It is not uninteresting to mark the rise and progress of certain branches of poetry and the _belles lettres_ in their connection with sects and Churches. They form tests by which at least the taste and literary standing of these bodies can be determined; and the degree of success with which they are cultivated within the same Church, in different ages, throws at times very striking lights on its condition and history. One wholly unacquainted with the recorded annals of the Church of Scotland might safely infer, from its literature alone, that it fared much more hardly in the seventeenth century, during which the literature of England rose to its highest pitch of grandeur, than in the previous sixteenth, in which its Knoxes, Buchanans, and Andrew Melvilles flourished; and further, that its eighteenth century was, on the whole, a quiet and tranquil time, in which even mediocrity had leisure afforded it to develope itself in its full proportions. Literature is not the proper business of Churches; but it is a means, though not an end. And it will be found that all the better Churches have been as literary as they could; and that, if at any time the literature has been defective, it has been rather their circumstances that were unpropitious, than themselves that were in fault. Their enemies have delighted to represent the case differently. Our readers must remember the famous instance in _Old Mortality_, so happily exposed by the elder M'Crie, in which Sir Walter, when he makes his Sergeant Bothwell a writer of verses, introduces Burley as peculiarly a verse-hater, and 'puts into his mouth that condemnation of elegant pursuits which he imputes to the whole party;' 'overlooking or suppressing the fact,' says the Doctor, 'that there was at that very time in the camp of the Covenanters a man who, besides his other accomplishments, was a poet superior to any on the opposite side.' It is equally a fact, however, and shows how thoroughly the mind of even a highly intellectual people may be prostrated by a long course of tyranny and persecution, that Scotland had properly no literature after the extinction of its old classical school in the person of Drummond of Hawthornden, until the rise of Thomson. The age in England of Milton and of Cowley, of Otway, of Waller, of Butler, of Dryden, and of Denham, was in Scotland an age without a poet vigorous enough to survive in his writings his own generation. For even the greater part of the popular version of its Psalms, our Church was indebted to the English lawyer Rous. Here and there we may find in it the remains of an earlier and more classical time: its version of the hundredth Psalm, for instance, with its quaintly-turned but stately octo-syllabic stanzas, was written nearly a hundred years earlier than most of the others, by William Keith, a Scottish contemporary of Beza and Buchanan, and one of the translators of the Geneva Bible. But we find little else that is Scotch in it; the Church to which, in the