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DINBURGH looks its best in the last days of May and the earliest days of June. The gardens, lavishly scattered amid the masses of substantial stone buildings, wear their first fresh green: you can look, everywhere, into depths of shade; and the air is fragrant with lilac and hawthorn blossoms. The Castle Rock and Arthur's Seat show sharply against the bright blue: through the openings in the streets you look upon the not distant sea: the Pentland hills and those of Fife are seen through the sunny haze. Near the west end of Princes Street, on the first floor, you may sit in the great bay-window of the University Club library; and looking across the quiet bustle of the street (which never roars), gladden your eyes with inexpressible verdure, and refresh your soul with the unfeverish delight of gazing on that huge basaltic precipice which looks northward upon the New Town. Great souls, of business aptitude, and plunged at this season in what they deem the things of the State but what to most people appear as very pettifogging and sordid details, do not condescend to notice these things. Mr. Brass's motion, or that extraordinary overture from the Presbytery of Fogystone, shuts gracious and patient Nature out. Well, they have their reward: their names may be seen printed in the newspapers. And for such honour the wise man might be content to die.

Looking out from that pleasant bay-window, across the Princes Street Gardens, you may discern upon the slope stretching from the Castle down towards Holyrood a lofty and graceful spire. Circumstances may have so environed you as to cause that edifice to appeal to your sense of duty. You ought to

be there. And it is drawing towards eleven o'clock in the forenoon, which is the hour of cause. Let us, with two or three more in like manner bound, possess ourselves of one of the Club keys, and entering the gardens, slope slowly towards the east, through green clumps, across the railway-track, away up the steep and rocky hill. Never does the writer pull up that brae, without remembering a pleasant hour in which he led up it the most charming of living historians, on his very first day North of the Tweed: and called his attention to the view. That great man is not given to gush, but his observations were enthusiastic: and the writer felt proud, forasmuch as he is a Scotchman, and lived in Edinburgh. Et in Arcadia ego. But now, coming out from the gardens on the Castle Esplanade, a few steps down the street bring us to the building whence soars the spire, already named. It is, in fact, a handsome church: though for ten days at this season yearly used for purposes apart (sometimes extremely far apart) from the worship of God. Let us enter, having a right so to do. And here we are in the General Assembly of the National Church, by law established: a Supreme Court beyond which there lies no appeal: exercising real and great powers, and thus wholly unlike that most respectable debating society which in England is called Convocation: and not unsurrounded by some circumstances of State pageantry. It is fit that decent folk be present at the religious services with which the meetings of this Venerable House are opened. They are brief: but this year certainly very decorous and solemn. But it is in this ecclesiastical assembly as in others,

not unknown: not many of the members are present at prayers. This is much to be regretted. For, as was well remarked by a worthy lay member of the House, their absence is not only unbecoming towards Almighty God, but in a high degree disrespectful to His Grace the Lord High Commissioner. The caution, though well-intended, failed of due success. And morning by morning the pleasant face of the Earl of Galloway looked down on somewhat empty benches from the Throne which he genially filled.

But the chamber soon grows crowded enough, when business of any interest is called for. Near four hundred members, clergymen and laymen, an elected number sent by Presbyteries, Universities, and Boroughs, crowd their appointed seats. And divers galleries are packed with spectators, male and female. The arrangement of the Chamber is very much like that of the House of Commons. The air becomes terribly hot and stuffy. And currents of cold atmosphere rush bitterly in when any door is opened.

Many years are gone since the writer first beheld the General Assembly. Then, he was a boy, and looked with awe upon the grave Moderator, arrayed in robes of grandeur while in his Chair, and while out of it wearing for those momentous days in his history the regulation court dress and cocked hat. It makes one feel how time is slipping away, when things come to be so that one can familiarly address a Moderator by his surname, and find the claim cordially allowed. One did not know how even an old friend might take it, having risen so high. You remember how Sydney Smith seriously cautioned a very forward lad who was going to meet the Archbishop of Canterbury at dinner. Mind,' said the Canon solemnly, 'Mind you don't call him Howley!'

Ah, how things are changed!

