His ing savour in the nostrils of the Lord." To the proceedings of the more moderate Covenanters, who, on the martyrdom of Charles I. sought to place his son, whom they had crowned King of Scotland, on the English throne, Cant was wholly hostile; in 1650 he waited on General David Leslie to tell him "that he thought one crown was enough for any one man, and that one kingdom might serve him very well." Though entertaining such sentiments, Cant does not seem to have found favour with Cromwell or his generals; and after the English occupation of Scotland, his power began to wane. parishioners, whom for ten years he had ruled with a rod of iron, at length dared to murmur under their yoke. For a while he set them at defiance, railing at the magistrates from the pulpit, and cursing in his prayers" those who were obnoxious to him; but on the eve of the Restoration, warned by the signs of the times, he abandoned his charge, and fled from the city with his wife and family. He was soon after formally deposed; the clergyman who pronounced the sentence had been ordained by Cant, who was present in church, and on hearing the sentence read, cried out, "Davie! Davie! I kent aye ye would do this, from the day I laid my 66 1 Pennant's Second Tour in Scotland, in Pinkerton's Voyages and Travels, vol. iii. p. 430. 2 Sir James Balfour's Annales of Scotland, vol. iv. p. 161. hands on your head." He survived his ejection only three years. On the 30th April 1663 he breathed his last, in the seventy-ninth year of his age, and the forty-ninth of his ministry. "My conscience," he exclaimed " on his deathbed, bears me witness that I never gave a wrong touch to the Ark of God in all my days." He was interred in St Nicholas' churchyard, at Aberdeen; and a Latin epitaph on his tombstone records how, by his conversation and walk, he upheld declining religion, reformed the degenerate manners of the world, and was a flaming Boanerges and a loving Barnabas !2 His Presbyterian spirit would have been sorely vexed if he had lived to see the backslidings of his children. His daughter Sarah died a Quaker ;3 and his son Andrew, after distinguishing himself by Christmas and Thirtieth-of-January Sermons, lived to become a Nonjuring Bishop ! It is said that his father dreaded some calamity like this. "One day," 1 Wodrow's Analecta, vol. iii. p. 265. MS. 2 Collection of Epitaphs in Scotland, p. 133. Glasgow, 1834. 3 Diary of Alexander Jaffray, with Memoirs of the People called Quakers in the north of Scotland. By John Barclay. P. 322. Lond. 1833. 4 Keith's Catal. Scot. Bish. p. 553. Archaeologia Scotica, vol. i. p. 357. Jaffray's Diary, p. 216. Bower's Hist. of Univ. of Edinb. vol.i.p.297. It is said, that for one of his Thirtiethof-January Sermons he "got above 800 merks." Pitcairn's B says Patrick Walker, "going a piece of way together, he was skipping before his father, who said to him, Souple Andrew, I fear that be thy fault all thy days, both in principle and practice.' The same excellent pedlar informs us, that Mr John Semple having heard "the old worthy Mr Andrew Cant preach in the morning, and his son in the evening, and after supper being desired to pray, had these singular expressions anent their sermons: 'Lord, we had a very good dish set before us this forenoon in a very homely dress; and in the afternoon wholesome food, but in a very airy fine dress. Good Lord, pierce his heart with the compunction of a broken law, and fright him with the terror of the curses thereof. Good Lord, brod [prick] him, and let the wind out of him; make him like his father, otherwise he will be a sad grief of heart to many.' In the popular belief, the clergyman who deposed Cant met a fearful doom. "As he was walking in the Links of Montrose," says Wodrow, " about the twilight, at a pretty distance from the town, he espied as it were a woman all in white standing not far from him, who immediately disappeared; and he coming up presently to the place, saw no person Babel, pp. 75, 76. Edinb. 1830. He is accused of being one of the chief authors of that scandalous work, The Scots Presbyterian Eloquence Display'd. 1 Biographia Presbyteriana, vol. i. p. 164. Edinb. 1827. there, though the Links be very plain. Only casting his eyes on the place where she stood, he saw two words drawn and written as it had been with a staff upon the sand,- SENTENCED AND CONDEMNED; upon which he came home very pensive and melancholy, and in a little sickens and dies. What to make of this," concludes the Presbyterian martyrologist, "or what truth is in it, I cannot tell; only I had it from a minister who lives near Montrose." I 1 V. INEXPRESSIBLES. THAT part of dress which it is now unlawful to name, seems of old to have had the singular virtue of discomfiting witches and demons. Every one may have heard how the bare vision of St Francis' inexpressibles put the devil to flight. In Thuringia, it is believed that, to keep the fairies from stealing babies, you have only to hang the father's breeches on the bed.2 1 Wodrow's Analecta, vol. i. p. 149. MS. 2 Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland, pp. 50, 51. I think I have heard that in some parts of Scotland the father's breeches were placed under the pillow. Another preventive is described by Alexander Ross: "A clear brunt coal wi' the het tengs was taen Frae out the ingle-mids, fu' clear and clean, And throw the corsy-belly letten fa', For fear the wee ane sud be taen awa." Fortunate Shepherdess. Reginald Scot, in his Discovery of Witchcraft, gives this "charme to find her that bewitched your kine" :-" Put a pair of breeches upon the cowe's head, and beat her out of the pasture with a good cudgell, upon a Fridaie, and she will runne right to the witches dore and strike thereat with her hornes."1 The same mystic spell prevailed against the famous Brownie of Blednoch in Galloway : "On Blednoch banks, an' on crystal Cree, For many a day a toil'd wight was he; While the bairns play'd harmless roun' his knee, Sae social was Aiken-drum. But a new-made wife, fu' o' rippish freaks, Let the learn'd decide, when they convene, He was heard by a herd gaun by the Thrieve, Crying, 'Lang, lang now may I greit an' grieve, 1 Retrospective Review, vol. v. p. 110. |