92 FAMOUS SCOTS 



them, too, seemed typical of a time of famine and desti- 

 tution.' 



'I am proud of my country, no other country in 

 Europe could have done it,' said Lord Jeffrey. The 

 Church had simply, in 1843, reverted to the precedents 

 of 1560 and 1578, and had, in the simile of Goldsmith 

 happily used by Miller on the occasion, returned like 

 the hare to the spot from which it flew. Edinburgh, he 

 maintained, had not seen such a day since the unroll- 

 ing by Johnston of Warriston of the parchment in the 

 Greyfriars'. There was a secession, not from the Church, 

 but from the law courts, and temporary majorities of 

 the Assembly. But the evil men do lives in brass after 

 them, and the Act of 1712 had rent the Church of 

 Scotland. No other country had been so fortunately 

 situated for the exemplification of an unbroken and a 

 National Church. It was left to two Tory Governments 

 to ruin it, but opportunities once lost may not there- 

 after be recovered. Under the long reign of Moderatism 

 it looked as if the Nee tamen consumebatur were indeed 

 to be a mockery. But the revival of national feeling 

 at the beginning of the century, and the expression of 

 popular rights in the Reform Bill of 1832, were waves 

 that were destined to extend from the nation to the 

 Church. The great book of M'Crie in 1811 had truly 

 been fruitful of results. For a century Moderatism had 

 reigned on a lost sense of nationality. But, as for long 

 the history of Rome had been written with a patrician 

 bias and an uneasy remembrance of that figure of 