The old familiar faces are many of them no longer here. I look round the benches: I still know most of the middle-aged and older members : but I discern a great many nicelooking young fellows among the clergy, whom I do not know at all. A few years have brought those who were schoolboys, and who

(one confusedly thought) always would be schoolboys, into the duties and cares of men: and here they are, members of Assembly, each set over his parish in some pleasant country place, as the writer used to be. How well I know their ways; and all their little perplexities and worries! I suppose those who are growing old in any profession, if they be fairly good-hearted, know the warm flow of kind feeling towards the younger men who are worthily starting in it: but most of all, surely, it is so in the Church. If I were ass enough to fancy my blessing was worth anything, it should go heartily to many a quiet country manse. But here, Principal Lee is gone, and good Professor Robertson: Dr. Robert Lee, smartest speaker I ever heard in the Assembly, save perhaps his successor in Greyfriars Dr. Wallace: best and greatest, Norman Macleod, best and greatest despite of little things better otherwise: and he who though an ex-moderator, and many years Professor of Divinity in the Metropolitan University, was never to his friends anything but Tom Crawford, for the loveable schoolboy of St. Andrew's fifty years since was in him unsophisticated to the last: liberal though sound in his theology: twenty years ago advanced in his convictions of the need of improvement in public worship farther than many who now hold themselves far advanced: with the one weakness of a timidity in speaking out what he thought, which was worked upon by men a thousand miles below him, intellectually and morally.

Last to be named, Dr. Cook, whom nature intended for a Chief Justice or a Secretary of State, but perverse fate made a Scotch minister. Yes, these are gone: but no doubt new men of remarkable ability and great fitness for debate are yearly drawing ahead of the ruck. Such are Dr. Story, the biographer of Dr. Lee, always incisive and cool, not always conciliatory: Dr. Charteris, always conciliatory and always judicious, whom you trust and like the more the more you know him: above all Dr. Wallace, this year the most frequent speaker of the Assembly, and beyond comparison the most brilliant. One or two of the older generation of Assembly talkers are still spared: who, let it be said without offence, might with great advantage have been spared a good deal sooner. I do not mean by a grateful world, to which they are doubtless inestimable benefactors; long may they abide therein: but by the Assembly whose time they waste, and the tone of whose debates they lower. Vulgar declamatory appeals to vulgar prejudices ought not to be heard here. That they are sometimes heard is plain matter of fact.

The General Assembly, besides its other uses, happily provides occasion for the exercise of faculties which, but for its recurrence, might rust unoccupied away. During these ten days some clergymen, who are nobodies during the rest of the year, have their innings, and make the most of them. You find that men whose preaching is beyond words tedious and poor, have a lawyer-like faculty for business; and can, in a somewhat narrow and pettifogging fashion, speak with considerable ability and even vivacity. You may see such men quite happy, going on hour after hour in the minute discussion of the pettiest details. There is no topic so trivial, but what they will be ready to get up a debate upon it. Years ago, in a jaded house, at two

in the morning, I beheld a preacher (if he might be so styled who could not preach at all) endeavour to discuss at length whether or not it is permissible in a sermon to quote verse. The way in which he discussed that question was by strongly and repeatedly and very loudly expressing his own opinion upon it: as if anybody cared a brass farthing what he thought. It is a weakness about a deliberative assembly which sits too short a time to allow men to find their level in it, that a glib and confident utterance counts for a great deal too much. The reader will remember the estimation which, according to Butler, follows

Him who can express

No sense at all in several languages: and it is to be admitted that a man who can express opinions of no value whatsoever with fluency and confidence, and in a loud voice (that is needful), and who has the Old Bailey talent of shutting up younger members by some ready and insolent retort, also whose skin is (morally) about a foot thick, and formed of gutta percha, gets going on far too long and too often. You cannot degrade yourself by fighting him with his own weapons: and he is wholly unaware when he is pierced by yours. Once, indeed, I remember the most delicate fence proving brilliantly successful. was on the last occasion that Dr. Lee was pulled up about his innovations in public worship at Greyfriars. A country minister appeared, with others, at the bar against him, and made a very unsuccessful speech. Indeed, I do not think I ever heard a worse. But, though very weak, foolish, and rambling, it was plainly inspired by very keen feeling against Dr. Lee; and at one point the speaker said, with great severity of manner, that he would admit that Dr. Lee had been a very lucky man. Finally, he sat down amid general laughter: not with him. Other

speeches were made: and at length Dr. Lee rose to reply. He answered, with much power, the arguments of the other speakers. Finally, he came to the unfortunate one described. 'With regard to this speech,' he said, 'I shall say but one sentence. The reverend gentleman declared in it that I have been a very lucky man. It certainly did occur to me, as he went on, that upon this day my good luck had not deserted me.' I do not remember a happier sentence, judging from its effect on the House. The House roared. Dr. Lee's adversary was annihilated. Had Dr. Lee battered him, and danced upon him (and there was temptation to do so), a re-action would have come, and the sympathy of the Assembly been turned in his favour. In the Assembly you may hit a man hard, but not too hard. If you do, it will hurt yourself, not him. Yet, though this be true, there are one or two habitual talkers who make one think of the complaint made of Johnson's way of arguing: If his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt-end.' If their reasons are answered, some rough joke (which would never find admission to Punch) is used to turn the laugh against their opponent. A rule, too, with old hands, appears to be, Never admit you are wrong. This, too, I believe is the way with Old Bailey barristers. A worthy man, speaking in the Assembly, made reference to the teaching of a well-known heretic whom he called Socinus. A roar pulled him up. A mere slip of the tongue,' he said: ' of course I meant Socinius.' But some of the very best of mankind are lacking in exact scholarship, if the phrase be allowed. It is recorded that an excellent lay member heard it stated, in some report, that each student of divinity in the Universities is required to write a Greek Exegesis, or critical exercise on a difficult text. 'Ah,' said the good man, 'how delightful it is

that in these days, when we hear so much of Ecce Homo, every student has to write an Ecce Jesus!' O sancta simplicitas! Would we had more of it!

