red from the Reformation in any other part
of Europe. Elsewhere it found a middle class existing--created already
by trade or by other causes. It raised and elevated them, but it did not
materially affect their political condition. In Scotland, the commons,
as an organised body, were simply created by religion. Before the
Reformation they had no political existence; and therefore it has been
that the print of their origin has gone so deeply into their social
constitution. On them, and them only, the burden of the work of the
Reformation was eventually thrown; and when they triumphed at last, it
was inevitable that both they and it should react one upon the other.

How this came about I must endeavour to describe, although I can give
but a brief sketch of an exceedingly complicated matter. Everybody knows
the part played by the aristocracy of Scotland in the outward
revolution, when the Reformation first became the law of the land. It
would seem at first sight as if it had been the work of the whole
nation--as if it had been a thing on which high and low were heartily
united. Yet on the first glance below the surface you see that the
greater part of the noble lords concerned in that business cared nothing
about the Reformation at all; or, if they cared, they rather disliked it
than otherwise. How, then, did they come to act as they did? or, how
came they to permit a change of such magnitude when they had so little
sympathy with it? I must make a slight circuit to look for the
explanation.

The one essentially noble feature in the great families of Scotland was
their patriotism. They loved Scotland and Scotland's freedom with a
passion proportioned to the difficulty with which they had defended
their liberties; and yet the wisest of them had long seen that, sooner
or later, union with England was inevitable; and the question was, how
that union was to be brought about--how they were to make sure that,
when it came, they should take their place at England's side as equals,
and not as a dependency. It had been arranged that the little Mary
Stuart should marry our English Edward VI., and the difficulty was to be
settled so. They would have been contented, they said, if Scotland had
had the 'lad' and England the 'lass.' As it stood, they broke their
bargain, and married the little queen away into France, to prevent the
Protector Somerset from getting hold of her. Then, however, appeared an
opposite danger; the queen would be