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482 truly, I pity them; they know not what they are doing; they may shut me in where they please, but they cannot shut out God from me. For my part, I am as content to he here as in the castle, and as content in the castle as in the Tower of London, and as content there as when at liberty, arid I hope to be as content on the scaffold as any of them all." His short time till Monday he spent in serenity and cheerfulness, and in the proper exercises of a dying Christian. To some of the ministers be said that they would shortly envy him for having got before them, for he added, "my skill fails me, if you who are ministers will not either suffer much, or sin much; for, though you go along with those men in part, if you do it not in all things, you are but where you were, and so must suffer; and if you go not at all with them, you shall but suffer." On the morning of his execution, he spent two hours in subscribing papers, making conveyances, and forwarding other matters of business relating to his estate; and while so employed, he suddenly became so overpowered with a feeling of divine goodness, according to contemporary authority, that he was unable to contain himself, and exclaimed, "I thought to have concealed the Lord's goodness, but it will not do : I am now ordering my affairs, and God is sealing my charter to a better inheritance, and saying* to me, 'Son, be of good cheer; thy sins are forgiven thee.'" He wrote the same day a most affecting letter to the king, recommending to his protection his wife and children. "He came to the scaffold," says Burnet, "in a very solemn, but undaunted manner, accompanied with many of the nobility and some ministers. He spoke for half an hour with a great appearance of serenity. Cunningham, his physician, told me that he touched his pulse, and it did then beat at the usual rate, calm and strong." It is related, as another proof of the resolution of Argyle, in the last trying scene, that, though he had eaten a whole partridge at dinner, no vestige of it was found in his stomach after death; if he had been much affected by the anticipation of death, his digestion, it may be easily calculated, could not have been so good. His head was struck off by the instrument called the Maiden, and affixed on the west end of the Tolbooth, where that of Montrose had been till very lately perched; a circumstance that very sensibly marks the vicissitudes of a time of civil dissension. His body was conveyed by his friends to Dunoon, and buried in the family sepulchre at Kilmun.

Argyle, with few qualities to captivate the fancy, has always been esteemed by the people of Scotland as one of the most consistent and meritorious of their array of patriots. For the sake of his exemplary moral and religious character, and his distinguished exertions in the resistance to the measures of Charles I., as well as his martyrdom in that cause, they have overlooked a quality generally obnoxious to their contempt his want of courage in the field which caused him, throughout the whole of the transactions of the civil war, to avoid personal contact with danger, though often at the head of large bodies of troops. The habits of Argyle in private life were those of an eminently and sincerely pious man. In Mr Wodrow's diary of traditionary collections, which remains in manuscript in the Advocates' Library, it is related, under May 9, 1702, upon the credit of a clergyman, the last survivor of the General Assembly of 1651, that his lordship used to rise at five, and continue in private till eight: besides family worship, and private prayer, morning and evening, he prayed with his lady morning and evening, in the presence of his own gentleman and her gentlewoman; he never went abroad, though but for one right, without taking along with him his writing-standish, a bible, and Newman's Concordance. Upon the same authority, we relate the following anecdote: "After the coronation of king Charles II. at Scone, he waited a long time for an opportunity of dealing freely with his majesty on religious matters, and particular-