SCOTLAND, CHURCH OF.

united under the name of 'The United Presbyterian Church' (q. v.). Negotiations are at present in progress for an union of the United Presbyterian Church and the Free Church.

held the divine right of the people to choose their own ministers. The leader of the discontented party was a minister named Ebenezer Erskine, and he with his adherents, in the year 1733, finally separated from the Establishment, and formed a A few remarks may be added on the history of communion which took the title of the Associate Scottish Episcopacy subsequently to the Revolution. Presbytery, though its members were popularly It is a common but erroneous opinion that almost known as the Seceders. The Seceders themselves all the Episcopal clergy were Jacobites from were soon divided by a very absurd dispute into the time of the accession of William and Mary. two bodies, called the Burgher and Antiburgher The bishops were so; but a large number, Synods. In the year 1761, another secession from probably a considerable majority of the clergy, the Establishment took place in connection with the had at first no objection to take the oath of law of patronage; and the separated body assumed allegiance to the new government. During the the name of the Presbytery of Relief. reign of Queen Anne, the Episcopal clergy were well disposed to the government, knowing the queen's good wishes to their communion. They were frequently harassed by the courts of the Establishment; but all who were willing to take the oaths obtained an ample protection for their worship on the passing of the Toleration Act of 1712. On the death of the queen, almost all the clergy, and most of the laity, were involved directly or indirectly in the attempts to overthrow the Hanoverian dynasty, and it was this which finally made the names of Episcopalian and Jacobite for many years to be convertible terms.

There were no further secessions from the church; but its members were divided into two parties, known as the Moderates and the Evangelicals (q. v.), the former of whom were favourable, the latter hostile to the law of patronage. For many years the Moderates, headed by Dr Robertson the historian and others of his school, and supported by the influence of the government, maintained an ascendency in the General Assembly and throughout the country. In the latter years of George III., and during the reign of George IV., this ascendency began to decrease. The political excitement which prevailed in the beginning of the reign of William IV. strongly affected the Scottish Establishment, which from its very constitution is peculiarly liable to be moved by the impulses of popular feeling. The two parties in the General Assembly engaged in a struggle more fierce than any in which they had yet met; and the subject of dispute, as before, was immediately connected with the law of patronage. Dr Chalmers, the most distinguished minister in Scotland, added the whole weight of his influence to the popular party, and in 1834 an interim act of Assembly was passed, known as the Veto Act, which declared it to be a fundamental law of the church that no pastor should be intruded on any congregation contrary to the will of the people, and laid down certain rules for carrying out this principle. The legality of this act was doubted; and in connection with a presentation to the parish of Auchterarder, the presentee, on being rejected by the presbytery in terms of the Veto Act, appealed, with concurrence of the patron, to the Court of Session-the supreme civil court in Scotland. That court decided that the conduct of the presbytery in rejecting the presentee was illegal, and their judgment was affirmed by the House of Lords. Other cases of a similar nature followed, and something like a conflict took place between the civil and ecclesiastical courts, the former enforcing their sentences by civil penalties, the latter suspending and deposing the ministers who obeyed the injunctions of the Court of Session. In the General Assembly of 1843 the dispute came to a crisis. A large number of ministers and elders of the popular party left the Assembly, and met apart in a similar body, of which Dr Chalmers was chosen moderator. They formed themselves into a separate communion under the title of 'The Free Church of Scotland,' and gave up their benefices in the Established Church, and all connection whatever with that body. The Free Church carried off about onehalf of the members of the Establishment, and became a rival communion in most of the parishes of Scotland. See FREE CHURCH.

Before the commencement of this great struggle, and again soon after its conclusion, the divisions connected with the older separation were partially healed. In 1820 the Burgher and Antiburgher Seceders were united under the name of the Associate Synod of the Secession Church; and in 1847 this Associate Synod and the Relief Synod were

It

In the meantime, the succession of bishops had been kept up by new consecrations, and after some years the dioceses, though diminished in number, were regularly filled. An important change took place in the forms of worship. No longer trammelled by their connection with the state, they adopted liturgical forms similar to those in the English Prayer-book, and in almost all cases identical, except that many of the congregations used an Office for the communion modelled on that of the Scottish Liturgy of King Charles I. The Episcopalians took no such open part in the insurrection of 1745 as they did in that of 1715, but their sympathies were known to be with the House of Stewart; and the government carried through parliament some intolerant acts, which were put in execution with great harshness, and which for many years suppressed all public worship in the Episcopal communion. was only after the accession of George III. that these statutes ceased to be actively enforced; and it was not till 1792 that the Episcopalians, who from the death of Prince Charles had acknowledged the reigning dynasty, were relieved from the penal laws. The act which gave this relief imposed restrictions on their clergy officiating in England, and prohibited their holding benefices in the English Church. In 1804, the bishops and clergy agreed to adopt the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, and in 1863, the Prayer-book was adopted as the authorised service-book of the Episcopal Church, permission being given in certain cases to use the Scottish Communion Office. The restrictions imposed on the Scottish clergy by the act of 1792 were modified by an act passed in 1840; and in 1864 they were entirely removed, the right being reserved to bishops in England and Ireland to refuse institution to à Scottish clergyman without assigning any reason, on his first presentation to a benefice in England or Ireland, but not after he should have once held such benefice.

