The Cavalier by Agnes Repplier

"An evil reputation is light to raise, but heavy to bear, and very difficult to put aside. No Rumor which many people chatter of altogether dieth away; she too is, after her kind, an immortal. " So moralizes Hesiod over an exceedingly thankless truth, which, even in the primitive simplicity of the golden age, had forced itself upon man's unwilling convictions; and while many later philosophers have given caustic expression to the same thought, few have clothed it with more delicate and agreeable irony. Rumor is, after her kind, an immortal. Anteus-like, she gains new strength each time she is driven to the ground, and it is a wholesome humiliation for our very enlightened minds to see how little she has suffered from centuries of analysis and research. Rumor still writes our histories, directs our diplomacy, and controls our ethics, until we have grown to think that this is probably what is meant by the _vox populi_, and that any absurdity credited by a great many people becomes in some mysterious way sacred to the cause of humanity, and infinitely more precious than truth. When Wodrow, and Walker, and the author of The Cloud of Witnesses, were compiling their interesting narratives, Rumor, in the person of "ilka auld wife in the chimley-neuck," gave them all the information they desired; and this information, countersigned by Macaulay, has passed muster for history down to the present day. As a result, the introduction of Graham of Claverhouse into Mr. Lang's list of English Worthies has been received with severely qualified approbation, and Mr. Mowbray Morris has written the biography of a great soldier in the cautious tone of a lawyer pleading for a criminal at the bar.

If ever the words of Hesiod stood in need of an accurate illustration, it has been furnished by the memory of Claverhouse; for his evil reputation was not only raised with astonishing facility, but it has never been put aside at all. In fact, it seems to have been a matter of pride in the grim-visaged Scottish saints to believe that their departed brethren were, one and all, the immediate victims of his wrath; and to hint that they might perhaps have fallen by any meaner hand was, as Aytoun wittily expressed it, "an insult to martyrology. " The terror inspired by his inflexible severity gave zest to their lurid denunciations, and their liveliest efforts of imagination were devoted to conjuring up in his behalf some fresh device of evil. In that shameless pasquinade, the Elegy, there is no species of wickedness that is not freely charged, in most vile language, to the account of every Jacobite in the land, from the royal house of Stuart down to its humblest supporter; yet even amid such goodly company, Claverhouse stands preëminent, and is the recipient of its choicest flowers of speech.