still saw their nationality preserved and represented. All through the year the clergy individually, in the thousand parishes or so into which Scotland was divided, managed their own parochial affairs with the assistance of select laymen called elders; these clergymen, again, with some of their elders, held frequent district meetings, called “presbyteries,” in order to regulate by deliberation and voting the church affairs of their districts; there were still larger meetings, periodically held, called “provincial synods”; but the grand rendezvous of all, the supreme court of appeal and ecclesiastical legislation, was the annual General Assembly in Edinburgh. The time of its meeting was one of bustle and excitement. Black coats swarmed in the streets; the Assembly was opened with military pomp and circumstance by a Lord High Commissioner representing the Crown; this Commissioner sat on a throne during the meetings, and held levees and dinner-parties in Holyrood Palace all through the ten days; the clergy, with lay representatives, some of whom were usually noblemen or baronets, deliberated and debated during those ten days, under a president of their own choosing called the “Moderator”; the proceedings were in parliamentary form, and the decisions by a majority of votes; and in many cases,—as in trials of clergymen for moral or ecclesiastical misdemeanour,—barristers were called in to plead professionally, as they did in the secular law-courts. As was natural in a deliberative assembly almost all the members of which were of the speaking class, the speaking was of a very high order,—far higher, indeed, than has ever been heard in these later days in the British Parliament; while at the same time there was ample opportunity for the exercise of business talent and of all the tact and skill of party-leadership. Much of the general politics of Scotland took necessarily the form of church politics; and, indeed, the connections between church politics and state politics were pretty close. The vast majority of the clergy were adherents of Dundas in general politics, and bent on swaying church polity in the same direction; while the small minority of “Evangelicals” or “High-Fliers,” as they were called, corresponded to the proscribed “Liberals” in secular politics. The leading clergymen of both parties were to be found in or near Edinburgh. Respecting the _Mercantile and Artisan classes_ it need only be repeated that they were by no means separated by any social demarcation from the fore-mentioned classes, but were intertwined with these by family-relationships, and often also by the sympathies belonging to superior natural intelligence and superior education. Booksellers and printers were more numerous in Edinburgh proportionally than in any other British town.