The dioceses of the Scottish Episcopal Church are seven in number, viz., Moray, Aberdeen, Brechin, Argyle, St Andrews, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. The bishops are chosen by the clergy of the diocese, and by representatives of the lay communicants, a majority of both orders being necessary to a valid election. One of the bishops, under the name of Primus, chosen by the other bishops, presides at all meetings of the bishops, and has certain other privileges, but possesses no metropolitan authority.

SCOTLAND, ROYAL ARMS OF SCOTT.

Royal Arms of Scotland, previous to the Union.

or, holding in the dexter paw a sword, and in the sinister a sceptre, both erect proper.

The lion is first seen on the seal of Alexander II., and the tressure on that of Alexander III. The unicorn supporters do not appear on any of the royal seals of Scotland till the time of Queen Mary, on whose first Great Seal (1550) they are represented as chained and gorged with crowns. They were, however, sculptured on Melrose Abbey as early as

SCOTT.

contributed some vigorous essays on 'The Characteristics of the Great Masters' to Blackwood's Magazine. An unusually interesting Memoir by his brother, W. B. Scott, was published in 1850. SCOTT, SIR MICHAEL, a medieval scholar and philosopher of the 13th c., whose real history is not only obscure but positively unknown. Boece identifies him with a Michael Scott of Balweary, in the parish of Kirkcaldy, in Fifeshire, who, along with Sir Michael de Wemyss, was sent to Norway in 1290, by the Scottish Estates, to bring home the 'Maiden of Norway,' and his death is fixed in the following year. But Sir Robert Sibbald, in his History of Fife and Kinross (published in the reign of Charles II.), speaks of a certain indenture, dated 1294, to which S.'s name was affixed, and in another part of the same book states that he went on a second embassy to Norway, in 1310, to demand the cession of the Orkneys. If we may rely upon Sir Robert's statement, it is hardly possible that the Scotch wizard' of European renown could have been the same person as Michael Scott of Balweary, because (as the story goes) after studying at Oxford or Paris, he went to the court of Frederic II., and wrote there some books at the request of that monarch. Now Frederic died in 1250, and supposing the wizard' not more than 30 years old at that time, this would make him 70 when he went to Norway the first time to bring home the Maiden,' and 90 on his second visit to demand the cession of the Orkneys; neither of which things is likely. Hector Boece, it should be observed, is our sole authority for the identification of Michael Scott of Balweary with the wizard, while, on the other hand, Dempster, in his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Scotorum (Bologna, 1627), distinctly avers that the name Scotus, borne by the latter, was that of his nation and not of his family--Michael, the Scot.' It has been suggested that the ambassador may have been the son of the wizard, and that Boece may have confounded the two-a supposition probable enough in itself, but for which, in the absence of evidence, nothing can be said. The legend is further complicated by the fact that it appears to be English as well as Scottish. Cumberland claims the magic hero for herself. Camden, in his Britannia (1586), asserts that he was a monk of Ulme or Holme Cultram in that country, about 1290, who applied himself so closely to the mathematics, and other abstract parts of learning, that he was generally looked on as a conjuror; and a vain credulous humour has handed down I know not what miracles done by him.' He likewise states that S.'s magic books' were preserved there, but adds that they were then mouldering into dust; and Satchells (see his rhyming History of the Right Honourable Name of Scott) declares that he examined a huge tome which was held to be the wizard's, at Burgh-under-Bowness in 1629. According to the Scottish legend, he was buried in the Abbey of Melrose, and the Border was the scene of many of his most wonderful exploits, such as the cleaving of the Eildon Hills into three separate cones, and his bridling of the river Tweed! Dante mentions him in his Inferno (some years before 1321), in a way that shews that already his fame as a magician had spread over the continent, and suggests the suspicion that he must have died sooner than is commonly believed. All, however, that any one who rationally looks at the legend can believe is, that a certain Michael Scott, or Michael the Scot, flourished in the 13th c., and was mistaken by the common people of his country for a wizard or magician, probably on account of his skill as an experimentalist in natural philosophy. The writings attributed to him indicate that his studies lay in this direction.

