re that sitteth on
seven hills, as if ane wasna braid eneugh for her auld hinder end.
Sae the commons o' Renfrew, and o' the Barony, and the Gorbals, and
a' about, they behoved to come into Glasgow ae fair morning, to try
their hand on purging the High Kirk o' Popish nicknackets. But the
townsmen o' Glasgow, they were feared their auld edifice might slip
the girths in gaun through siccan rough physic, sae they rang the
common bell, and assembled the train-bands wi' took o' drum. By
good luck, the worthy James Rabat was Dean o' Guild that year--(and
a gude mason he was himsell, made him the keener to keep up the
auld bigging), and the trades assembled, and offered downright
battle to the commons, rather than their kirk should coup the
crans, as others had done elsewhere. It wasna for luve o'
Paperie--na, na!--nane could ever say that o' the trades o'
Glasgow--Sae they sune came to an agreement to take a' the
idolatrous statues of sants (sorrow be on them!) out o' their
neuks--And sae the bits o' stane idols were broken in pieces by
Scripture warrant, and flung into the Molendinar burn, and the auld
kirk stood as crouse as a cat when the flaes are kaimed aff her,
and a'body was alike pleased. And I hae heard wise folk say, that
if the same had been done in ilka kirk in Scotland, the Reform wad
just hae been as pure as it is e'en now, and we wad hae mair
Christianlike kirks; for I hae been sae lang in England, that
naething will drived out o' my head, that the dog-kennel at
Osbaldistone-Hall is better than mony a house o' God in Scotland.

31. Now this sentence is in the first place a piece of Scottish
history of quite inestimable and concentrated value. Andrew's temperament
is the type of a vast class of Scottish--shall we call it
"_sow_-thistlian"--mind, which necessarily takes the view of either Pope
or saint that the thistle in Lebanon took of the cedar or lilies in
Lebanon; and the entire force of the passions which, in the Scottish
revolution, foretold and forearmed the French one, is told in this one
paragraph; the coarseness of it, observe, being admitted, not for the
sake of the laugh, any more than an onion in broth merely for its
flavor, but for the meat of it; the inherent constancy of that
coarseness being a fact in this order of mind, and an essential part of
the history to be told.

Secon