novels of "The Monastery" and "The Abbot," which impugns either the sagacity or recollection of the author; excites the smile of the critic; and hurts the feelings of the serious reader. His use, or rather abuse, of Holy Writ, by perpetual quotations from the consecrated volume, we have already reprobated; and with no more severity than (as we think) such an impious liberty with the Bible well deserves it is not, therefore, to this unjusti fiable practice which we at present refer, but to the strange inconsistency with which he must stand charged, in seasoning the conversation of his Roman Catholic characters with a superabundance of such scriptural passages and phrases. Surely he must have been aware that to the papistical laity the scriptures were "a sealed book," which they were not privileged to open; a "tree of life," fenced round by prohibitions and anathemas, to prevent them from gathering its salutary fruit; and, consequently, that they could not, by any possibility, obtain such a knowledge of its contents as would enable them to quote the bible in common colloquy, with the same familiarity

and ease as one, of their monks would have cited his breviary or missal. From the lips of the Reformer, the Covenanter, and the Puritan, such quotations (however misplaced in' a novel) are at least natural and consistent. "The book" (by which term they emphatically designated the bible) was the volume that they principally, though not exclusively, studied. It lay near their hearts; it identified itself with all their associations; it was the fountain of their faith; the spring of their comfort, hope, and courage; the rule of their lives; and the sanction (though in some cases the mistaken or misinterpreted one) of their peculiar habits and conduct; and its language, thus familiarized and endeared to them, would be,, of course, interwoven with their conversation, and become the natural and proper vehicle of the expression of feeling among serious and -religious men. It is true that our author, through all his works, has contrived to render this mode of colloquy, as far as it relates to the Covenanters and Puritans, ridiculous, by caricaturing the personages who employ it, and throwing a spice of absurdity into the

manner in which, or upon the occasions when, it was exercised; but this is unfair and ignoble misrepresentation. However enthusiastic or misguided certain of these people might have been, they were, as a class of men, infinitely above contempt. Respectable for their sincerity, and admirable for their fortitude and firmness, their hearts were deeply imbued with the unction of holiness; they spoke as they felt-scripturally; and used a language, at that time neither affected nor grotesque, because it was drawn from a source which was then considered as the purest standard of the English tongue, the phraseology of which was as much respected by taste, as venerated by piety. To the author's Roman Catholic quoters of scripture, however, none of this reasoning can be applied, as his justification in representing them so familiar with the sacred writings. It is a gross breach of costume-a violation of an obvious and well-known fact. But this practice would seem to be thus inconsistently attributed to them in the spirit of compliment; to which the self-same appropriate use of scripture among the Puritans, in

the succeeding age, was to serve as a foil and contrast; for while the biblical passages which issue from the lips of the former are usually combined with situations or circumstances of solemnity or decorum, and have, consequently, the effect of elevating the characters of the speakers, the sly admixture of the burlesque and absurd, with the occasions on which the Covenanters use a similar phraseology, have a like tendency to render them the objects of ridicule, if not of contempt.

Biographical Illustrations.

MARY QUEEN of Scots.

Few public characters have had less posthumous justice awarded to them than this unfortunate potentate. The historians of her own and subsequent times have (with but few exceptions) united to accumulate upon her name a more than ordinary load of odium and infamy; and by falsehoods, the most bold and iniquitous, laboured to rob her memory of the last tribute which can be paid to the manes of defamed and persecuted virtue, -the esteem and compassion of the wise and good. The causes of this base prostitution of the pen of the historian, to the unmerited calumniation of the departed, are not difficult