delicacy and
hesitation to be used in employing the weapon of ridicule on any point
connected with religion. Some passages occur in the work before us for
which the writer's sole apology must be the uncontroulable disposition
to indulge the peculiarity of his vein of humour--a temptation which
even the saturnine John Knox was unable to resist either in narrating
the martyrdom of his friend Wisheart or the assassination of his enemy
Beatson, and in the impossibility of resisting which his learned and
accurate biographer has rested his apology for this mixture of jest and
earnest.

"There are writers," he says (rebutting the charge of Hume against
Knox), "who can treat the most sacred subjects with a levity bordering
on profanity. Must we at once pronounce them profane, and is nothing
to be set down to the score of natural temper inclining them to wit
and humour? The pleasantry which Knox has mingled with his narrative
of his (Cardinal Beatson's) death and burial is unseasonable and
unbecoming. But it is to be imputed not to any pleasure which he took
in describing a bloody scene, but to the strong propensity which he
had to indulge his vein of humour. Those who have read his history
with attention must have perceived that he is not able to check this
even on the very serious occasions."--_Macrie's Life of Knox_, p. 147.

Indeed Dr. Macrie himself has given us a striking instance of the
indulgence which the Presbyterian clergy, even of the strictest
persuasion, permit to the _vis comica_. After describing a polemical
work as "ingeniously constructed and occasionally enlivened with strokes
of humour," he transfers, to embellish his own pages, (for we can
discover no purpose of edification which the tale serves), a ludicrous
parody made by an ignorant parish-priest on certain words of a Psalm,
too sacred to be here quoted. Our own innocent pleasantry cannot, in
this instance, be quite reconciled with that of the learned biographer
of John Knox, but we can easily conceive that his authority may be
regarded in Scotland as decisive of the extent to which a humourist may
venture in exercising his wit upon scriptural expressions without
incurring censure even from her most rigid divines.

It may however be a very different point how far the author is entitled
to be acquitted upon the second point of indictment. To use too much
freedom with things sacred is a course much more easily glossed over
than tha