During this period of convalescence he experienced a religious change, leading to positions from which he never saw reason to recede. 'It is,' he says, 'at once delicate and dangerous to speak of one's own spiritual condition, or of the emotional sentiments on which one's conclusions regarding it are so often doubtfully founded. Egotism in the religious form is perhaps more tolerated than any other, but it is not on that account less perilous to the egotist himself. There need be, however, less delicacy in speaking of one's beliefs than of one's feelings.' This last remark is eminently characteristic at once of the individual and of the national type of severe reticence on internal religious experience. This may serve to throw some light on the taunt flung by Dr. Johnson, in one of his most boisterous moods in Skye, at the head of Boswell. 'Can you,' he asked, 'name one book of any value on a religious subject written by the Scottish clergy?' Johnson does not seem to be dwelling on specifically theological works; he has rather in his mind the manuals of a homiletic or devotional order, in which he rather wildly asserts 'the clergy of England to have produced the most valuable works in theory and practice.' It might fairly have been retorted on Johnson that, were this so, the physicians at least had ministered but poorly to themselves, by quoting to him his own remark that he had never once met with a sincerely religious English clergyman; but Bozzy, patriotic for once, fell upon the defence of faithful discharge of pulpit ministrations and poor endowments. It might have been wiser to have fallen back on the long and militant struggle of the Church of Scotland for her existence, wiser still to have based the defence on national and psychological grounds. Nothing in the Scottish character is more remarkable than the absence of the feeling that led Luther and Wesley to a constant introspection, or at least to its frank outward expression and effusive declaration of their spiritual state. Some little knowledge of this national trait we think would have saved much windy and remote declamation about fanaticism, gloomy austerity, and enthusiasm--that mental bugbear of the eighteenth century, and well-nigh sole theological stock-in-trade of the gentlemanly and affected school of Hume and Robertson. The absence of anything like mysticism either in the nation or in its theology has been, therefore, unfavourable to the appearance of any cheap or verbal pietism. Calvinism, it may be added, is poor in comparison with Lutheranism, poorer still when contrasted in this respect with the Roman Church; for, while the former has Behmen and Swedenborg, and the latter many names such as Guyon and Rosmini among a host, Scotland has nothing of this kind, unless in the case of Erskine of Linlathen or Campbell of Row. The reason for this would seem to be that Calvinism has both a religious and a political side. As a philosophic creed, at