descendant. Strongly attached to the Establishment, the people, though they thus forsook their old places of worship, still remained members of the national Church, and travelled far in the summer season to attend the better ministers of their own and the neighbouring counties. We have been assured, too, from men whose judgment we respect, that, under all their disadvantages, religion continued peculiarly to flourish among them;--a deep-toned evangelism prevailed; so that perhaps the visible Church throughout the world at the time could furnish no more striking contrast than that which obtained between the cold, bald, commonplace services of the pulpit in some of these parishes, and the fervid prayers and exhortations which give life and interest to these humble meetings of the people. What a pity it is that differences such as these the Duke of Sutherland cannot see! The marriage of the young countess into a noble English family was fraught with further disaster to the county. There are many Englishmen quite intelligent enough to perceive the difference between a smoky cottage of turf and a whitewashed cottage of stone, whose judgment on their respective inhabitants would be of but little value. Sutherland, as a country of _men_, stood higher at this period than perhaps any other district in the British empire; but, as our descriptions in the preceding chapter must have shown,--and we indulged in them mainly with a view to this part of our subject,--it by no means stood high as a country of farms and cottages. The marriage of the Countess brought a new set of eyes upon it,--eyes accustomed to quite a different face of things. It seemed a wild, rude country, where all was wrong, and all had to be set right,--a sort of Russia on a small scale, that had just got another Peter the Great to civilise it,--or a sort of barbarous Egypt, with an energetic Ali Pasha at its head. Even the vast wealth and great liberality of the Stafford family militated against this hapless county: it enabled them to treat it as the mere subject of an interesting experiment, in which gain to themselves was really no object,--nearly as little so as if they had resolved on dissecting a dog alive for the benefit of science. It was a still further disadvantage, that they had to carry on their experiment by the hands, and to watch its first effects with the eyes, of others. The agonies of the dog might have had their softening influence on a dissector who held the knife himself; but there could be no such influence exerted over him, did he merely issue orders to his footman that the dissection should be completed, remaining himself, meanwhile, out of sight and out of hearing. The plan of improvement sketched out by his English family was a plan exceedingly easy of conception. Here is a vast tract of land, furnished with two distinct sources of wealth. Its shores may be made the seats of extensive fisheries, and the whole of its interior