relief in April, 1853, almost exceed credibility, and were borne with the most heroic fortitude. Their release from the most terrible of deaths was owing to the discovery by M'Clintock of a notice left by M'Clure on Melville Island, and his name inscribed on the same stone that bore that of Parry. M'Clure was still unwilling to leave his ship, looking forward to the prospect of yet accomplishing the passage with her. Part of the crew returned with Kellett; and at length M'Clure, unable to extricate his vessel, came home also. His reception in Britain was such as was due to the acknowledged discoverer of the northwest passage. The honour of knighthood was conferred on him, and the substantial reward of £5000. He has been since serving on the China station.—J. F. W.
M'CRIE, Thomas, D.D., the biographer of Knox and Melville, was born at Danse, where his father was a manufacturer and merchant, in November, 1772, and gave early promise of future distinction. Before he was fifteen years of age he was able to take charge of two country schools successively; and at sixteen he commenced his studies in the university of Edinburgh, where he attached himself particularly to the teaching of Dugald Stewart. In 1795 he was licensed to preach by the Associate presbytery of Kelso; and so acceptable was his preaching that in little more than a month afterwards he was called to be minister of the Associate congregation in Potterrow, Edinburgh. This was a fortunate settlement for him in reference to the aims and labours of his future literary life, as it planted him within easy reach of the great libraries and manuscript collections, of which he was afterwards to make such admirable use. It is remarkable that his studios were first concentrated upon the early history and constitution of the Church of Scotland, by the exigencies of a controversy which arose in that branch of the Secession Church with which he was connected; and which issued, in 1806, in his separation from the great majority of his brethren. "The voluntary principle," in the sense of opposition to all church establishments, had begun to find its way into the Associate Synod, and Dr. M'Crie was the leader of a small minority of four ministers, who resisted the adoption of measures involving this new principle, and were formally deposed in consequence from their ministry. He removed with his attached flock to a new place of worship in the same neighbourhood, and there he continued to labour uninterruptedly till his death—
" Nor ere had changed, nor wished to change his place."
The first fruits of his historical studies had in the meanwhile begun to appear in a series of biographical and other articles, communicated to the Christian Magazine, from 1802 to 1806. One of these papers was—"An Account of the concluding part of the life and death of that illustrious man, John Knox, the most faithful restorer of the Church of Scotland." It was a translation from the work of Principal Smeaton, in reply to the calumnies of popish writers, and was the first indication given to the world of his being engaged in original researches upon that important subject. In truth, as early as 1803, he had conceived the design of drawing up "a selection of lives of Scottish reformers, in some such order as to embrace the most important periods of the history of the Church of Scotland, in which a number of facts which are reckoned too minute and trivial for general history, might be brought to bear upon and occasionally illustrate it. The order, for instance, might be Patrick Hamilton, George Wishart, John Knox, John Craig, Andrew Melville, &c." In these words he reveals precisely the main characteristic of his literary genius, which was neither wholly historical nor wholly biographical, but which found its most congenial employment in the composition of biographical history, or historical biography, having equal delight in the personal traits and minute facts appropriate to the one, and in the broad views and profound principles characteristic of the other. It is not often that biographers make good historians, or that great historians are equally great in biography. But the result of his labours showed that he was equally capable of both. The "Life of Knox" was commenced in 1807, and the first edition appeared in 1811. The subject was one of national interest and importance, and in that respect was happily chosen. But it was an arduous and unpromising one at the time he made choice of it. For several generations the name of Knox had been highly unpopular even in his own country and church. A series of polite writers, who were unable to appreciate and admire his greatness, owing to a total want of religious and ecclesiastical sympathy with his mighty deeds and words, had brought in the fashion of slandering one of the greatest Scotchmen that ever lived, as a gloomy, narrow-minded, and ignorant bigot; and this opinion had come to be everywhere current in both parts of the kingdom. It was a bold, as well as a noble undertaking, to grapple with a prejudice so deeply fixed in the public mind, and so universally diffused. But the author's success was complete. The critics took good time to consider their judgment; but at length they came out with a unanimous verdict of approbation and applause. Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh led the way, and the Quarterly for once concurred in the praise heaped upon a whig historian by a whig critic. Thus encouraged, the author applied himself to the improvement of his work for a new edition, which appeared in 1813 in a form so amplified as to be almost a new work; and in this form it has since been translated into French, Dutch, and German. In the interval between the two editions the university of Edinburgh had conferred upon him the degree of D.D.; and he now took position in the foremost rank of Scottish authors. His "Life of Knox" became a power in the land; it did much to revive the true spirit of the national church, and to give a new impulse to the ecclesiastical life of the nation; and it is hardly too much to say that John Knox redivivus, called up to life again by the genius of his biographer, became once more the reformer of his own church, by infusing much of his manly earnestness and force into the Moncrieffs, and Thomsons, and Chalmerses, who were the leaders of her last religious and ecclesiastical revival. What follows of Dr. M'Crie's literary career must be told more briefly. In 1817 appeared his admirable review of Scott's Tales of my Landlord in the Christian Instructor, which Sir Walter found it necessary to reply to as best he could. In 1819 he gave to the world his "Life of Andrew Melville," a companion work to his "Knox," and which cost him, he tells us, a hundred times more labour. It is indeed a most rich and curious repository of historical and biographical lore, and not inferior in any respect to the other either in point of style or spirit; but its subject was less interesting, and it appealed to the sympathies of a narrower circle of readers. It was now the earnest desire and hope of multitudes of his countrymen, that he would complete the biographical series in which he had advanced so far by preparing a Life of Alexander Henderson, the leading man of what has often been called the Second Scottish Reformation. But his earliest historical studies had awakened in him a vivid interest in the progress and suppression of the Reformation in Italy and Spain—an interest which was revived and strengthened by a summer sojourn on the continent in 1822, which had become necessary for the recruital of his health. The fruits of the laborious studies which he was thus led to apply to these painfully interesting portions of reformation history, including the labour of acquiring a competent knowledge of the Italian and Spanish languages, appeared in his "History of the Progress and Suppression of the Reformation in Spain," published in 1827, and in his "History of the Reformation in Italy," which appeared in 1829—both of them works of extensive original research and extreme accuracy, and which have been as highly valued, and even more read on the continent, than in this country. His last publication was a pamphlet, "What ought the General Assembly to do at the present Crisis?" in which he counselled the Church of Scotland, "without delay, to petition the legislature for the abolition of patronage," and which manifested the ardent sympathy which, though a seceder, he continued to the end of his life to feel with the struggles in which that church was engaged, with the view of recovering the full inheritance of her original rights and liberties. The church took his advice, and covered the tables of parliament with petitions; but beyond the appointment of a committee in the commons, before which he was examined in May, 1834, and the preparation of a huge blue-book of evidence, the matter never went further. In 1833 he procured a search to be made by one of his sons in the ancient records of Geneva, with a view to a work upon the life of Calvin; but in this new and important undertaking he had not been able to advance beyond a few chapters, when his indefatigable and powerful pen fell from his hand. On the 4th of August, 1835, he had a sudden seizure, by which he was carried off on the following day. His remains were appropriately laid in the old historical burying-ground of Gray Friars, and were followed to the tomb by the tributary sorrow of a whole nation, who felt that in him