SCOTT, SIR WALTER, the fourth child of Walter Scott, Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, was born in that city on the 15th August 1771. He came of the old Border family, the Scotts of Harden, an offshoot from the house of Buccleuch. Though he matured into a man of robust health, and of strength nearly herculean, as a child he was feeble and sickly, and very early he was smitten with a lameness which remained with him through life. His childhood was passed for the most part at Sandyknowe, the farm of his grandfather, in Roxburghshire. Here the foundations of his mind were laid; and his early and delighted familiarity with the ballads and legends then floating over all that part of the country, probably did more than any other influence to determine the sphere and modes of his future literary activity. Between the years 1779 and 1783 he attended the High School of Edinburgh, where, despite occasional flashes of talent, he shone considerably more on the playground as a bold, high-spirited, and indomitable little fellow, with an odd turn for story-telling, than within-he did as a student. In 1783, he went to the University, and for three years he remained there, as it seemed, not greatly to his advantage. Afterwards, in the height of his fame, he was wont to speak with deep regret of his neglect of his early opportunities. But though leaving college but scantly furnished with the knowledge formally taught there, in a desultory way of his own he had been hiving up stores of valuable, though unassorted information. From his earliest childhood onward, he was a ravenous and insatiable reader; his memory was of extraordinary range and tenacity, and of what he either read or observed he seems to have forgot almost nothing. Of Latin, he knew little, of Greek less; but a serviceable, if somewhat inexact knowledge of French, Italian, Spanish, and German he had acquired, and he continued to retain. On the whole, for his special purposes, his education was perhaps as available as if he had been the pride of all his preceptors. In 1786, he was articled apprentice to his father, in whose office he worked as a clerk till 1792, in which year he was called to the bar. In his profession he had fair success, and in 1797 he was married to Charlotte Margaret Carpenter, a lady of French birth and parentage. Towards the end of 1799, through the interest of his friends Lord Melville and the Duke of Buccleuch, he was made sheriff-depute of Selkirkshire, an appointment which brought him £300 a year, with not very much to do for it. Meantime, in a tentative and intermittent way, his leisure had been occupied with literature, which more and more distinctly announced itself as the main business of his life. His first publication, a translation of Burger's ballads, Lenore and The Wild Huntsman, was issued in 1796. In 1798 appeared his translation of Goethe's drama of Goetz von Berlichingen; and in the year following he wrote the fine ballads, Glenfinlas, the Eve of St John, and the Grey Brother. The year 1802 gave to the world the first two volumes of his Border Minstrelsy, which were followed in 1803 by a third and final one. This work, the fruit of those raids'-as he called them

over the Border counties, in which he had been wont to spend his vacations, was most favourably received by the public, and at once won for him a prominent place among the literary men of the time. In 1804, he issued an edition of the old poem Sir Tristrem, admirably edited and elucidated by valuable dissertations. Meantime The Lay of the Last Minstrel had been in progress, and by its publication in 1805, S. became at a bound the most popular author of his day. During the next ten years, besides a mass of miscellaneous work, the

SCOTT.

