In all Scottish cities _The Clergy_ have, from time immemorial, exercised an amount of social influence not willingly allowed to any other class of persons. This arises partly from the same causes which give the clergy influence in other parts of Britain, but partly from the peculiar affection of the Scottish people for the national theology with which they have been saturated through so many centuries of clerical teaching. In Edinburgh, in consequence of the perpetuation there of relics of that old Scottish aristocracy which never was completely brought into subjection to Presbytery, and in consequence of the presence in society of a distinct intellectual element in the lawyers, the clergy have not perhaps had, relatively, the same weight as in other towns. Still they were powerful even in the old Edinburgh of the Dundas rule. At the very least, a negative respect was paid to them by the preservation throughout the place of an external Presbyterian decorum and strictness; and in all houses “the minister” was treated with distinction. Add to this that there generally were among the Edinburgh clergy men possessing claims to respect in addition to those belonging to their profession. Some, even in that age of “Moderatism,” were remarkable for their eloquence and zeal as preachers and as pastors; others had literary pretensions; and others were professors in the University as well as parish clergymen. More, indeed, than now, the professorial and the clerical elements were then intermixed in Edinburgh. Perhaps, however, that which gave the greatest dignity to the clerical or ecclesiastical element in Edinburgh was the annual meeting in that city, every May, of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. In the history of Scottish society since the Union there is, perhaps, no one fact of greater importance than the regular and uninterrupted succession of those annual “General Assemblies” in Edinburgh for the discussion of the affairs of the National Church. Let an Englishman fancy that during the last two centuries there had been no Parliament in England, no meetings of the House of Lords or of the House of Commons, but that regularly during that period there had been annual convocations of representatives of the whole body of the English Clergy, together with such leading members of the laity as churchwardens or the like from all the English parishes, and that these convocations had sat ten days in every year, discussing all public matters in any way bearing on the Church, and making laws affecting the entire ecclesiastical organisation of England, and he will have an idea of the extent to which the national history of Scotland since her union with England is bound up in the records of her “General Assemblies.” The General Assembly, in fact, from the year 1707 to the Disruption of the Scottish Church in 1843, was, to some extent, a veritable Parliament, in which, though the secular Parliament had been abolished, the united people of Scotland