Still, however, we must allow that there is great delicacy and hesitation to be used in employing the weapon of ridicule on any point connected with religion.  Some passages occur in the work before us for which the writer’s sole apology must be the uncontroulable disposition to indulge the peculiarity of his vein of humour—­a temptation which even the saturnine John Knox was unable to resist either in narrating the martyrdom of his friend Wisheart or the assassination of his enemy Beatson, and in the impossibility of resisting which his learned and accurate biographer has rested his apology for this mixture of jest and earnest.

“There are writers,” he says (rebutting the charge of Hume against Knox), “who can treat the most sacred subjects with a levity bordering on profanity.  Must we at once pronounce them profane, and is nothing to be set down to the score of natural temper inclining them to wit and humour?  The pleasantry which Knox has mingled with his narrative of his (Cardinal Beatson’s) death and burial is unseasonable and unbecoming.  But it is to be imputed not to any pleasure which he took in describing a bloody scene, but to the strong propensity which he had to indulge his vein of humour.  Those who have read his history with attention must have perceived that he is not able to check this even on the very serious occasions.”—­Macrie’s Life of Knox, p. 147.

Indeed Dr. Macrie himself has given us a striking instance of the indulgence which the Presbyterian clergy, even of the strictest persuasion, permit to the vis comica.  After describing a polemical work as “ingeniously constructed and occasionally enlivened with strokes of humour,” he transfers, to embellish his own pages, (for we can discover no purpose of edification which the tale serves), a ludicrous parody made by an ignorant parish-priest on certain words of a Psalm, too sacred to be here quoted.  Our own innocent pleasantry cannot, in this instance, be quite reconciled with that of the learned biographer of John Knox, but we can easily conceive that his authority may be regarded in Scotland as decisive of the extent to which a humourist may venture in exercising his wit upon scriptural expressions without incurring censure even from her most rigid divines.

It may however be a very different point how far the author is entitled to be acquitted upon the second point of indictment.  To use too much freedom with things sacred is a course much more easily glossed over than that of exposing to ridicule the persons of any particular sect.  Every one knows the reply of the great Prince of Conde to Louis XIV when this monarch expressed his surprize at the clamour excited by Moliere’s Tartuffe, while a blasphemous farce called Scaramouche Hermite was performed without giving any scandal:  “C’est parceque Scaramouche ne jouoit que le ciel et la religion, dont les devots se soucioient beaucoup moins que d’eux-memes.”