruction, be well assured that the Almighty will impute to you that loss of life, that destruction of human souls, and all those various calamities, which our inextinguishable hatred against the English, and their warfare against us, must necessarily produce.

"Confident that we now are, and shall ever, as in duty bound, remain obedient sons to you as God's vicegerent, we commit the defence of our cause to that God, as the great King and Judge, placing our confidence in Him, and in the firm hope that He will endow us with strength, and confound our enemies; and may the Almighty long preserve your Holiness in health."

And so in this Abbey near the sea, with no thought of infallible judgment, but solemnly reminding the pope of the sin which may lie at his door, the little land casts its sorrows with all humility before him,-"this small country, lying on the utmost boundaries of the habitable earth.”

Pope John Twenty-Second was a poor umpire to go to in such extremity. Pope John, busied and concerned with

the rivalries of two emperors, himself inflicting such sorrows as the Scottish barons prayed him to avert. In the Rhineland and the Papal states they offer no such prayers. Tauler, filled with a passionate piety, retires into himself, making no revolt nor protest, but silently drawing round him a few pure, fervent souls. Tauler and Eckhart, and Ruysbrocck and Nicolas of Suso, are the group of charmed mystic names, contemporaneous with the eight earls and thirty-one barons who sign, in the Scottish Abbey, this appeal to the power of the pope.

This grave remonstrance, this solemn appeal to right, rising, from a little land, in the midst of her great perplexities, was not much to the subtle pope John, with imperial Frederick at Aix-la-Chapelle to support against imperial Louis; and a battle imminent, and an issue uncertain; clergy to instruct; an interdict to proclaim; and a secret antagonistic brotherhood rising up, an unspoken rebuke, before all Christendom.

But the remonstrance is valuable indeed, as proving the temper of those strong old barons who gathered with so bold a front round Bruce's throne.

One of this resolute group of Lords, is Walter the High Steward. He appears at later intervals in raids with Randolph and Douglas across the Cumberland border, and then is seen no more.

Walter died at Bathgate, in the year 1328,-one year earlier than Bruce, and eleven years after Marjory. His remains were carried to the Abbey on the banks of the Cart, a desolate and stricken place, and laid, among its ruined splendours, by the side of his royal wife,

Barbour, in his rhythmical Life of Bruce, records the sorrow of the land, when Walter, the High Steward, was laid in his early grave.

"When long time they their dule had made,

The corpse to Paisley have they had,

And there with great solemnity,

And with great dule eirded was he."

And, when many years later, the son of Walter and Marjory ascended the throne of Scotland as Robert Second, the first Steward King, the prophecy to Banquo, uttered by the witches on Forres heath, found its fulfilment.

QUEEN'S grave! The first is made in the Abbey when Robert had been three years on the throne. The endless Border warfare was then at its wildest. Percy was lord warden of the English Eastern Marches. The Gordens forayed Northumberland; and the men of Northumberland took swift revenge, and encamped on the starlit summer nights among the Lammermuirs.