It would be difficult to find a more striking scene. Any sudden incident of an individual character thus occurring in a public assembly calls forth a thrill of interest, and gives at once to the most disconnected crowd a pictorial unity. The interest and excitement in those roused and eager eyes, the crowd all turned towards the astonished subject of this appeal, the soft young faces making a little circle round him, half terrified, half flattered by the sudden consciousness that all eyes were turned towards them, would make a fine theme for a historical painter. And "the said John, abashed," finding no refuge in the great excitement and surprise of the moment, he so stern and so strong, but in tears! It was thus that the ministry of the great Reformer began. It is unnecessary to follow in detail a career so well known. Every particular of it, and even the sermons with all their heads, may be found in the _Historie of the Reformation in Scotland_, which yields in interest, in picturesqueness and the most living and graphic power of narrative, to none of the primitive chronicles. No professional word-painter has ever put a dramatic scene, a contention, a battle, such as those which were everyday occurrences in Scotland at that time, upon paper with more pictorial force, or with half the fervour of life and reality. The writer goes through all the gamut of popular passion. He exults sometimes fiercely, laughs sometimes coarsely, throws in "a merry jest," which is often grim with savage humour; but throughout all is always real, always genuine, writing not impartially, but with the strong conviction and sentiment of a man elucidating matters in which he has been himself a prominent actor. The arguments of his adversaries when he enters upon a public controversy are unaccountably feeble, which perhaps may be explained by the fact that the friars were not much accustomed to controversy, perhaps by the natural bias of a controversialist to lessen the force of his antagonists' arguments; and he does not pretend to contemplate his adversaries, either spiritual or political, with any tolerance, or permit any possibility that they too might perhaps mean well and have a righteous intention, even though it was entirely opposed to that of John Knox: such ideas had no currency in his day. That Mary of Guise might really mean and wish to avoid bloodshed, to strike no blow that was not inevitable, to keep the breach from being widened by actual civil war; and that the policy of temporising as long as that was possible was anything but wicked wiles and intentions of betrayal, was an idea which he would seem to have been incapable of conceiving. This is a drawback perhaps common to every struggle so important and fundamental as was the strife which began to rage in Scotland. Had we a history compiled by the spectators to whom we have referred it would probably, unless nature gave them an exceptional