peculiar crisis which the national history had then reached. A new political and social influence was at the time waiting to start into vigorous development; it met the Reformation, embraced it, moulded it to its own inspirations and aims, and carried itself triumphantly forward in its advance. It is very true that some of the greater nobles soon saw reason to join themselves to the reformed cause, and in various ways to aid or hinder it; but in the beginning, and at the end, the Scottish Reformation continued essentially a middleclass movement, with all the hardy virtue belonging to its parentage, yet also with the parental defectssturdy and uncompromising in its faith, and free in its instincts, but with no sacred inheritance of traditionary story binding it by beautiful links to the great Catholic past; and further, as has been long too sadly apparent, with no sympathetic expansiveness for moulding into religious unity classes widely separated in material rank and in intellectual and artistic culture.

It is sufficiently singular, and so far in corroboration of the view now presented, that the Scottish reformers, one and all of them of any note, sprung from the class of gentry to which we have referred. Patrick Hamilton, indeed, was immediately connected with the higher nobility, and, through his mother, with the royal family; but the fact of his being a younger son, and

He was the son of Sir Patrick Hamilton of Kincavil, an illegitimate son of the first Lord Hamilton, and of Catherine Stewart (illegitimate ?), daughter of Alexander Duke of Albany, second son of King James II. On the mother's side the illegitimacy merely followed an act of ecclesiastical divorce. His father perished in the conflict between the Hamiltons and Douglases, known as Cleanse the Causeway, which took place in Edinburgh in 1520.

the illegitimacy that attached to the descent of both his parents, rendered his own social position certainly not higher than that of the lairds or gentry. George Wishart, again, was brother to the Laird of Pittarow, and Knox was the son of a younger brother of the house of Ranferly.

Patrick Hamilton is the first prominent name that meets us in the Scottish Reformation. His brief and sad, yet beautiful story, has been told anew in our day in a very elegant and well-informed volume,* where we read for the first time, in a clear and consistent light, the narrative of his education, first in Paris, then in St Andrews, and lastly in Germany, in the very heart of the reforming influences; his return to his native country, and marriage (a fact not previously known); and then his preaching, and seizure and trial by the elder Beaton a narrative which serves to deepen the affecting story of his martrydom in front of the gate of the old college of St Andrews on the 29th of February 1528. Hamilton no doubt caught his first reforming impulse during the years that he studied in Paris (1519-20), when the university was all astir on the subject of Luther's doctrines. His subsequent studies in Germany confirmed the early impulse thus communicated; and the proto-reformer of Scotland was thus substantially Lutheran in the origin and character of his teaching.

This foreign influence in the rise of the Reformation. in Scotland deserves to be noticed. But it would be wrong to attribute too much importance to it. An

* By Mr Lorimer, of the English Presbyterian College, London.

awakening, half literary, half spiritual, had already begun during the preceding ten years in St Leonard's College, St Andrews; and Hamilton was in the very midst of this new excitement while pursuing his studies there. We get, also, in Knox's History, one clear glimpse of an earnest Lollardism towards the end of the preceding century, in the reign of James IV.* The spirit which he describes, and the articles which he gives in detail, recall strongly the spirit and doctrines which we have seen to characterise the surviving Wickliffite influence in England - the same broad and somewhat crude apprehension of Scriptural truth-the same scornful humour-the same strong, yet retiring piety-with the remarkable difference, that the "thirty persons" called “Lollards of Kylle" seem to have belonged, not to the peasantry, as in England, but to the better classes of society. At this single point, a line of antecedent religious life in Scotland rises into brief and impressive prominency. And it no doubt continued to some extent during the next thirty years, and helped in the advance of the Reformation; but in what degree, or through what connections it did this, we cannot distinctly trace, either in the case of Hamilton or of any of the chief reformers.

The zeal of Patrick Hamilton, although quenched in cruel flames, lived after him. His teaching, enhanced by the noble and pathetic courage of his death, made a deep impression on the national mind. The reforming spirit spread on all sides. "Men began," says Knox, "very liberally to speak." The bishops had only one

* History, Book I.

weapon with which to encounter the rising spirit. They bethought themselves of burning some more heretics. "New consultation was taken that some should be burned;" but a "merrie gentleman," a familiar of the bishop, was heard to say, "Gif ye burn more, let them be burnt in how sellars; for the reik of Mr Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it did blow upon."

Such was the state of affairs while Knox was rising into full manhood, and beginning with his steady and long-piercing glance to look forth upon the world, and note the circumstances and signs of the times amidst which he found himself. At the time of Hamilton's death he was twenty-three years of age, and about terminating his studies in the university of Glasgow. He was born in 1505, in the neighbourhood of Haddington, of parents whose ancestry and social position have been subjects of dispute, although the evidence seems conclusive that his father belonged to the Knoxes of Ranferly, an old and respectable family of Renfrewshire.* His own statement, that "his great-grandfather, gudeschir, and father, served under the Earls of Bothwell, and some of them have died under their standards," + is perfectly consistent with this. He received his preliminary education at the grammar school of Haddington, and in the year 1521 was sent to the university of Glasgow, where he had, therefore, been a considerable number of years at the time that the reforming opinions began to spread rapidly throughout the country.

It is not very clear when or under what special *M'CRIE'S Life of Knox, p. 2.

Y

+ Ibid.

influences Knox first began to incline towards these opinions. He had gone to Glasgow university with the view of being trained for the Church, and there, under Major, he soon proved himself an apt and distinguished pupil of the scholastic theology. He was considered as equalling if not excelling his master in the subtleties of the dialectic art. To this teacher also he probably owed the first impulse to that remarkable freedom of political opinion which afterwards characterised him. He is said to have been ordained before the year 1530; but at this time, and for twelve years onward, there is a great gap in his life, which his biographer has been wholly unable to fill up. We only know that some time after taking his degree he removed to St Andrews, and taught there, although in what college does not clearly appear; and that about 1535, especially by the study of the Fathers, his traditionary opinions had become thoroughly shaken. Not till eight years later, however, or in 1543, did he become an avowed and marked reformer.

This year is in every way memorable in the history of the Scottish Reformation. The death of the King after the disastrous defeat of Solway Moss in the end of the previous year, and the consequent accession of the Earl of Arran to the regency, produced at first a change favourable to the views of the reformers. Negotiations were renewed with England; Protestant preachers were taken under special protection by the Regent, and a measure passed the committee of Parlia ment known by the name of the Lords of the Articles, and received his sanction, authorising the reading of the Scriptures in the common tongue. Everything