'The morning levée had been marked by an incident of a somewhat extraordinary nature, and which history, though in these days little disposed to mark prodigies and omens, will scarce fail to record. The crowd in the Chamber of Presence was very great, and there was, we believe, a considerable degree of confusion and pressure in consequence. Suddenly,--whether brushed by some passer by, jostled rudely aside, or merely affected by the tremor of the floor communicated to the partitioning, a large portrait of William the Third, that had held its place in Holyrood for nearly a century and a half, dropped heavily from the walls. "There," exclaimed a voice[3] from the crowd,--"there goes the Revolution Settlement." For hours before the meeting of Assembly, the galleries of St. Andrew's Church, with the space behind, railed off for the accommodation of office-bearers, not members, were crowded to suffocation, and a vast assemblage still continued to besiege the doors.... The Moderator rose and addressed the House in a few impressive sentences. There had been infringement, he said, of the constitution of the Church,--an infringement so great, that they could not constitute the Assembly without a violation of the Union between Church and State, as now authoritatively defined and declared. He was, therefore, compelled, he added, to protest against proceeding further, and, unfolding a document which he held in his hand, he read, in a slow and emphatic manner, the protest of the Church. For the first few seconds, the extreme anxiety to hear defeated its object,--the universal "hush, hush," occasioned considerably more noise than it allayed; but the momentary confusion was succeeded by the most unbroken silence; and the reader went on till the impressive close of the document, when he flung it down on the table of the House and solemnly departed. He was followed at a pace's distance by Dr. Chalmers; Dr. Gordon and Dr. Patrick M'Farlan immediately succeeded, and then the numerous sitters on the thickly occupied benches behind filed after them, in a long unbroken line, which for several minutes together continued to thread the passage to the eastern door, till at length only a blank space remained. As the well-known faces and forms of some of the ablest and most eminent men that ever adorned the Church of Scotland glided along in the current, to disappear from the courts of the State institution for ever, there rose a cheer from the galleries. At length, when the last of the withdrawing party had disappeared, there ran from bench to bench a hurried, broken whispering,--"How many? how many?"--"_four hundred_": The scene that followed we deemed one of the most striking of the day. The empty vacated benches stretched away from the Moderator's seat in