IT was in this part of Scotland, as you well know, that the chief struggles in behalf of the Presbyterian form of church-government, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, occurred; and, in spite of the existence of many such individuals as the Philosophical Weaver I mentioned the other day, and of no inconsiderable extension of the tenets of the sceptical school of Scotch philosophy among persons of a higher order, it is here that the same love for the national system of faith and practice, out of which those struggles sprung, is seen still to survive, in not a little of its original fervour, in the breasts of the great majority of the people. I have witnessed many manifestations of the prevalence of this spirit since I came into the West of Scotland, and, I need not add, I have witnessed them with the sincerest pleasure. It is always a noble thing to see people preserving the old feelings and principles of their fathers; and here, there can be no doubt, there would have been a peculiar guilt of meanness, had the descendants of men who, with all their minor faults, were so honest and so upright as these old Covenanters were, permitted themselves to be ashamed of adhering to the essentials of the system for which they did and suffered so much, and so nobly. It is not to the people of the West of Scotland that the energetic reproach of the poet can apply. I allude to the passage in which he speaks of

The idle and foolish whimsies with which the religious fervour of the Covenanters was loaded and deformed, have given way before the calm, sober influences of reflection and improvement; but it is well that the spirit of innovation has spared every thing that was most precious in the cause which lent heroic vigour to the arms of that devout peasantry, and more than ghostly power to that simple priesthood.