fessed to be ministers of Christ and to be following out the ends of his mission, but only by that which is actually exhibited by the common herd of worldly politicians. The latter certainly was the standard which Gregory and Innocent followed, both in the kind of objects they aimed at, and in the means they employed to accomplish them. But it is a very unnecessary and unwarrantable complaisance to judge of them only by this standard, and to abstain from applying to them any higher one. It is certain that Gregory invented the doctrine that the Pope has a right to depose sovereigns and to absolve subjects from their oaths of allegiance, that he claimed this power as belonging to him jure divino, and exercised it with singular barbarity and insolence in the case of Henry IV., emperor of Germany, while, with all his boldness and apparent sincerity, he did not venture to deal in the same way with our William the Conqueror, who had given him about equal provocation. Gregory no doubt called this maintaining ecclesiastical liberty, as did Benedict XIII., when, in last century, he canonized him; and Voigt is complaisant enough to adopt this Popish nomenclature, telling us that Gregory's great and only idea was the independence of the Church, but most men will think it more correctly described as establishing ecclesiastical tyranny. It is certain that Gregory compelled many thousands of clergymen to part with their wives, in spite of their strenuous opposition and solemn remonstrances, and that he succeeded in permanently establishing the celibacy of the clergy as the law and practice of the Church. The man who could devise and execute such schemes had undoubtedly some of the qualities of a hero, qualities well fitted to excite the admiration of men who look merely to boldness, earnestness, and strength of purpose, and disregard the dictates and the interests of truth and morality. It is certain that Innocent III. zealously prosecuted the object of securing for himself an influence in appointing to the great ecclesiastical benefices, that he quarrelled on this subject with John King of England, that he excommunicated and deposed that monarch, absolved his subjects from their oath of allegiance, laid the kingdom under an interdict, i.e., prohibited and prevented for a time the celebration of all religious services, transferred the crown of England to the king of France, and finally compelled John to agree to hold his crown and kingdom as the vassal of the holy see. It is certain that he condemned and annulled the Magna Charta, which the Barons of England had extorted from his vassal King John, that he imposed upon the Church the belief of transubstantiation and the practice of auricular confession, that he instigated the horrible massacres of the Albigenses by Simon de Montfort, and required secular princes to extirpate all heretics from their dominions, on pain of excommunication and forfeiture of their territory. This man, too, had evidently some of the qualities of a hero; but it is rather strange that he should be held up nowa-days to the admiration of philanthropic and Christian men. When Hurter wrote his eulogistic Life of Innocent, he was professedly a Protestant, and held the office of a clergyman, but he must have been at heart an infidel. In 1845, as Gosselin tells us, he joined the communion of the Church of Rome, but he is probably as much an infidel as before. We do not deny that some of these papal heroes of the Middle Ages, who introduced and established the temporal supremacy of the holy see, had, viewed merely as men and politicians, some striking and splendid qualities; that they had succeeded in persuading themselves, that in struggling to promote their own supremacy, they were labouring for the interests of religion and the welfare of their subjects, and that the end sanctifies the means; that in some of them ambition was divested of its more sordid and degrading elements and accompaniments, and appeared somewhat like the "last infirmity of noble minds;" and that in several instances their interferences in temporal affairs were directed to good objects and followed by beneficial results. But there is nothing in all this that should materially affect the estimate that ought to be formed of their character, motives, and conduct, when tried by the standard that ought to be applied to them, nothing that should lead us to look back to them with respect and veneration as benefactors of the species, nothing that should prevent us from noticing, in the history of the Pope's temporal supremacy, of the steps by which it rose, and of the discussions to which it has given rise, a striking illustration of the ambitious, skilful, and unscrupulous policy which the Church of Rome has ever pursued, of the kind of objects it has ever aimed at as far as it could, and of the means it has employed to effect them. We expected to have been able to embrace in this Article some account of the Gallican Liberties, and of the very interesting controversy to which they have led, a controversy conducted by men of the highest eminence, and fitted to throw light upon some important principles, which are still discussed with earnestness both in this country and upon the continent. But our space is for the present exhausted." Memoirs and Correspondence of Sir R. M. Keith, K.B. 169 ART. VII.-Memoirs and Correspondence (official and familiar) of Sir Robert Murray Keith, K.B., Envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary at the Courts of Dresden, Copenhagen, and Vienna, from 1769 to 1792. With a Memoir of Queen Carolina Matilda of Denmark, and an Account of the Revolution there in 1772. Edited by Mrs. GILLESPIE SMYTH, 2 vols. London, 1849. COLONEL ROBERT KEITH, and his son Sir Robert Murray Keith, the former ambassador at the Courts of Vienna and St. Petersburgh, the latter, after some active service in the seven years' war, successively British Minister at Dresden, Copenhagen, and Vienna, belonged to a class of useful public servants which many things in the constitution of Scottish society, during the last century, were well fitted to produce. Bishop Burnet, who had seen much of the world, and been an inquisitive and shrewd observer, scruples not, with a sort of blundering honesty, little likely to make his advice more palatable, to tell the gentry of England that they were, for the most part, the worst instructed and the least knowing of any of their rank he ever went amongst. But the Scotch, says he, "though less able to bear the expense of a learned education, are much more knowing: the reason of which is this; the Scotch, even of indifferent fortunes, send private tutors with their children, both to schools and colleges; these look after the young gentlemen, mornings and evenings, and read over with them what they have learned, and so make them perfecter in it: they generally