l, and
ministers came to be placed in the parishes of Sutherland without the
consent and contrary to the will of the people. Churches, well filled
hitherto, were deserted by their congregations, just because a
respectable woman of the world, making free use of what she deemed her
own, had planted them with men of the world who were only tolerably
respectable; and in houses and barns the devout men of the district
learned to hold numerously-attended Sabbath meetings for reading the
Scriptures, and mutual exhortation and prayer, as a sort of substitute
for the public services, in which they found they could no longer join
with profit. The spirit awakened by the old Earls had survived
themselves, and ran directly counter to the policy of their
descendant. Strongly attached to the Establishment, the people, though
they thus forsook their old places of worship, still remained members
of the national Church, and travelled far in the summer season to
attend the better ministers of their own and the neighbouring
counties. We have been assured, too, from men whose judgment we
respect, that, under all their disadvantages, religion continued
peculiarly to flourish among them;--a deep-toned evangelism prevailed;
so that perhaps the visible Church throughout the world at the time
could furnish no more striking contrast than that which obtained
between the cold, bald, commonplace services of the pulpit in some of
these parishes, and the fervid prayers and exhortations which give
life and interest to these humble meetings of the people. What a pity
it is that differences such as these the Duke of Sutherland cannot
see!

The marriage of the young countess into a noble English family was
fraught with further disaster to the county. There are many Englishmen
quite intelligent enough to perceive the difference between a smoky
cottage of turf and a whitewashed cottage of stone, whose judgment on
their respective inhabitants would be of but little value.
Sutherland, as a country of _men_, stood higher at this period than
perhaps any other district in the British empire; but, as our
descriptions in the preceding chapter must have shown,--and we
indulged in them mainly with a view to this part of our subject,--it
by no means stood high as a country of farms and cottages. The
marriage of the Countess brought a new set of eyes upon it,--eyes
accustomed to quite a different face of things. It seemed a wild, rude
country, where all was wrong, a