It is in this cathedral that part of the scene of Rob Roy is laid.  This was my first experience in cathedrals.  It was a new thing to me altogether, and as I walked along under the old buttresses and battlements without, and looked into the bewildering labyrinths of architecture within, I saw that, with silence and solitude to help the impression, the old building might become a strong part of one’s inner life.  A grave yard crowded with flat stones lies all around it.  A deep ravine separates it from another cemetery on an opposite eminence, rustling with dark pines.  A little brook murmurs with its slender voice between.

On this opposite eminence the statue of John Knox, grim and strong, stands with its arm uplifted, as if shaking his fist at the old cathedral which in life he vainly endeavored to battle down.

Knox was very different from Luther, in that he had no conservative element in him, but warred equally against accessories and essentials.

At the time when the churches of Scotland were being pulled down in a general iconoclastic crusade, the tradesmen of Glasgow stood for the defence of their cathedral, and forced the reformers to content themselves with having the idolatrous images of saints pulled down from their niches and thrown into the brook, while, as Andrew Fairservice hath it, “The auld kirk stood as crouse as a cat when the fleas are caimed aff her, and a’ body was alike pleased.”

We went all through the cathedral, which is fitted up as a Protestant place of worship, and has a simple and massive grandeur about it.  In fact, to quote again from our friend Andrew, we could truly say, “Ah, it’s a brave kirk, nane o’ yere whig-malceries, and curliewurlies, and opensteek hems about it—­a’ solid, weel-jointed mason wark, that will stand as lang as the warld, keep hands and gun-powther aff it.”

I was disappointed in one thing:  the painted glass, if there has ever been any, is almost all gone, and the glare of light through the immense windows is altogether too great, revealing many defects and rudenesses in the architecture, which would have quite another appearance in the colored rays through painted windows—­an emblem, perhaps, of the cold, definite, intellectual rationalism, which has taken the place of the many-colored, gorgeous mysticism of former times.

After having been over the church, we requested, out of respect to Baillie Nicol Jarvie’s memory, to be driven through the Saut Market.  I, however, was so thoroughly tired that I cannot remember any thing about it.

I will say, by the way, that I have found out since, that nothing is so utterly hazardous to a person’s strength as looking at cathedrals.  The strain upon the head and eyes in looking up through these immense arches, and then the sepulchral chill which abides from generation to generation in them, their great extent, and the variety which tempts you to fatigue which you are not at all aware of, have overcome, as I was told, many before me.