have said grace over their _cock-a-leekie_ thus procured, without once suspecting that there was anything wrong in the practice; but that schoolmasters like M’Culloch, who was a person of humanity, should have done so, serves strikingly to show how blinding and tyrannical must be that influence which custom exercises over even the best of men; and that not only does religion exert a beneficial effect on civilisation, but that civilisation may, in turn, react with humanizing influence on the religious. The very origin of the festival is said to have been ecclesiastical. It was instituted, we find it intimated in the _Clavis Calendaria_, “in allusion to the indignities offered to our Saviour by the Jews before the crucifixion;” but how it should have survived the Reformation, and been permitted not only to shelter, like the Gibeonites of old, in the house of the enemy, but have also become an object of the direct patronage of many of our best men of the evangelical school, seems a problem of somewhat difficult solution. It is just possible, however, that the Reformers, who were well enough acquainted with human nature to be aware of the necessity of relaxation, might have seen nothing very barbarous in the practice; seeing that the tone of men’s feelings in such matters depends more on the degree of refinement which has been attained to by the age or country in which they live, than on the severity of their general morals or the purity of their creed. I may add, that the practice of cock-throwing was abolished in the old school of Cromarty by Mr. Russel’s immediate successor--the late Rev. Mr. Macadam of Nigg; but the annual cock-fight survived until put down, a few years ago,[10] by the present incumbent of the parish. [Sidenote: M’CULLOCH THE MECHANICIAN.] There was one other Cromarty man of the last century who became eminent in his own walk and day, and to whom I must therefore refer; but I know not that he owed much, if anything, to the old school of the burgh.