letter of the Covenant he signed incompatible with the peculiar nature of Scottish loyalty, which had never been of that patient, unquestioning, one might almost say unreasoning, nature which has sometimes marked the English loyalist. To save the country meant to save the King in spite of himself, in spite of those evil counsellors who stood ever at his ear to poison him against his Scottish subjects. It was an enchanting prospect for an ardent, aspiring young man who had fired his imagination with the romantic pages of Plutarch. "As Philip's noble son," he had written,