palliating circumstances, in which a portion of the general prejudice originated,
the critic adds: "From these, or from other causes, however, it seems to be
undeniable that the prevailing opinion about John Knox, even in this country,
has come to be, that he was a fierce and gloomy bigot, equally a foe to polite
learning and innocent enjoyment; and that, not satisfied with exposing the
abuses of the Romish superstitions, he laboured to substitute for the rational
religion and regulated worship of enlightened men, the ardent and unrectified
spirit of vulgar enthusiasm, dashed with dreams of spiritual and political independence, and all the impracticabilities of the earthly kingdom of the saints.
How unfair, and how marvellously incorrect these representations are, may be
learned from the perusal of the book before us a work which has afforded us
more amusement and more instruction than any thing we ever read upon the
subject; and which, independent of its theological merits, we do not hesitate to
pronounce by far the best piece of history which has appeared since the commencement of our critical career. It is extremely accurate, learned, and concise, and, at the same time, very full of spirit and animation, exhibiting, as it appears to us, a rare union of the patient research and sober judgment which
characterize the more laborious class of historians, with the boldness of thinking and force of imagination which is sometimes substituted in their place. It
affords us very great pleasure to bear this public testimony to the merits of a
writer who has been hitherto unknown, we believe, to the literary world either
of this or the neighbouring country; of whom, or of whose existence at least,
though residing in the same city with ourselves, it never was our fortune to
have heard till his volume was put into our hands; and who, in his first emergence from the humble obscurity in which he has pursued the studies and
performed the duties of his profession, has presented the world with a work
which may put so many of his contemporaries to the blush, for the big
promises they have broken, and the vast opportunities they have neglected."
This was much, coming as it did from the "Edinburgh Review," a work that hitherto had been by no means distinguished for its advocacy of Christian principles, or love of evangelical piety; and nothing, therefore, was better fitted to arrest the attention of the world in behalf of the volume that had lately appeared. The subject thus discussed in the great northern journal for July 1812, was taken up by its powerful southern rival, and in the "Quarterly Review" of July, 1813, appeared a critique, in which the reviewers, in their admiration of John Knox, seem to have allowed their well-known devotedness to Episcopacy and Toryism for the time to go to sleep. After expressing their admiration that the Scottish reformer should have found a better biographer than had yet fallen to the lot of even Calvin and Luther, they thus characterize the literary merits of the work: "Compact and vigorous, often coarse, but never affected, without tumour and without verbosity, we can scarcely forbear to wonder by what effort of taste or discrimination the style of Dr. M'Crie has been preserved so nearly unpolluted by the disgusting and circumlocutory nonsense of his contemporaries. Here is no puling about the 'interesting sufferer, 'the patient saint,' 'the angelic preacher.' Knox is plain Knox, in acting and in suffering always an hero; and his story is told as an hero would wish that it should be told—with simplicity, precision, and force." Still, however, the reviewers could not well get over the demolished monasteries, or the tears of Queen Mary, and in their wrath they administered the following rebuke to the biographer, which, however, he accepted as no small compliment:—"But