most important items of which were elaborate editions of Dryden (1808) and of Swift (1814), including in either case a Life, he gave to the world the poems Marmion (1808), The Lady of the Lake (1810), The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), Rokeby (1812), The Bridal of Triermain, anonymously published (1813), The Lord of the Isles, and The Field of Waterloo. The enthusiasm with which the earlier of these works were received somewhat began to abate as the series proceeded. The charm of novelty was no longer felt; moreover, a distinct deterioration in quality is not in the later poems to be denied; and in the bold outburst of Byron, with his deeper vein of sentiment and concentrated energy of passion, a formidable rival had appeared. All this S. distinctly noted, and after what he felt as the comparative failure of The Lord of the Isles in 1815, with the trivial exception of the anonymous piece Harold the Dauntless (1817), he published no more poetry. But already in Waverley, which appeared without his name in 1814, he had achieved the first of a new and more splendid series of triumphs. Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, The Black Dwarf, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, and The Heart of Midlothian rapidly followed, and the 'Great Unknown,' as he was called (whom yet every one could very well guess to be no other than Walter S.), became the idol of the hour. The rest of the famous series, known as the Waverley Novels, it would be idle to mention in detail. From this time onward, for some years, S. stood on such a pinnacle of fame and brilliant social prosperity as no other British man of letters has ever gone near to reach. He resided chiefly at Abbotsford, the romance in stone' he had built himself in the Border country which he loved, and thither, as 'Pilgrims of his Genius,' summer after summer repaired crowds of the noble and the distinguished, to partake the princely hospitalities of a man whom they found as delightful in the easy intercourse of his home, as before they had found him in his writings. In 1820, to set a seal upon all this distinction, a baronetcy was bestowed upon him as a special mark of the royal favour. But the stately fabric of his fortunes, secure as it seemed, was in secret built upon the shifting sands of commercial speculation, and in the disastrous crisis of the year 1826 a huge ruin smote it. In 1805, S.'s income, as calculated by his biographer, was something nigh £1000 a year, irrespective of what literature might bring him; a handsome competency, shortly by his appointment to a clerkship of the Court of Session, to have an increment at first of £800, subsequently of £1300. But what was ample for all prosaic needs, seemed poor to his imagination with its fond and glittering dreams. Already some such vision, as at Abbotsford was afterwards realised, flitted before his mind's eye, and it was the darling ambition of his heart to re-create and leave behind him, in the founding of a family, some image of the olden glories which were the life of his literary inspirations. In the year above mentioned, lured by the prospect of profit, and without the knowledge of his friends, he joined James Ballantyne, an old schoolfellow, in the establishment of a large printing business in Edinburgh. To this, a few years afterwards, a publishing business was added, under the nominal conduct of John Ballantyne, a brother of James; S., in the new adventure, becoming as before a partner. Gradually the affairs of the two firms became complicated with those of the great house of Constable & Co., in the sudden collapse of which S. found himself one forenoon a bankrupt, with personal liabilities to the extent of something like £150,000. 'In the reproof of chance Lies the true proof of men'

and now, in this challenge of adverse fate, S.'s manhood and proud integrity were most nobly approved. With his creditors, composition would have been easy; but this usual course he disdained. God granting him time and health,' he said, he would owe no man a penny. And somewhat declined as he now was from the first vigour and elasticity of his strength, he set himself by the labour of his pen to liquidate this enormous debt.

Breaking up his establishment at Abbotsford, where the wife whom he loved lay dying, he hired a lodging in Edinburgh, and there for some years, with stern and unfaltering resolution, he toiled at his prodigious task. The stream of novels flowed as formerly; a History of Napoleon, in eight volumes, was undertaken and completed, with much other miscellaneous work; and within the space of two years, S. had realised for his creditors the amazing sum of nearly £40,000. A new and annotated edition of the novels was issued with immense success, and there seemed every prospect that, within a reasonable period, S. might again front the world, as he had pledged himself to do, not owing to any man a penny. In this hope he toiled on; but the limits of endurance had been reached, and the springs of the outworn brain broke in that stress of cruel and long-continued effort. In 1830 he was smitten down with paralysis, from which he never thoroughly rallied. It was hoped that the climate of Italy might benefit him; and by the government of the day a frigate was placed at his disposal in which to proceed thither. But in Italy he pined for the home to which he returned only to die. At Abbotsford, on the 21st September 1832, he died with his children round him and the murmur of the Tweed in his ears. On the 26th, he was buried beside his wife in the old Abbey of Dryburgh.

In estimate of S. as an author, a few words must suffice. As regards his poetry, there is now little difference of opinion. Its merits, if somewhat superficial, are very genuine, and continue to secure for it some portion of the popular favour with which it was at first received. Deficient in certain of the higher and deeper qualities, and in those refinements of finish which we are of late accustomed to exact, it is admirable in its frank abandon, in its boldness and breadth of effect, its succession of clear pictures, its careless, rapid, easy narrative, unfailing life, spirit, vigorous and fiery movement. As a lyrist, S. specially excelled; and scattered hither and thither in his works are to be found little snatches of ballad and song scarcely surpassed in the language. The rank of S. as a writer of prose fiction, it is not so easy to fix with anything like precision. So imposing to the mind is his immense prestige as a novelist, that even at this date it is difficult to criticise him coolly; but it is not without risk of awakening some under-murmur of dissent, that the absolute supremacy can now be assigned him which at one time, almost without question, used to be conceded as his due. Nor is the dissent without some just ground of reason. S., with the artistic instinct granted him in largest measure, had little of the artistic conscience. Writing with the haste of the improvisatore, he could exercise over his work, as it proceeded, no jealous rigour of supervision; and on its appearance he was amply pleased with it if the public paid him handsomely. Hence he is an exceedingly irregular writer; many of his works are in structure most lax and careless, and some of the very greatest of them are disgraced by occasional infusions of obviously inferior matter. Yet, all reasonable deductions made, it may be doubtful whether in mass and stature he is quite reached by any other novelist who could be mentioned. To class him, or even speak of him along

SCOTT SCOTTISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE.