with the fist, he is one of those large,
but somewhat coarse-grained natures, that influence rude populations by
having so much in common with them, and in which the piety of the
Christian, the thought of the Protestant, and the zeal of the martyr are
curiously blended with the ferocity of the demagogue. Jenny Geddes, at
the time when Archbishop Laud attempted to force Episcopacy upon
Scotland, is a fair specimen of the kind of character which the
teachings and the practice of such a man would tend to produce in a
nation. This rustic heroine was present when the new bishop, hateful to
Presbyterian eyes, began the service, with the smooth saying, "Let us
read the Collect of the Day." Jenny rose in wrath, and cried out to the
surpliced official of the Lord,--"Thou foul thief, wilt thou say mass at
my lug?" and hurled her stool at his head. Then rose cries of "A Pope! a
Pope! Stone him!" And "the worship of the Lord in Episcopal decency and
order" was ignominiously stopped. And in the next reign, when the same
thing was attempted, the Covenanters, the true spiritual descendants of
Knox, opposed to the most brutal persecution a fierce, morose heroism,
strangely compounded of barbaric passion and Christian fortitude. They
were the most perfect specimens of pure moral grit the world has ever
seen. In the great theological humorist of the nineteenth century, the
Reverend Sydney Smith, the legitimate intellectual successor of the
Reverend Rabelais and the Reverend Swift and the Reverend Sterne, their
sullen intrepidity excites a mingled feeling, in which fun strives with
admiration. In arguing against all intolerance, the intolerance of the
church to which he belonged as well as the intolerance of the churches
to which he was opposed, he said that persecution and bloodshed had no
effect in preventing the Scotch, "that metaphysical people, from going
to heaven in their true way instead of our true way"; and then comes the
humorous sally,--"With a little oatmeal for food and a little sulphur
for friction, allaying cutaneous irritation with one hand and grasping
his Calvinistical creed with the other, Sawney ran away to the flinty
hills, sung his psalm out of tune his own way, and listened to his
sermon of two hours long, amid the rough and imposing melancholy of the
tallest thistles." But from the graver historian, developing the
historic significance of their determined resistance to the insolent
claims of ecclesiastical authority