AFTER giving his account of the Reformation in Scotland, and propounding his theory of the nature and causes of that movement, Mr. Buckle continues his sketch of Scottish ecclesiastical history as far as the Revolution of 1688-9. In the events of these hundred and thirty years he finds also a thin sort of unity, consisting in a modification of that problem of three bodies, in terms of which he had represented all prior Scottish history as capable of being expressed. He does not say this directly himself. Indeed, as soon as he has got a little way clear of the Reformation, his problem of three bodies seems rather to desert him; and, though we still hear of king, nobles, and clergy, and are called upon to contemplate, as before, their mutual attractions and repulsions, there has somehow bounced up in the meantime a vast, black fourth body, the people, of whom it seems to be necessary to take account more and more, and whose relations to the king, nobles, and clergy have suddenly become such that the movement which we were taught so expressly to regard as aristocratic in its origin assumes, under our eyes, a decidedly democratic prolongation. In other words, after passing the immediate fact of the Reformation, Mr. Buckle does come round very considerably to the more ordinary view, which represents the course of the Reformed Kirk of Scotland as an extraordinary development of democratic spirit and principle. I believe that there is a historical inconsistency, which he would find it difficult to get over, between his acquiescence in this account of the course and tendency of the Reformed Kirk after its establishment, and his preceding account of the manner in which it came to be established. Mr. Buckle, however, has

a way of letting himself over the apparent inconsistency. It is as follows:

Although the Reformation was the act of the nobles, triumphing over the old. clergy and the crown, it was no sooner effected than they found themselves face to face with a Frankenstein of their own raising, in the shape of the new Protestant preachers, who had gone with them so far. These black-coated gentry, appearing in the field after the battle was over, had their own views as to the division of the spoil, and somewhat astonished the barons and lairds by saying so. In Mr. Buckle's own words,

Immediately the revolution was com"pleted, the nobles and the preachers began to quarrel about the wealth of "the Church. The nobles, thinking that "they ought to have it, took it into their own hands. Thereupon the Protestant

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preachers said that the nobles were "instigated by the devil." The nobles, we are left to imagine, only clung the harder to what they had seized, and told the preachers to go to the personage named. They did not go quite so far; but they did the next most vehement thing in the circumstances; they went to-the people. "The clergy," says Mr. Buckle, "finding themselves despised by "the governing class, united themselves "heartily with the people, and advocated "democratic principles. In 1574 Mel"ville became their leader. Under his "auspices that great struggle began "which never stopped until, sixty years "later, it produced the rebellion against "Charles I." This struggle, he goes on to explain, assumed at once the form of a contest whether Presbyterianism or Episcopacy should be the system of the Reformed Kirk. The preachers and the people fought frantically for Presbyterianism; but the nobles upheld Episco

pacy, "because they loved inequality for "the same reasons which made the clergy "love equality." Ere long that shambling Scotch Solomon, King James, grew up to be of age enough to show his own leanings to prelacy, and to associate himself with the nobles in its behalf. A sad time he consequently had of it with the Melvilles, the Blacks, the Welshes, and the rest of the Presbyterian clergy. They were incessantly round him, clutching him by the throat every time he made an attempt to appoint a bishop, and thundering in his ears from the pulpit and in the closet such democratic language about the relative rights and duties of kings and subjects as no other sovereign on earth had then to listen to, and as even now, if reverend gentlemen ventured on it with reference to Queen Victoria, might lead to prosecutions for treason. A happy day it was for James when he turned his back on Edinburgh, and set out, in his thirty-seventh year, to take possession of the English throne. Then, from his safe distance, and with his new power at his back, he paid off his tormentors. Mr. Buckle briefly relates how, when once on the throne of England, he succeeded in setting up Episcopacy, with some of its accompaniments, in Scotland. With equal brevity he tells of the attempt of his successor, the melancholy king of the narrow forehead, to force even a more rigid Episcopacy upon Scotland; and how the Scotch people, rising in rebellion, not only shattered Episcopacy and restored Presbytery within their own land, but also gave the signal for the great Puritan Revolution which brought Charles to the block and made England a commonwealth. Then, overleaping the Cromwell period, he glances at the condition of Scotland after the Restoration, when, first under Charles II. and then under James II., there was the fearful retaliation of those prelatic persecutions under which Scotland bled and groaned, till at length the Revolution re-established the Kirk on a definite basis, and the weary land had rest in its selfselected bed of Calvinism, Kirk-sessions, Presbyteries, Synods, and General Assemblies.

