Even at this time of Assemblies, when the atmosphere is almost exclusively clerical and ecclesiastical, the two great church armies represented here certainly conceal from the casual observer all rivalries and jealousies, if indeed they cherish any. As for the two dissenting bodies, the Church of the Disruption and the Church of the Secession have been keeping company, so to speak, for some years, with a distant eye to an eventual union. In the light of all this pleasant toleration, it seems difficult to realise that earlier Edinburgh, where, we learned from old parochial records of 1605, Margaret Sinclair was cited by the Session of the Kirk for being at the ‘Burne’ for water on the Sabbath; that Janet Merling was ordered to make public repentance for concealing a bairn unbaptized in her house for the space of twenty weeks and calling said bairn Janet; that Pat Richardson had to crave mercy for being found in his boat in time of afternoon service; and that Janet Walker, accused of having visitors in her house in sermon-time, had to confess her offence and on her knees crave mercy of God AND the Kirk Session (which no doubt was much worse) under penalty of a hundred pounds Scots. Possibly there are people yet who would prefer to pay a hundred pounds rather than hear a sermon, but they are few.
It was in the early seventeen hundred and thirties when Allan Ramsay, ‘in fear and trembling of legal and clerical censure,’ lent out the plays of Congreve and Farquhar from his famous High Street library. In 1756 it was, that the Presbytery of Edinburgh suspended all clergymen who had witnessed the representation of Douglas, that virtuous tragedy written, to the dismay of all Scotland, by a minister of the Kirk. That the world, even the theological world, moves with tolerable rapidity when once set in motion, is evinced by the fact that on Mrs. Siddons’ second engagement in Edinburgh, in the summer of 1785, vast crowds gathered about the doors of the theatre, not at night alone, but in the day, to secure places. It became necessary to admit them first at three in the afternoon and then at noon, and eventually ‘the General Assembly of the Church then in session was compelled to arrange its meetings with reference to the appearance of the great actress.’ How one would have enjoyed hearing that Scotsman say, after one of her most splendid flights of tragic passion, ‘That’s no bad!’ We have read of her dismay at this ludicrous parsimony of praise, but her self-respect must have been restored when the Edinburgh ladies fainted by dozens during her impersonation of Isabella in The Fatal Marriage.
Since Scottish hospitality is well-nigh inexhaustible, it is not strange that from the moment Edinburgh streets began to be crowded with ministers, our drawing-room table began to bear shoals of engraved invitations of every conceivable sort, all equally unfamiliar to our American eyes.
‘The Purse-Bearer is commanded by the Lord High Commissioner and the Marchioness of Heatherdale to invite Miss Hamilton to a Garden Party at the Palace of Holyrood House, on the 27th of May. WEATHER PERMITTING.’
‘The General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland admits Miss Hamilton to any gallery on any day.’
‘The Marchioness of Heatherdale is At Home on the 26th of May from a quarter-past nine in the evening. Palace of Holyrood House.’
‘The Moderator of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland is At Home in the Library of the New College on Saturday, the 22nd of May, from eight to ten in the evening.’
‘The Moderator asks the pleasure of Miss Hamilton’s presence at a Breakfast to be given on the morning of the 25th May at Dunedin Hotel.’
We determined to go to all these functions impartially, tracking thus the Presbyterian lion to his very lair, and observing his home as well as his company manners. In everything that related to the distinctively religious side of the proceedings we sought advice from Mrs. M’Collop, while we went to Lady Baird for definite information on secular matters. We also found an unexpected ally in the person of our own ex-Moderator’s niece, Miss Jean Dalziel (Deeyell). She has been educated in Paris, but she must always have been a delightfully breezy person, quite too irrepressible to be affected by Scottish haar or theology. “Go to the Assemblies, by all means,” she said, “and be sure and get places for the heresy case. These are no longer what they once were,—we are getting lamentably weak and gelatinous in our beliefs,—but there is an unusually nice one this year; the heretic is very young and handsome, and quite wicked, as ministers go. Don’t fail to be presented at the Marchioness’s court at Holyrood, for it is a capital preparation for the ordeal of Her Majesty and Buckingham Palace. ‘Nothing fit to wear’? You have never seen the people who go or you wouldn’t say that! I even advise you to attend one of the breakfasts; it can’t do you any serious or permanent injury so long as you eat something before you go. Oh no, it doesn’t matter,—whichever one you choose, you will cheerfully omit the other; for I avow, as a Scottish spinster, and the niece of an ex-Moderator, that to a stranger and a foreigner the breakfasts are worse than Arctic explorations. If you do not chance to be at the table of honour—”
“The gifted Miss Hamilton is always at the table of honour; unless she is placed there s............