morals and too diligent in duty to please our vitiated tastes!' Carlyle's _Autobiography_ is one of the most instructive of books; like the similar disclosure by Benvenuto Cellini, it is the presentation of a man who is destitute of a moral sense. Although in the pulpits of the metropolis Moderatism was but only too well represented, there were yet some striking exceptions. Sir Walter Scott, whose feelings led him strongly in the direction of the Latitudinarian party, has yet drawn in _Guy Mannering_ an admirable sketch of Dr. John Erskine, the colleague of Principal Robertson in the Greyfriars, and for long the leader of the Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland. Some of the members of that party were gladly heard by Miller, but his greatest delight he confesses to have been in hearing the discourses of the old Seceder, Dr. Thomas M'Crie. 'Be sure,' said his uncles to him on leaving Cromarty, 'and go to hear M'Crie.' The doctor was no master of rhetoric or of pulpit eloquence, but the doctrine was the theology of the true descendant of the men of Drumclog and Bothwell. Nothing is more characteristic of the university system of Scotland than that the greatest ecclesiastical scholar she could produce was to be found in a humble seceding chapel at the foot of Carrubber's Close. In Scotland, at least within the present century, no more influential book has been published than his _Life of Knox_, which silently made its appearance in 1811. In the revival of ecclesiastical and national feeling in the country the book will ever remain a classic and a landmark. There it occupies the place which, in the field of classical and historical scholarship, is taken by Wolf's _Prolegomena to Homer_. Lord Jeffrey could truly declare that to fit one's-self for the task of even a reviewer of M'Crie, the special reading of several years would be necessary. Its influence was at once felt. The 'solemn sneer' of the Humes, Gibbons, Robertsons, and Tytlers, and, be it mentioned with regret, of even Scott in that unworthy squib against the religion of his country, _Old Mortality_, had done much, at least among the _literati_ and the upper classes, to obliterate and sap a belief or knowledge of the great work which had been accomplished for civil liberty by the early reformers; but now the school of flimsy devotees of Mary, Montrose and Claverhouse, with its unctuous retention of the sneer (or, historically meant, compliment) of the Merry Monarch as to Presbyterianism being no fit religion for a gentleman, the school whose expiring flicker is seen in Aytoun's _Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers_, was for ever exploded by the research of M'Crie. It was in an unlucky hour that Scott ventured a reply to the strictures of his reviewer. Never was humiliation more deep or more bitterly felt by the novelist. The novel of Scott is about as gross a caricature as 'Carrion' Heath's _Life_ of Oliver Cromwell, and for the historical restoration of the great Reformer,