I SPENT the Friday of last week very pleasantly at —— Hill, the villa of one of my Glasgow acquaintances, situated a few miles to the north of that city. In the course of talk after dinner, when I had been enlarging on the pleasures I had received from hearing Dr Chalmers preach, and, altogether, from observing the religious state of the peasantry in this part of the world, a gentleman who was present asked me, If I had ever yet been present at the giving of the Sacrament in a country kirk in Scotland? and on my replying in the negative, expressed some wonder that my curiosity should not already have led me to witness, with my own eyes, that singular exhibition of the national modes of thinking and feeling in regard to such subjects. I allowed that it was strange I should not have thought of it sooner, and assured him, that it was a thing I had often had in my mind before I set out on my journey, to enquire what the true nature of that scene might be, and how far the description, given in the Holy Fair of Burns, might be a correct one. He told me, that, without question, many occurrences of a somewhat ludicrous nature sometimes take place at these Sacraments; but that the vigorous, but somewhat coarse pencil, of the Scottish bard, had even, in regard to these, entirely overstepped the modesty of nature, while he had altogether omitted to do any manner of justice to the far different elements which enter most largely into the general composition of the picture—adding, too, that this omission was the more remarkable, considering with what deep and fervent sympathy the poet had alluded, in “The Cotter's Saturday Night,” and many others of his compositions, to the very same elements, exerting their energies in a less conspicuous manner. While we were yet conversing on this subject, there arrived a very accomplished and agreeable clergyman, Dr Hodgson of Blantyre, who, on understanding what we were talking of, said, That the safest and shortest way for the stranger was to go and see the thing; he himself, he added, was so far on his way to assist at this very ceremony, at a parish some ten miles off, and nothing could give him greater pleasure than taking me with him.