Except that in Mr. Buckle's summary of this portion of Scottish history, as in his summaries of the preceding portions, we miss that profound originality which we had been led to expect from so much preliminary flourish about what real history ought to be-except that, here again, like the Irishman, we find the scientific sedan-chair in which we had been offered a lift, no such mighty invention after all-I do not know that, at first sight, much fault would be found with it. There are scores of summaries of the same series of events in our language quite as scientific, and a good deal. more lively; but Mr. Buckle's may answer very well for ordinary English purposes. On a closer and deeper examination, however, some drawbacks would require to be made before giving it even this recommendation.

As I have already said, there is too violent a break of continuity between his prior account of the Scottish Reformation as a purely aristocratic achievement, and the account he now gives of the early history of the reformed Kirk as a democratic movement of clergy and people against the nobles. Without again appealing to philosophical considerations of human nature tending to show that the case could not have been quite as Mr. Buckle represents it—that his theory of the post-Reformation history of Scotland, as consisting only in the clergy going mad for private ends and biting the people, is rationally as imperfect as his theory of the pre-Reformation history, as consisting only in the nobles going mad for private ends and biting the clergy-we might appeal to the records of what actually did happen. There did, as Mr. Buckle states, arise differences between the nobles and the reformed preachers immediately after the Reformation as to the appropriation of the revenues of the old Church. Had John Knox had his way with these revenues, there would have been such a provision for learning, and for other high purposes of civilization in Scotland, over and above the immediate provision for the new clergy, as few lands under the sun have hitherto seen. He

had, among other things, a splendid scheme of national education, which included, first-a School in every parish, where every village artisan might be taught to read and write, and have, moreover, his sprinkling of grammar and Latin, to bring out whatever seeds of higher capability there might be in him; next, a College in every notable town, "in which the arts, at least logic and rhetoric, should be read;" and, lastly, three or four national Universities. It was his desire that arrangements should be made in connexion with this scheme, such that if, in the meanest family in the land, there were a lad of more than ordinary intellectual promise, that lad should be taken in hand as precious to the nation, and the way to honour and influence opened up to him. Those were not the days in which men had discovered that such state endowments for intellectual purposes were politically pernicious. But the nobles and landed proprietors had lights of their own on the subject. They voted Knox's scheme to be "a devout imagination," kept most of what they had got, and yielded only so much as sufficed for the maintenance of a poor ministry, and of that humble machinery of parish schools and the like, to which Scotland, nevertheless, owes so much. Nay, more, in the course of this contest for the Church revenues, there did develope itself a natural reason why the nobles should find prelacy of a certain sort convenient. Every one has heard of the nickname of Tulchan Bishops, by which the popular wit of that time in Scotland designated the prelates who were forced on the Kirk by James VI. and his adherents among the nobles. A tulchan, in the language of the country people, was a calf's skin stuffed with straw, and placed beside the cow while she was being milked, in order that the cow might think all was right, and yield the milk freely; and the implication in the nickname was, that the Scottish prelates were not proper specimens of their order, but only wore the title that their patrons might have the milk. But, notwithstanding this connexion between

prelacy and aristocratic interest in Scotland after the Reformation, it would be wrong to assert that the struggle between Prelacy and Presbytery in Scotland, during the reigns of James and Charles L., was equivalent merely to a class-antagonism between the Scottish aristocracy and the Scottish clergy. On an analysis of the population of Scotland at that time, in its several constituent portions of nobles, lairds or gentry, clergy, burgesses, and common people, with a view to estimate the proportions of Prelatic and Presbyterian sentiment in each rank and class (for which analysis more materials exist than might be supposed), it would be found that, while Presbyterianism might justly be described as the popular cause, there was a mixture of all ranks on both sides. There were whole districts, and notably the town and shire of Aberdeen, where anti-Presbyterian feeling so prevailed, even among the people, that, when Presbytery triumphed, they had to be invaded and converted by rather rough reasoning. Among the clergy themselves, too, there was a time when Presbyterianism became nearly dormant, when Tulchan Prelacy and its accompaniments were acquiesced in by what seemed a majority, and when such staunch chips of the old block as Calderwood had to lament over the degeneracy of their brethren from the days of Knox and Melville. Lastly, as Calvinism and Presbyterianism had been the forms of theology and Church-government under the inspiration of which such of the Scottish nobility as favoured the Reformation had acted in helping it forward, so in what amount of traditional Presbyterianism there did exist in Scotland during the era of forced Prelacy the nobles did not cease to be represented.

