_Of Knox’s Language respecting the Assassination of Cardinal Beatoun._――Mr Hume has, not very philosophically, inferred the savageness of Knox’s temper from the evident satisfaction with which he wrote of Cardinal Beatoun’s assassination; and in this judgment he has been followed by several writers. If to express satisfaction at cutting off one who was regarded as a public enemy be viewed as an infallible mark of cruelty, we must pronounce this verdict upon many who were never before suspected of such a {385} disposition. The manner in which the Christian fathers expressed themselves, respecting the death of the persecutors of the church, is not unknown. See Julian the apostate, chap. vii. viii. in Works of the Rev. Samuel Johnston, p. 22‒24. Bayle, Critique General de l’Histoire du Calvinisme, p. 295. Even the mild and philosophic Erasmus could not refrain from declaring his joy at the violent death of two of the most learned and eminent reformers. “Bene habet (says he) quod duo Coriphæi perierunt, Zuinglius in acie, Oecolampadius paulo post febri et apostemate. Quod si illis favisset Ενυαλιος, actum est de nobis.” Epist. 1205: Jortin’s Life of Erasmus, ii. 28. Sir Walter Scott, in his Cadyow Castle, (See Lyrical Pieces,) has lately exerted all his poetic powers to invest Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh with the character of a hero, in assassinating the regent Murray, a person who is no more to be compared to cardinal Beatoun, than “Hyperion to a Satyr.” I know the apology that will be made for the poet (although I think he might have found, in this, and in some other instances, a subject more worthy of his muse); but what shall we say of the historian who narrates the action of Bothwellhaugh “approvingly,” celebrates the “happy pencil of the poet” in describing it, and insults over the fall of Murray, by quoting a sarcastic line from the poem, in the very act of relating his death! Chalmers’s Caledonia, ii. 571. Yet this same writer is highly displeased that Sir David Lindsay, in his Tragedy of Beatoun, has “no burst of indignation” at the cardinal’s murder; and twice in the same work he has related with triumph, that, on the margin of one edition of Knox’s history, the part which James Melvin acted in that scene is called a “godly fact.” And he pronounces the assassination of Beatoun to be “the _foulest_ crime which ever stained a country, except perhaps the similar murder of archbishop Sharpe, within the same shire, in the subsequent century, by similar miscreants.” Chalmers’s Works of Lyndsay, vol. i. 34, 35, ii. 231. How marvellously does prejudice distort the judgment even of learned men! And how surprising to find the assassination of two sanguinary persecutors represented as more criminal than the murder of the generous Henry IV., the patriotic Prince of Orange, and the brave and pious Coligni! There are not a few persons who can read in cold blood of thousands of {386} innocent persons being murdered under the consecrated cloak