The next day, which was Sunday, before going to church, I walked towards the west part of the city; where the streets are broad and the houses extremely well-built, of the same noble material as the new town of Edinburgh; and many of the dwellings have fine gardens.  Their sites in many places overlook the pleasant valley of the Clyde, and I could not help acknowledging that Glasgow was not without claim to the epithet of beautiful, which I should have denied her if I had formed my judgment from the commercial streets only.  The people of Glasgow also have shown their good sense in erecting the statues which adorn their public squares, only to men who have some just claim to distinction.  Here are no statues, for example, of the profligate Charles II., or the worthless Duke of York, or the silly Duke of Cambridge, as you will see in other cities; but here the marble effigy of Walter Scott looks from a lofty column in the principal square, and not far from it is that of the inventor Watt; while the statues erected to military men are to those who, like Wellington, have acquired a just renown in arms.  The streets were full of well-dressed persons going to church, the women for the most part, I must say, far from beautiful.  I turned with the throng and followed it as far as St. Enoch’s church, in Buchanan-street, where I heard a long discourse from a sensible preacher, Dr. Barr, a minister of the established Kirk of Scotland.

In the afternoon I climbed one of the steep streets to the north of my hotel, and found three places of worship, built with considerable attention to architectural effect, and fresh, as it seemed, from the hands of the mason.  They all, as I was told, belonged to the Free Kirk, which has lately been rent from the establishment, and threatens to leave it a mere shadow of a church, like the Episcopal church in Ireland.  “Nothing,” said an intelligent Glasgow friend of mine, “can exceed the zeal of the friends of the Free Church.  One of our Glasgow merchants has just given fifteen hundred pounds towards the fund for providing manses, or parsonages, for the ministers of that Church, and I know of several who have subscribed a thousand.  In all the colleges of Scotland, the professors are obliged, by way of test, to declare their attachment to the Presbyterian Church as by law established.  Parliament has just refused to repeal this test, and the friends of the Free Church are determined to found a college of their own.  Twenty thousand pounds had already been subscribed before the government refused to dispense with this test, and the project will now be supported with more zeal than ever.”

I went into one of these Free churches, and listened to a sermon from Dr. Lindsay, a comfortable-looking professor in some new theological school.  It was quite common-place, though not so long as the Scotch ministers are in the habit of giving; for excessive brevity is by no means their besetting infirmity.  At the close of the exercises, he announced that a third service would be held in the evening.  “The subject,” continued he, “will be the thoughts and exercises of Jonah in the whale’s belly.”