addressed to the slayers of the Cardinal, and to the
calling of Knox himself, a crisis of popular emotion and vehement
feeling. Such a man as Major, a son of the Renaissance, no Reformer nor
careful of any of these things, must have looked on with strange
feelings at all the revolutions accomplished before him, the rude jests
and songs, the half-jocular broadly humorous assaults, the cry of
heresy, the horror of the burnings, the deadly earnest of both preacher
and people after Beatoun's well-deserved but terrible end which cut all
compromises short. One wonders what thoughts were going on in the mind
of the old scholar who kept his place in his stall as well when mass was
sung as when every trace of that "idolatrous sacrifice" had been trodden
under foot. Would it be more or less the same to him whatever they
preached, those wild religionists, who tore each other in pieces? did he
look on with a secret smile at the turmoil they made, as if it mattered
which was uppermost, with a natural horror at the fierce flames of the
human sacrifice, yet consent in his mind that if they could so stamp the
heresy out which would otherwise destroy them, the bishops were only
logical to do it? while on the other side there was not much in point of
natural justice to be said against Norman Leslie and his men who slew
the Cardinal. Such spectators there must have been in no small number,
affording a curious rim and edge of observers to all that the more
active and violent might do or say. But these lookers-on have said
nothing on the subject, or their mild voices have been lost in the
clangour of actors vehement and earnest. It has been reserved for our
age to bring these dispassionate or, as we are apt to think, cynical
observers into the front rank.

The first scene in which John Knox comes prominently into sight of the
world occurs in the midst of that small but urgent and much-agitated
society on the fierce little headland by the sea, in the great and noble
cathedral which for most of the intervening time has been nothing but
ruins. We must in imagination rebuild these lofty walls, throw up again
the noble piers and clustered pillars, and see the townsfolk streaming
in--a crowd more picturesque in garb than any Scots assembly nowadays,
with its provost and councillors in their municipal finery: and the
grave representatives of the colleges filing in to their stalls--very
grave now, we may well believe, with many a look at the group o