fully appreciate, and a vigorous but well-regulated imagination that could bedeck the perfections of the moral world with all that is exquisite among the forms and colours of the natural. No one ever seemed less influenced by the tender feelings than Mary Anderson; she loved her brother’s friend--loved to study, to read, to converse with him, but in no respect did her regard for him seem to differ from her regard for her brother himself. She was his friend--a tender and attached one, it is true--but his friend only. But the young chaplain, whose nature it was to cleave to everything nobler and more powerful than himself, was of a different temper, and he had formed a deep though silent attachment to the highly-gifted maiden of the manse. Troublesome times came on; the politic and strong-minded proprietor was no longer known as the friend of the Presbyterian Church, and the comparatively weak and facile chaplain wavered in all the agonies of irresolution, under the fascinating influences of the massier and wilier character. All the persuasive powers of Sir John were concentrated on the conversion of his nephew. Acts of kindness, expressions of endearment and good-will, and a well-counterfeited zeal for the interests of true religion formed with him merely a sort of groundwork for arguments of real cogency so far as they went, and facts which, though of partial selection, could not be well disputed. He had passed, he said, over the ground which Dallas now occupied, and was thus enabled to anticipate some of his opinions on the subject; he, too, had once regarded Christianity and the Presbyterian form of it as identical, and associated the excellencies of the one with the peculiarities of the other. He now saw clearly, however; and his nephew, he was assured, would soon see it too, that they were things as essentially different as soul and body, and that the Presbyterian form--the Presbyterian _body_, he might say--was by no means the best which the true religion could inhabit! He pointed out what he deemed the peculiar defects of Presbyterianism; and summed up with consummate skill the various indications of the subdued and unresisting mood which at this period formed that of the entire country.