go abroad a year or two and see the world; this obliges them to behave themselves well. Whereas a gentleman here is often both ill-taught and ill-bred: this makes him haughty and insolent." Thus, the Restoration, and Charles the II.'s intimacy with the polished Court of Louis the XIV., had done little to rub off that grossness of manners which so surprised Principal Baillie in Charles the I.'s time, and which, though often allied with an unsophisticated and sturdy patriotism, which the more refined Scot did not always possess, must have particularly unfitted a man for representing his sovereign at a foreign court. The class of which we speak in Scotland, and to which the Keiths belonged, were generally of ancient and originally noble races, of good families in the old sense of the word. But while this gave them a certain consciousness of rank, however poor they were, and a strong attachment to the country in which so many of their ancestors had lived and died, there were many things besides those mentioned by the historian, that tended to temper that exclusiveness and lazy pride which are apt to make an aristocracy narrow-minded, insolent and useless. Thierry has remarked, in the sketch of Scottish history appended to his history of the Norman Conquest, that the amalgamation of different races took place here under very favourable circumstances. Saxons, Danes, and Gallo-Normans in abundance acquired lands and influence amongst us, but coming as individuals seeking shelter and hospitality, or invited by wise princes to aid the progress of government and civilisation, they sought to identify themselves with the nation, instead of uniting to oppress it. No festering sores were made and perpetuated by the permanent success of foreign invaders; and the remembrance of Largs and Bannockburn, became dear, not to a distinct class, patrician or plebeian, but to the whole population. National independence achieved for one was achieved for all, and conferred on all a certain claim to respect. No tiller of the ground, however humble, was a serf, sold and bought with the land he laboured; no baron of foreign descent held his estate and titles by right of conquest. Even difference of language made no difference in this respect. Lowlander and Highlander, the man of Celtic blood and speech, and the man of Teutonic blood and speech, were all on a level; all were Scotchmen and all were free. There was but one, and that a slight exception-that of the coal-pitmen, who, on utilitarian grounds, until within less than a century ago, were tied by law, as indissolubly to their under-ground occupation, as the law of England, until the other day, held a clergyman subject for life to his ordinary as a priest. The feudal system, indeed, subsisted in full force; but in its primitive, not its secondary; its native, not its imported condition. In other countries of western Europe it was employed as a means of confirming the conquest of an invaded country, previously subject to its own laws and institutions, and hence arose the distinction between vassals and serfs. But in Scotland all were vassals-there were no serfs. The Gurths and Wambas to the south of the Tweed had no counterparts to the north. And yet those Gurths and Wambas were slow to forget that their sires had been, previous to the Norman Conquest, perhaps rich and noble as well as free; and to this day one can hardly fail to be reminded of the relation of the Saxon and the Norman of the 12th century, and the feelings it begot, in the bickerings of the aristocratical and democratical members of our British House of Commons, the gamelaw feud, and that of the protectionists and free-traders. We have no doubt that this kindly amalgamation of different races in Scotland, of itself, greatly favoured a certain kindly amalgamation of ranks here, which has greatly influenced the national character and fortunes, and has, we fear, not been pro Modification in Scotland of the Feudal System. 171 moted by our intimacy with England. The times that produced such men as the Keiths, Sir Ändrew Mitchell, and a host of others of that stamp, seem to be going by. Our peasants are no longer so conscious and so proud of their independence; our landed nobility and gentry, of old family, with some eminent exceptions, not so shrewd, industrious, willing to cultivate business habits, and, above all, in the public service, content to be poor. And no wonder, for great though silent changes are making, and no provident statesman seems ready to turn all these changes to the best account. The noxious influences of the feudal system were beautifully counteracted in old Scottish society, partly by our civil legislation, partly by circumstances which legislation could hardly reach; and it were well that our legislators in church and state, deeply pondering the natural propensity of society as well as individual man to evil, when left to itself, would suggest and adopt in time some such remedial measures as might effectually meet those novel corruptions which the modern condition of society threatens to produce. The tendency of the feudal system was to an aristocracy, exclusive, overbearing, devoted to war, impatient of the restraints of law-loyal it might be to the Crown, but by no means willing to set the example of respect for the decisions of the Crown's judges, neglectful of learning as fit only for churchmen and pedants, and still more disposed to despise trade as the proper occupation only of ignoble minds. But a law that compelled all the eldest sons of barons to learn Latin in a country where there were no exclusively aristocratical seminaries, by mingling the haughty youth of the aristocracy with the sons of merchants and tradesmen at the burgh schools, even where no tincture of learning, or taste for it, was acquired, must have had the happiest influence in softening down the asperities of a feudal aristocracy in the opening of life, when the temper and character are most susceptible of impressions, and plastic under them. Again, a law that compelled those barons to send their eldest sons and heirs to college to learn jure, that is, we presume, the civil or Roman law, was admirably fitted to inculcate respect for law in general, and to lead them to mark how far the heritable jurisdictions were purely administered; not to say that the study of Latin and the Roman law must have concurred to create a respect in the minds of the youthful chieftains, for accomplishments which they would otherwise have despised; to associate honour or fame with the judge's ermine, as well as the warrior's coat of mail; to see in scientific agriculture a pursuit eminently becoming a patriot landholder, and to apply the grand principles of equity, where all were free, to all individual rights. These kindly tendencies, introduced in the reign of James the IV., were strengthened by his son, who |