Another most touching picture of Hervey’s commemorates a later scene of Scottish devotion and martyr endurance scarcely below that of the days of the Covenant.  It is called Leaving the Manse.

We in America all felt to our heart’s core a sympathy with that high endurance which led so many Scottish ministers to forsake their churches, their salaries, the happy homes where their children were born and their days passed, rather than violate a principle.

This picture is a monument of this struggle.  There rises the manse overgrown with its flowering vines, the image of a lovely, peaceful home.  The minister’s wife, a pale, lovely creature, is just locking the door, out of which her husband and family have passed—­leaving it forever.  The husband and father is supporting on his arm an aged, feeble mother, and the weeping children are gathering sorrowfully round him, each bearing away some memorial of their home; one has the bird cage.  But the unequalled look of high, unshaken patience, of heroic faith, and love which seems to spread its light over every face, is what I cannot paint.  The painter told me that the faces were portraits, and the scene by no means imaginary.

But did not these sacrifices bring with them, even in their bitterness, a joy the world knoweth not?  Yes, they did.  I know it full well, not vainly did Christ say, There is no man that hath left houses or lands for my sake and the gospel’s but he shall receive manifold more in this life.

Mr. Hervey kindly gave me the engraving of his Covenanters’ Sacrament, which I shall keep as a memento of him and of Scotland.

His style of painting is forcible and individual.  He showed us the studies that he has taken with his palette and brushes out on the mountains and moors of Scotland, painting moss, and stone, and brook, just as it is.  This is the way to be a national painter.

One pleasant evening, not long before we left Edinburgh, C., S., and I walked out for a quiet stroll.  We went through the Grass Market, where so many defenders of the Covenant have suffered, and turned into the churchyard of the Gray Friars; a gray, old Gothic building, with multitudes of graves around it.  Here we saw the tombs of Allan Ramsay and many other distinguished characters.  The grim, uncouth sculpture on the old graves, and the quaint epitaphs, interested me much; but I was most moved by coming quite unexpectedly on an ivy-grown slab, in the wall, commemorating the martyrs of the Covenant.  The inscription struck me so much, that I got C——­ to copy it in his memorandum book.

  “Halt, passenger! take heed what you do see. 
  Here lies interred the dust of those who stood
  ’Gainst perjury, resisting unto blood,
  Adhering to the Covenant, and laws
  Establishing the same; which was the cause
  Their lives were sacrificed unto the last
  Of prelatists abjured, though here their dust