y men to whom the
_true_ in religion seemed a much less one. One at least of the minds
employed on the minor articles of the work had palpably a papistical
leaning.

A blaze of eulogium, which contrasts ludicrously enough with the
well-toned sobriety of what we may term its staple style, is made to
surround, like the halo in old paintings, some of the men who were
happy enough to be distinguished assertors of the Romish Church. We
would instance, as a specimen, the biographical sketches of Bossuet
and the Jesuit Bourdaloue, written by the late Dr. James Browne.
These, however, are but comparatively minute flaws in a work so truly
great, and of such immense multiplicity. They are some of the
imperfections of a work to which imperfection is inevitable, and
which, after all such deductions have been made, must be recognised as
by much the least faulty and most complete of its class which the
world has yet seen.

_April 30, 1842._

A VISION OF THE RAILROAD.

[_Private._] ----, ISLE OF SKYE.

.... I know not when this may reach you. We are much shut out from
the world at this dead season of the year, especially in those wilder
solitudes of the island that extend their long slopes of moor to the
west. The vast Atlantic spreads out before us, blackened by tempest, a
solitary waste, unenlivened by a single sail, and fenced off from the
land by an impassable line of breakers. Even from the elevation where
I now write--for my little cottage stands high on the hill-side--I can
hear the measured boom of the waves, swelling like the roar of distant
artillery, above the melancholy moanings of the wind among the nearer
crags, and the hoarser dash of the stream in the hollow below. We are
in a state of siege: the isle is beleaguered on its rugged line of
western coast, and all communication within that quarter cut off;
while in the opposite direction the broken and precarious footways
that wind across the hills to our more accessible eastern shores, are
still drifted over in the deeper hollows of the snow of the last great
storm. It was only yester-evening that my cousin Eachen, with whom I
share your newspaper, succeeded in bringing me the number published
early in the present month, in which you furnish your readers with a
report of the great railway meeting at Glasgow.

My cousin and I live on opposite sides of the island. We met at our
tryst among the hills, not half an hour, before sunset; and