42 FAMOUS SCOTS 



In the picture of old * Jupiter ' there is something that 

 recalls the belief of the erratic Lord Brougham, when he 

 voted against the Veto Act and the right to protest 

 against unsuitable presentees, from fear that it might end 

 in ' rejecting men too strict in morals and too diligent 

 in duty to please our vitiated tastes ! ' Carry le's Auto- 

 biography is one of the most instructive of books ; like 

 the similar disclosure by Benvenuto Cellini, it is the 

 presentation of a man who is destitute of a moral sense. 

 Although in the pulpits of the metropolis Moderatism 

 was but only too well represented, there were yet some 

 striking exceptions. Sir Walter Scott, whose feelings 

 led him strongly in the direction of the Latitudinarian 

 party, has yet drawn in Guy Mannering an admirable 

 sketch of Dr. John Erskine, the colleague of Principal 

 Robertson in the Greyfriars, and for long the leader of 

 the Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland. Some 

 of the members of that party were gladly heard by 

 Miller, but his greatest delight he confesses to have 

 been in hearing the discourses of the old Seceder, Dr. 

 Thomas M'Crie. ' Be sure,' said his uncles to him on 

 leaving Cromarty, 'and go to hear M'Crie.' The 

 doctor was no master of rhetoric or of pulpit eloquence, 

 but the doctrine was the theology of the true descendant 

 of the men of Drumclog and Bothwell. Nothing is 

 more characteristic of the university system of Scotland 

 than that the greatest ecclesiastical scholar she could 

 produce was to be found in a humble seceding chapel 

 at the foot of Carrubber's Close. In Scotland, at least 



