full length, and in one of its worst attitudes, and, as if to prevent all suspicion regarding the truth of the picture, taken apparently not by an enemy. The unfortunate Robert Heron, the familiar friend of Burns, and whose melancholy history has been so touchingly recorded by D'Israeli in his "Calamities of Authors," lived at this period exclusively by his exertions as an "author of all work." He sat in the Assembly during the debate as an elder for his native burgh of New Galloway; he even took a prominent part in it; and to his singularly ready and masterly pen can we alone attribute a report so unlike, in its fulness and general literary tone, almost all the other reports of the age. It may be well, too, to mention that, though extensively circulated at the time in the form of a pamphlet, its faithfulness has never once been questioned.
It has been remarked by Carlyle, that "the history of whatever man has accomplished is at bottom only the history of great men, leaders of their brethren, who have been the modellers, and, in a wide sense, the creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men have contrived to do." Certainly, in the religious, as in the political world, we find all the more remarkable events, and all the more influential codes of belief, clustered, if we may so express ourselves, round a few great names. The history of Knox is the history of the Reformation in Scotland; the very name of Calvin expresses the religious code of half the churches of Protestantism. Apparently on a similar principle, we find the cause of general missionary exertion in this country connected in an especial manner with one great name. The reader of one of the most amusing novels of Scott—Guy Mannering—must remember that, on Colonel Mannering's visit to Edinburgh, the lawyer Pleydell brings him to the Greyfriars to hear Principal Robertson preach, and that, instead of the historian, he hears but the historian's colleague. Sir Walter had too often sat in the Greyfriars not to know that the pulpit ministrations of Robertson could have formed no proper subject of favorable or
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