of the Established and Free Churches, and how they can
hear each other singing psalms across the street. There
is but a street between them in space, but a shadow
between them in principle; and yet there they sit,
enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray for each other's
growth in grace. It would be well if there were no more
than two; but the sects in Scotland form a large family
of sisters, and the chalk lines are thickly drawn, and
run through the midst of many private homes. Edinburgh
is a city of churches, as though it were a place of
pilgrimage. You will see four within a stone-cast at the
head of the West Bow. Some are crowded to the doors;
some are empty like monuments; and yet you will ever find
new ones in the building. Hence that surprising clamour
of church bells that suddenly breaks out upon the Sabbath
morning from Trinity and the sea-skirts to Morningside on
the borders of the hills. I have heard the chimes of
Oxford playing their symphony in a golden autumn morning,
and beautiful it was to hear. But in Edinburgh all
manner of loud bells join, or rather disjoin, in one
swelling, brutal babblement of noise. Now one overtakes
another, and now lags behind it; now five or six all
strike on the pained tympanum at the same punctual
instant of time, and make together a dismal chord of
discord; and now for a second all seem to have conspired
to hold their peace. Indeed, there are not many uproars
in this world more dismal than that of the Sabbath bells
in Edinburgh: a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin; the outcry
of incongruous orthodoxies, calling on every separate
conventicler to put up a protest, each in his own