Were we to credit the eulogies of Dean Stanley and others upon Home, Blair, and Robertson, we should regard this as the golden age of the Church of Scotland. Robertson he describes as 'the true Archbishop of Scotland.' But there are men who seem fated, in the pregnant phrase of Tacitus, to make a solitude and call it peace. The reign of Robertson was simply coincident with the very lowest spiritual ebb in the country, to which his own long régime had in no slight degree contributed. The Spaniard dates the decline and fall of his own country from the days of Philip II., _segundo sin segundo_, as Cervantes bitterly calls him, 'the second with (it was to be hoped) no successor.' Even in 1765, such had been the spread of religion outside the national establishment that the Assembly was forced to reckon with it. They found 'a hundred and twenty meetinghouses, to which more than a hundred thousand persons resorted.' Patronage was found, after debate, to be the cause. It is no tribute to Alva that he found the Low Countries a peaceful dependency of Spain and left them a free nation; none to the policy of 'thorough' that it sent Laud and Strafford to the block. An impartial verdict will be that Robertson undermined for ever the edifice which Carstares had reared. An attempt has been recently made again to cast a glamour over the old Scottish moderates of the eighteenth century. Their admirers point to Watson the historian of Philip II., to Henry the historian of Britain, to Robertson, to Thomas Reid the philosopher, Home the dramatist, Blair the sermon-writer, Adam Ferguson, Hill of St. Andrews, and George Campbell of Aberdeen. Not even the Paraphrases have escaped being pressed into the field to witness to the literary and other gifts of Oglivie, Cameron, Morrison, and Logan. But the merits of a class are not best seen by the obtrusion of its more eminent members, but by the average. We do not judge the provincial governors of Rome by such men as the occasional Cicero and Rutilius, but by the too frequent repetition of men like Verres and Piso. Nor even in these very upper reaches will the Moderates bear a close inspection. No one now reads Home's _Douglas_. Young Norval has gone the way, as the critic says, of all waxworks, and curious is the fate of the great Blair: he lives not for the works upon which immortality was fondly staked, but for having given breakfasts to Burns in his Edinburgh days. 'I have read them,' says Johnson of these sermons; 'they are _sermones aurei ac auro magis aurei_. I had the honour of first finding and first praising his excellencies. I did not stay to add my voice to that of the public. I love Blair's sermons, though the dog is a Scotchman and a Presbyterian, and everything he should not be.' This avalanche of laudation seems strange to the modern reader, who will find in them the rhetoric of Hervey's _Meditations on the Tombs_, united to a theology that could pass muster in a deistical writer.