the recusants in James the Sixth's time
- Bruce, Black, Blair, Livingstone, - from them to the brief, and at length
triumphant period of the Presbyterian Church's splendour, until it was overrun
by the English Independents. Then followed the dismal times of prelacy, the
indulgences, seven in number, with all their shades and bearings, until he
arrived at the reign of King James the Second, in which he himself had been, in
his own mind, neither an obscure actor nor an obscure sufferer. Then was Butler
doomed to hear the most detailed and annotated edition of what he had so often
heard before, - David Deans's confinement, namely, in the iron cage in the
Canongate Tolbooth, and the cause thereof.
    We should be very unjust to our friend David Deans, if we should »pretermit«
- to use his own expression - a narrative which he held essential to his fame. A
drunken trooper of the Royal Guards, Francis Gordon by name, had chased five or
six of the skulking Whigs, among whom was our friend David; and after he had
compelled them to stand, and was in the act of brawling with them, one of their
number fired a pocket-pistol, and shot him dead. David used to sneer and shake
his head when any one asked him whether he had been the instrument of removing
this wicked persecutor from the face of the earth. In fact the merit of the deed
lay between him and his friend, Patrick Walker, the pedlar, whose works he was
so fond of quoting. Neither of them cared directly to claim the merit of
silencing Mr. Francis Gordon of the Elfe-Guards, there being some wild cousins
of his about Edinburgh, who might have been even yet addicted to revenge, but
yet neither of them chose to disown or yield to the other the merit of this
active defence of their religious rights. David said, that if he had fired a
pistol then, it was what he never did after or before. And as for Mr. Patrick
Walker, he has left it upon record, that his great surprise was, that so small a
pistol could kill so big a man. These are the words of that venerable
biographer, whose trade had not taught him by experience, that an inch was as
good as an ell. »He« (Francis Gordon) »got a shot in his head out of a
pocket-pistol, rather fit for diverting a boy than killing such a furious, mad,
brisk man, which notwithstanding killed him dead!«66
    Upon the