Whoever, indeed, studies the true history of the struggle between Presbyterianism and Prelacy in Scotland will have to take account of a phenomenon to which Mr. Buckle has hardly adverted. He will find that, whatever continuity may be traced in the life of Scotland and the working of its theolo

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gical and ecclesiastical opinions, from the Reformation on through the reigns of Mary and James, there was, in the first years of the reign of Charles I., a new rousing and mustering of the elements. under the operation of new causes. was then that the Arminianism or NeoCatholicism of Laud-which gave a shock even to the national mind of England, and, by its conflict with the popular Calvinism of that country and its alliance with the doctrine of arbitrary government in the State, occasioned questionings that might not otherwise have been raised there as to the whole theory and expediency of Episcopacydescended like a cloud on the small neighbour-nation, provoking fire and explosion. As early as 1633, when Laud visited Scotland, he had fastened on the barbaric little country as a sort of outfield region on which, less impeded than in England by powerful Puritans and Parliament-men, he might carry out his views in their integrity, and rear a Church-system into the model of which he should be able to work the last perfections of his Neo-Catholic rule and ritual. With the Scottish Bishops as his agents he began the experiment with a new Service-Book and Book of Canons. Then came the catastrophe. The land which had at least borne with Prelacy and its accompaniments so long as they did not seem to trench on the fundamental matters of Calvinism and national independence, would not bear this insult of being made the nursery-ground of an Anglicanism deemed exotic in England itself. The old depths of Presbyterian feeling were broken up and yielded their unspent force. The older feeling of nationality was likewise called forth. The two feelings mingled. In the halls of the dead it was as if the spirit of Wallace was heard communing de re Scotica with the spirit of Knox. Nor, in the manner in which the result of their communings first declared itself, was there wanting the due touch of characteristic national humour. Lo! the assembled crowd in St. Giles's Church, Edinburgh, on Sunday, the 23d of July, 1637, when the new Service-Book was

to be used for the first time! Jenny Geddes hurls her stool. The nation accepts the homely signal. The signal had come from the people, and it was they who were first in the field ready for actual fight. But the clergy were soon in the field too. First came the Hendersons, the Dicksons, the Rutherfords, and others who had for years past been true to Presbyterianism in their hearts, and had never ceased to witness to it publicly as opportunity offered. Next came the Baillies, the Ramsays, the Rollocks, and others, who would have been satisfied hitherto with a moderate Prelacy, but were now convinced out of all doubts and hesitations. Finally, in successive rings round this group of leaders, there gathered the whole ministry of the land, except the Bishops, their immediate adherents, and the Aberdeen Doctors. And what of the nobles and gentry? In overwhelming proportion they, too, were now Presbyterian. By the end of 1637 there were at least twenty of the Scottish nobles pledged, along with the leading clergy, and with the chief burghs, to the pending contest-the Earls of Angus, Rothes, Sutherland, Dalhousie, Cassilis, Wemyss, and Lothian, and Lords Sinclair, Dalkeith, Lindsay, Balmerino, Burleigh, Hume, Boyd, Yester, Cranstoun, Loudoun, Montgomery, Dalzel', and Fleming. These names it is all the more necessary to enumerate because most of them are still known in the highest ranks of our British peerage, although in course of time the Presbyterian associations which were once their distinction have ceased to encircle them, and their present wearers are almost to a man dutiful members of that Church into which their forefathers refused to be forced, but which has since, by a milder and more natural mode of suasion, attached to itself gradually the whole aristocracy of Scotland. But these names were not all. Others and others were rapidly added, including that of the astute Argyle. When, in February and March, 1638, the nation, seeing war with Charles to be inevitable, bound itself by that Solemn Leagu: and Covenant of which the whole world has