A pleasant characteristic of the debates of the Assembly which has just closed is the great amendment in temper, specially in the discussion of the still smouldering question of the improvement of the public worship of the National Church. Poor Dr. Lee, who is gone, acted as the head of the moral batteringram; and received very rough usage while breaking a way through the wall of unreasoning prejudice in many conscientious Scotch people. It is strange to think, now that the battle is won, that a few years ago distinct persecution was the lot of such as ventured to say they thought it would be well to stand at praise in church, and to kneel at prayer: also to have the organ where it was desired. I remember when a clergyman, now only in middle-age, who was the first to suggest the changes of posture, was rudely told, in his Presbytery, that he had better be off to the Church of England if he wanted these things. Bullying did not avail. That young clergyman stuck to the Church of his fathers, and now holds all but the best living in it. I remember when the ordinary phrases of courtesy were denied to Dr. Lee in public debate: when not merely was he not 'my friend,' but not even the reverend gentleman; ' he was That Individual. Within the last ten years, I heard a truly good clergyman say, on on many occasions, that the proposal to kneel at prayer and stand at singing was suggested by the Devil. I have in my possession a formal and lengthy letter of excommunication addressed by an aged and revered minister to a younger one, long his special friend, but who (though not having himself introduced any 'innovation') had said he saw no harm in his father and

his brother having severally brought in an organ. The younger man replied impenitently; and indeed with some spirit: and the old gentleman, who held as a vital dogma the Personal Infallibility (not of the Pope, but of himself), was finally estranged. But the younger man had the better: Never once, while his senior lived or when he died, did he speak or write of him but as one of the most conscientious of men. 'A perjured person :''a man who had broken his ordination Vows' used to be the designation of him who knelt at prayer. Men of sense always snapped their fingers at that kind of thing; now it is heard no more. In the late Assembly it was pleasing to find the most courteous and kindly address employed by the most decided opponents and the hardest hitters. The exceptions were insignificant. To one who (like the writer) stands in the friendliest relations with the leading men of all parties, who knows their sterling integrity and true attachment to the Church, and who has often grieved over the estrangement and misunderstandings of men who if they had known must have respected one another, this is matter for true thankfulness. Why on earth should good men quarrel, because their points of view are different, and their heads not all of a bigness? As for these little bits of decency in ritual, the game is long since won. It would avail just as much to go down to the seashore and make an abusive speech requiring the tide not to flow, as to think by speeches whether civil or abusive to stop the quiet but resolute course of intelligent opinion in Scotland. Indeed it is startling to look back, and to remark how quickly what seemed the most perdurable prejudices have crumbled away. Just this time twenty years, June 1856, the writer ventured to argue, in this Magazine, with his estimable brother-Scots, in favour of the organ. It is difficult,

doubtless, to argue a question when all the reasons are on one side, and there is nothing but stupid prejudice on the other. Yet, after noting some hopeful circumstances, the writer was constrained to confess his belief that though the organ would ultimately excite as little wonder in Scotland as in England, no one then living would see that time. He has just now turned over the Scotch Clergy List, and found that in the one Synod of Glasgow and Ayr he knows fifty-five churches which have instrumental music. Some of these have the temporary make-shift of the harmonium. As he is not familiarly acquainted with the whole of that district of the country, there may be various organs of whose existence he is not aware. One large parish near Glasgow has seven churches belonging to the National Establishment. Six of these have the organ. Even these facts do not bring out the existing state of things. You must weigh as well as count the supporters of the organ. It is not too much to say that there is hardly a man of the smallest mark among the clergy of the Scotch Church, who is not decided in his support of that grand instrument of praise. And every Scotch newspaper which I ever by any chance see is clear upon the same side. Indeed, the opposition to such improvements, where it is found, is possibly now daffed aside with somewhat too much of impatient contempt. Opposed to the organ?' I lately heard a very clever representative of young Scotland say: Why, he must be an idiot.' Neither will appeals to John Knox, and his dislike to the 'kist fu' o' whistles,' now avail. Men who believe that the Christian Church might and did sometimes go wrong down to the sixteenth century, will not now be readily induced to accept the infallibility of a few good reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in matters both doctrinal

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