in themselves.  The accused malignants, on the other hand, complained bitterly of the impertinence of meddling fanatics and hypocrites.  Paterson was cruelly reviled, and was unable to defend himself.  He had been completely prostrated by bodily and mental suffering.  He looked like a skeleton.  His heart was broken.  His inventive faculties and his plausible eloquence were no more; and he seemed to have sunk into second childhood.

Meanwhile the second expedition had been on the seas.  It reached Darien about four months after the first settlers had fled.  The new comers had fully expected to find a flourishing young town, secure fortifications, cultivated fields, and a cordial welcome.  They found a wilderness.  The castle of New Edinburgh was in ruins.  The huts had been burned.  The site marked out for the proud capital which was to have been the Tyre, the Venice, the Amsterdam of the eighteenth century was overgrown with jungle, and inhabited only by the sloth and the baboon.  The hearts of the adventurers sank within them.  For their fleet had been fitted out, not to plant a colony, but to recruit a colony already planted and supposed to be prospering.  They were therefore worse provided with every necessary of life than their predecessors had been.  Some feeble attempts, however, were made to restore what had perished.  A new fort was constructed on the old ground; and within the ramparts was built a hamlet, consisting of eighty or ninety cabins, generally of twelve feet by ten.  But the work went on languidly.  The alacrity which is the effect of hope, the strength which is the effect of union, were alike wanting to the little community.  From the councillors down to the humblest settlers all was despondency and discontent.  The stock of provisions was scanty.  The stewards embezzled great part of it.  The rations were small; and soon there was a cry that they were unfairly distributed.  Factions were formed.  Plots were laid.  One ringleader of the malecontents was hanged.  The Scotch were generally, as they still are, a religious people; and it might therefore have been expected that the influence of the divines to whom the spiritual charge of the colony had been confided would have been employed with advantage for the preserving of order and the calming of evil passions.  Unfortunately those divines seem to have been at war with almost all the rest of the society.  They described their companions as the most profligate of mankind, and declared that it was impossible to constitute a presbytery according to the directions of the General Assembly; for that persons fit to be ruling elders of a Christian Church were not to be found among the twelve or thirteen hundred emigrants.  Where the blame lay it is now impossible to decide.  All that can with confidence be said is that either the clergymen must have been most unreasonably and most uncharitably austere, or the laymen must have been most unfavourable specimens of the nation and class to which they belonged.