scientious Dissenters--of many peaceful gentlemen on the banks of the
Dee, who mixed a happy playful humour with a catholic reverence for that
Christianity which he could recognise in other sects, though
preferring his own?

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The present generation of Burnetts think that those slang names were
invented by Barclay, but I knew him well, and venture to doubt his
humorous powers. In the midst of "sporting" and violent excitement he
was serious in talk, as became the descendant of the old Quakers.

[8] Mrs. Russell had lost her two sons by a strange fatality--both were
drowned, the elder, Lockhart, while skating at Bath, about 1805-6,
James, the younger, in crossing the river Dee in a boat rowed by
himself in 1827.

III.

Edward Ramsay left Somersetshire amidst the general regrets of his
parishioners and neighbours, and entered on his Edinburgh career 1st
January 1824. The journal which I am now using has not hitherto spoken
much of the differing opinions of his brother clergymen, although there
is sometimes a clergyman noted as "very low," and elsewhere, one branded
as a "concealed Papist." But in Edinburgh--it is vain to conceal
it--every profession must be broken into parties. He found Edinburgh, or
rather I should say the Episcopal Church in Edinburgh, then
theologically divided between the Evangelicals, headed by the Rev.
Edward Craig and the old-fashioned Churchmen, the rather moral school,
of which Mr. Alison was the distinguished ornament. Mr. Ramsay went to
St. George's Chapel, York Place, as Mr. Shannon's curate, in the
beginning of 1824, and remained doing that duty for two and a half
years. He then went to St. Paul's, Carrubber's Close, where he laboured
for a year.

In 1825 Ramsay "toiled on" with sermons and wrote a series on the
Articles. "A great improvement," he says, "must have taken place in
Edinburgh, for unquestionably the sermons I then got credit for we
should all think little of now[9]." In 1826 he left Mr. Shannon's
chapel, and took the single charge of the quaint old chapel of St.
Paul's, Carrubber's Close. Amongst the events recorded of the year was
the acquaintance he made by officiating at the funeral of Lady Scott,
Sir Walter's wife. In 1827 he mentions a change, "a considerable move to
me, which, under God, has been a good one." He closed with an offer of
the curacy of St. John's, under Bishop Sandford, when he was
thirty-seven years of age. In spring he was ill, and