marty,―at the request of his relation and son-in-law, my friend Mr. Isaac Forsyth of Elgin. William Forsyth had been a grown man ere the abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions; and, from the massiveness and excellence of his character, and his high standing as a merchant, in a part of the country in which mer chants at the time were few, he had succeeded, within the precincts of the town, to not a little of the power of the hereditary Sheriff of the district; and after acting for more than half a century as a laborious Justice of the Peace, and succeeding in making up more quarrels than most country lawyers have an opportunity of fomenting,-for the age was a rude and combative one, and the merchant ever a peace-maker,—he lived long enough to see Liberty-and-Equality Clubs and Processions, and died about the close of the first war of the first French Revolution. It was an important half-century in Scotlandthough it exhibits but a narrow, inconspicuous front in the history of the country-that intervened between the times of the hereditary jurisdictions and the Liberty-and-Equality Clubs. It was specially the period during which popular opinion began to assume its potency, and in which the Scotland of the past merged, in consequence, into the very dissimilar Scotland of the present. And I derived much pleasure in tracing some of the more striking features of this transition age in the biography of Mr. Forsyth. My little work was printed, but not published, and distributed by Mr. Forsyth of Elgin among the friends of the family, as perhaps a better and more adequate memorial of a worthy and able man than could be placed over his grave. It was on the occasion of the death of his lastsurviving child, the late Mrs. M'Kenzie of Cromarty, a lady from whom I had received much kindness, and under whose hospitable roof I had the opportunity afforded me of meeting not a few superior men,—that my memoir was undertaken ; and I regarded it as a fitting tribute to a worthy family just passed away, at once deserving of being remembered for its own sake, and to which I owed a debt of gratitude.

In the spring of 1839, a sad bereavement darkened my household, and for a time left me little heart to pursue my

wonted amusements, literary or scientific. We had been visited, ten months after our marriage, by a little girl, whose presence had added not a little to our happiness: home became more emphatically such from the presence of the child, that in a few months had learned so well to know its mother, and in a few more to take its stand in the nurse's arms, at an upper window that commanded the street, and to recognize and make signs to its father as he approached the house. Its few little words, too, had a fascinating interest to our ears;—our own names, lisped in a language of its own, every time we approached; and the simple Scotch vocable “awa, awa,” which it knew how to employ in such plaintive tones as we retired, and that used to come back upon us in recollection, like an echo from the grave, when, its brief visit over, it had left us forever, and its fair face and silken hair lay in darkness amid the clods of the church-yard. In how short a time had it laid hold of our affections! Two brief years before, and we knew it not; and now it seemed as if the void which it left in our hearts the whole world could not fill. We buried it beside the old chapel of St. Regulus, with the deep rich woods all around, save where an opening in front commands the distant land and the blue sea; and where the daisies, which had learned to love, mottle, star-like, the mossy mounds; and where birds, whose songs its ear had become skilful enough to distinguish, pour their notes over its little grave. The following simple but truthful stanzas, which I found among its mother's papers, seem to have been written in this place,-sweetest of buryinggrounds, a few weeks after its burial, when a chill and backward spring, that had scowled upon its lingering illness, broke out at once into genial summer :—

Thou'rt "awa, awa," from thy mother's side,

And "awa, awa," from thy father's knee;

Thou'rt "awa" from our blessing, our care, our caressing,

But "awa" from our hearts thou'lt never be.

All things, dear child, that were wont to please thee

Are round thee here in beauty bright,

There's music rare in the cloudless air,

And the earth is teeming with living delight.

Thou'rt "awa, awa," from the bursting spring time,

Tho' o'er thy head its green boughs wave;
The lambs are leaving their little footprints
Upon the turf of thy new-made grave.

And art thou" awa,” and “awa” forever,—
That little face,-that tender frame,—
That voice which first, in sweetest accents,
Call'd me the mother's thrilling name,-
That head of nature's finest moulding,-
Those eyes, the deep night ether's blue,
Where sensibility its shadows

Of ever-changing meaning threw ?

Thy sweetness, patience under suffering,
All promis'd us an opening day
Most fair, and told that to subdue thee
Would need but love's most gentle sway.

Ah me! 'twas here I thought to lead thee,
And tell thee what are life and death,
And raise thy serious thought's first waking
To Him who holds our every breath.

And does my selfish heart then grudge thee,
That angels are thy teachers now,-
That glory from thy Saviour's presence
Kindles the crown upon thy brow?

O, no! to me earth must be lonelier,
Wanting thy voice, thy hand, thy love;
Yet dost thou dawn a star of promise,
Mild beacon to the world above.

CHAPTER XXV.

"All for the Church, and a little less for the State."

BELHAVEN.

I HAD taken no very deep interest in the Voluntary controversy. There was, I thought, a good deal of overstatement and exaggeration on both sides. On the one hand the Voluntaries failed to convince me that a State endowment for ecclesiastical purposes is in itself in any degree a bad thing. I had direct experience to the contrary. I had evidence the most unequivocal that in various parts of the country it was a very excellent thing indeed. It had been a very excellent thing, for instance, in the parish of Cromarty, ever since the Revolution, down to the death of Mr. Smith,-in reality, a valuable patrimony of the people there; for it had supplied the parish, free of cost, with a series of popular and excellent ministers, whom otherwise the parishioners would have had to pay for themselves. And it had now given us my friend Mr. Stewart, one of the ablest and honestest ministers in Scotland, or elsewhere, whether Established or Dissenting. And these facts, which were but specimens of a numerous class, had a tangibility and solidity about them which influenced me more than all the theoretic reasonings pressed on my attention about the mischief done to the Church by the over-kindness of Constantine, or the corrupting effects of State favor. But then I could as little agree with some of my friends on the endowment

side, that the Establishment, even in Scotland, was everywhere of value, as with some of the Voluntaries that it was nowhere of any. I had resided for months together in various parts of the country, where it would have mattered not a farthing to any one save the minister and his family, though the Establishment had been struck down at a blow. Religion and morals would have no more suffered by the annihilation of the minister's stipend, than by the suppression of the pension of some retired supervisor or superannuated officer of customs. Nor could I forget, that the only religion, or appearance of religion, that existed in parties of workmen among which I had been employed (as in the south of Scotland, for instance), was to be found among their Dissenters,-most of them, at the time, asserters of the Voluntary principle. If the other workmen were reckoned, statistically at least, adherents of the Establishment, it was not because they either benefited by it or cared for it, but only somewhat in the way that, according to the popular English belief, persons born at sea are held to be long to the parish of Stepney. Further, I did not in the least like the sort of company into which the Voluntary controversy had introduced the good men on both sides: it gave a common cause to the Voluntary and the Infidel, and drew them cordially together; and, on the other hand, placed side by side, on terms portentously friendly, the pious asserter of endowments and the irreligious old Tory. There was religion on both sides of the controversy, but a religious controversy it was not.

The position of my grandmother's family, including, of course, Uncles James and Sandy, was a sort of midway one between the Secession and the Establishment. My grand, mother had quitted the family of Donald Roy long ere he had been compelled, very unwillingly, to leave the Church; and as no forced settlements had taken place in the parish into which she had removed, and as its ministers had been all men of the right stamp, she had done what Donald himself had been so desirous to do,-remained an attached member of the Establishment. One of her sisters had, however, married in Nigg; and she and her husband, following Donald