wish to avoid
bloodshed, to strike no blow that was not inevitable, to keep the breach
from being widened by actual civil war; and that the policy of
temporising as long as that was possible was anything but wicked wiles
and intentions of betrayal, was an idea which he would seem to have been
incapable of conceiving. This is a drawback perhaps common to every
struggle so important and fundamental as was the strife which began to
rage in Scotland. Had we a history compiled by the spectators to whom we
have referred it would probably, unless nature gave them an exceptional
keenness of vision, be wanting in those qualities of animation and force
which he who is confident of having every good influence on his side,
and nothing but the powers of evil against him, is likely to possess.
Major indeed was a historian, but he did not meddle with the history of
his own time; and Buchanan, while separated from the reader by the bonds
and cerements of his Latin, and therefore shut out from a popular
audience, is as great a partisan as Knox.

The little garrison of St. Andrews was taken, as everybody knows, by the
French, and carried away to prison and the galleys; but no blood was
shed to avenge the blood of Beatoun, a point which ought to be put to
their credit. John Knox suffered all these misfortunes with a steadfast
soul, still declaring to all who surrounded him, in the extremity of
suffering, hardship, and sickness, that he should again preach in that
Church of St. Andrews from which he had been taken. This is the first of
the many prophecies completely verified afterwards with which he is
credited. He escaped after about three years of captivity and misery in
France, during which he would seem to have been actually employed in the
galleys, and came to England, where it is to be supposed the story of
his influence and power with the Scotch Reformers had preceded him,
otherwise the advancement to which he reached, and which might have been
greater but for his dissatisfaction with the imperfectly Reformed Church
there, and the bondage of ceremonials and traditions still left in it,
would have been still more extraordinary. He was one of the chaplains to
the boy-king Edward, for whom he had the amiable prejudice common to
those who secure the favour of very young princes, expecting from him
everything that was great and good. At the death of the young King,
however, Knox removed hurriedly to the Continent with many others,
knowi