which the present biographer can agree. Several passages from Knox's
works are cited, and the reader is expected to be "shocked at their
principles." They are certainly shocking, but they are not, as a rule,
set before the public by biographers of the Reformer.

Mr. Carlyle introduced a style of thinking about Knox which may be called
platonically Puritan. Sweet enthusiasts glide swiftly over all in the
Reformer that is specially distasteful to us. I find myself more in
harmony with the outspoken Hallam, Dr. Joseph Robertson, David Hume, and
the Edinburgh reviewer of 1816, than with several more recent students of
Knox.

"The Reformer's violent counsels and intemperate speech were remarkable,"
writes Dr. Robertson, "even in his own ruthless age," and he gives
fourteen examples. {0a} "Lord Hailes has shown," he adds, "how little
Knox's statements" (in his "History") "are to be relied on even in
matters which were within the Reformer's own knowledge." In Scotland
there has always been the party of Cavalier and White Rose
sentimentalism. To this party Queen Mary is a saintly being, and their
admiration of Claverhouse goes far beyond that entertained by Sir Walter
Scott. On the other side, there is the party, equally sentimental, which
musters under the banner of the Covenant, and sees scarcely a blemish in
Knox. A pretty sample of the sentiment of this party appears in a
biography (1905) of the Reformer by a minister of the Gospel. Knox
summoned the organised brethren, in 1563, to overawe justice, when some
men were to be tried on a charge of invading in arms the chapel of
Holyrood. No proceeding could be more anarchic than Knox's, or more in
accordance with the lovable customs of my dear country, at that time. But
the biographer of 1905, "a placed minister," writes that "the doing of
it" (Knox's summons) "was only an assertion of the liberty of the Church,