The excellence of the sermons, and the able way in which they had been prepared and were delivered, gave us the impression that rivalry existed between the ministers of the different churches as to which of them could preach the best sermon.  They were all fine orations, carefully thought out and elaborated, especially that by Dr. James.

During the intervals between the services we walked about the city, and again passed the splendid monument to Sir Walter Scott with the following remarkable inscription, written by Lord Jeffery, beneath its foundation stone: 

This Graven Plate, deposited in the base of a votive building on the fifteenth day of August in the year of Christ 1840, and never likely to see the light again till all the surrounding structures are crumbled to dust by the decay of time, or by human or elemental violence, may then testify to a distant posterity that his countrymen began on that day to raise an effigy and architectural monument to the memory of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., whose admirable writings were then allowed to have given more delight and suggested better feelings to a large class of readers in every rank of society than those of any other author, with the exception of Shakespeare alone, and which were, therefore, thought likely to be remembered long after this act of gratitude on the part of the first generation of his admirers should be forgotten.  He was born at Edinburgh 15th August 1771:  and died at Abbotsford, 21st September 1832.

We also passed that ancient and picturesque mansion in the High Street known as the “House of John Knox,” in which the distinguished reformer died in 1572.  Born in the year 1505, it was he who, in the reign of Mary Queen of Scots, stirred Scotland to mighty religious impulses, boldly denouncing Mary as a Papist and a Jezebel.  How he escaped being beheaded or burned or assassinated was, considering the nature of the times in which he lived, a mystery almost amounting to a miracle.

[Illustration:  MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS]

Queen Mary sailed from France and landed at Leith, near Edinburgh, on August 19th, 1561, where she was welcomed by the Scots as Dowager of France, Queen of Scotland, and heiress of England, and was “gorgeouslie and magnificentlie” received, according to Scottish ideas, by the lords and ladies who came to meet and accompany her to Edinburgh; but, according to the diary of one of the Queen’s ladies, “when they saw them mounted on such wretched little hackneys so wretchedly caparisoned they were greatly disappointed, and thought of the gorgeous pomp and superb palfreys they had been accustomed to in France, and the Queen began to weep.”  On their arrival at Edinburgh they retired to rest in the Abbey, “a fine building and not at all partaking of that country, but here came under her window a crew of five or six hundred scoundrels from the city, who gave her a serenade with wretched violins and little rebecks of which there are enough in that country, and began to sing Psalms so miserably mis-tuned and mis-timed that nothing could be worse.  Alas! what music, and what a night’s rest!” What the lady would have written if bagpipes had been included in the serenade we could not imagine, but as these instruments of torture were not named, we concluded they must have been invented at a later period.