period, when a more fervid religious spirit had taken possession of the Scottish clergy themselves, and flamed forth in more zealous expositions of peculiar Calvinistic doctrine from the pulpit than had been customary in the days of Robertson and Blair, that evangelical orthodoxy obtained in Edinburgh its visible and intimate alliance with social respectability. Moreover, even those who were then indubitably orthodox and devout by the older standard were devout after a freer fashion, and with a far greater liberty both of conduct and of rhetoric, than would now be allowable in consistency with the same reputation. There is no point on which Lord Cockburn lays more stress than on this. “There is no contrast,” he says, “between those old days and the present that strikes me so strongly as that suggested by the differences in religious observances, not so much by the world in general, as by deeply religious people. I knew the habits of the religious very well, partly through the piety of my mother and her friends, the strict religious education of her children, and our connection with some of the most distinguished of our devout clergymen. I could mention many practices of our old pious which would horrify modern zealots. The principles and feelings of the persons commonly called evangelical were the same then that they are now; the external acts by which these principles and feelings were formerly expressed were materially different.” Among the differences, Lord Cockburn notes in particular the much laxer style, as it would now be called, in which Sunday was observed by pious people and even by the most pious among the clergy. There seems also to have been more freedom of speech, in the direction of what would now be called profane allusion, among the admittedly pious. One of the gems of Lord Cockburn’s book is his portrait of one venerable old lady, a clergyman’s widow, sitting neatly dressed in her high-backed leather chair, with her grandchildren round her, the very model of silver-haired serenity, till one of her granddaughters, in reading the newspaper to her, stumbled on a paragraph which told how the reputation of a certain fair one at the court of the Prince Regent had suffered from some indiscreet talk of his about his own relations with her, but then starting up, and exclaiming, with an indignant shake of her shrivelled fist,—“The dawmed villain! does he kiss and tell?” There were not a few old ladies of this stamp in Edinburgh in Lord Cockburn’s boyhood and youth; some of whom survived far into the present century, too old to part with their peculiarities, even to please the clergy. “Ye speak, sir, as if the Bible had just come oot,” said one such old lady, who lingered long in Edinburgh, to a young clergyman who was instructing her on some point of Christian practice on which she was disposed to differ from him. The continuation in the society of Edinburgh of a considerable