ornate parks. The country road is now one of the handsomest and busiest thoroughfares in the whole world. Its first building was put up when the Calton Hill Methodist Society was still in its infancy. On the hill above the huge Waverley terminus of the North British Railway-the largest of its kind in the British Isles -the Edinburgh friends of John Wesley secured a quaint little building, known as the Saut Backet, or Saltcellar, from its box-like appearance. This they rented, for Sunday services, to dissenting Presbyterians, who later founded several large and flourishing congregations in the New Town. In one of these churches Dr. John Brown, author of the immoral Rab and his Friends, grew up to manhood as the minister's son. The Saut Backet served as a meeting place for fifteen years, when it gave place to another hall in the same locality described as "a dirty, damp, dangerous hole, holding six hundred people." This hall was sold in 1815 to the bridge commissioners when the North Bridge was constructed. The construction fifty years later of the handsome Edinburgh Post Office has changed the whole appearance of the district. Another "elect lady" who aided Wesley in his work was Lady Glenorchy, who opened a chapel for gospel work near the Grassmarket. Wesley secured a clergyman from Ireland, the Rev. Richard de Courcy, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, for its ministrations, but in the fierce Calvinist-Arminian controversy which was then raging de Courcy took the Calvinist side, and Wesley's preachers were shut out. Through all this trouble Lady Maxwell remained his steadfast friend. Lady Glenorchy, a short time after her desertion of Wesley's cause, fell ill and died, leaving her friend Lady Maxwell as sole executrix and manager of her schools and chapel.

Wesley came to hold the people of Edinburgh in high esteem. Three years before his death he remarks of them in his diary: "I still find a frankness and openness in the people of Edinburgh which I find in few other parts of the kingdom. I spent two days among them with much satisfaction." He and they had a common foothold in reverence for the Bible, and their differences were minor and unessential. In an entry to be found in his diary, dated Dundee, June 5, 1766, he sums things up thus: "My ground is the Bible. Yea, I am a Bible-bigot. I follow it in all things, both

great and small. Therefore (1) I always use a short, private prayer, when I attend the public service of God. Do not you [Scotchmen]? Why do you not? Is not this according to the Bible? (2) I stand, whenever I sing the praise of God in public. Does not the Bible give you plain precedent for this? (3) I always kneel before the Lord my Maker, when I pray in public. (4) I generally in public use the Lord's Prayer, because Christ has taught me when I pray to say-" Practically, on all the points of difference, doctrinal and ceremonial, the Presbyterian Churches of Scotland have come close to Wesley's position. Only two years ago, by a decision of the English Lord Chancellor Halsbury, the largest Presbyterian body in Scotland, formed by a union of two powerful churches, lost most of its property because it had so to speak-compounded with Arminianism.

During most of the nineteenth century Edinburgh Methodism kept on the quiet tenor of its way, being steadily recruited from northern England. It failed, however, to make itself felt as a power, as an intellectual and religious influence; the chapels were English offshoots. But in the year 1888 there came to the city an Englishman, the Rev. George Jackson, then in his twenty-fifth year, to be pastor of the Nicholson Square Church, which is close to the University. "His eighteen years' magnificent service in Edinburgh," says a journal of standing, The Scottish Review and Christian Leader, "has begotten an intellectual respect for Methodism and shattered our Presbyterian self-complacency. Mr. Jackson has broken down the middle wall of partition, and Presbyterian and Methodist have learned to understand and to think well of each other." Mr. Jackson's aim when he arrived in Edinburgh was to move out from the more scholastic environments of Nicholson Square, associated with routine work, and do something for the city at large and its struggling masses. He conceived the plan of founding another congregation which, to use his own words, "should do for the Methodists on the west side of the city what already Nicholson Square Church was doing on the east side." Accordingly he launched "The West End Mission." Its first home was not far from Coates Place, associated with Lady Maxwell. In Shandwick Place there was a second-class entertain

ment hall known as Albert Hall, and this was rented for Sundays. After two years the work had so grown that its supporters felt justified in moving to the Synod Hall in Castle Terrace, a hall capable of seating about two thousand persons. It is interesting to recall the fact that this great structure was originally built for theatrical purposes; but the Edinburgh people did not take to the grand theater and it was readjusted to church ends, being made the headquarters of United Presbyterian work in the capital. Soon the hall was filled to its full capacity by audiences largely composed of young men who were attracted by the speaker's fresh and forcible manner of treating gospel truth, and many of them proved valuable and loyal assistants to him in his further efforts to evangelize the masses. A men's meeting was organized, which aimed at creating an interest in social and religious questions among workingmen who were not in the habit of attending any church. These gatherings were held on Sunday afternoons, and prominent men from different parts of the country were invited to speak. Not only were new converts numerous, but many who were drifting into infidelity were influenced for good and brought back into the Christian communion.

Another movement was the "Temperance Public House," which furnished counter attractions to public houses (or saloons) of the city. A few years later work began further north, at Stockbridge, in a poor neighborhood; and before long a flourishing Sunday school, and all the equipment of an active church, were in full activity. A place of amusement known as Albion Hall had been rented for the work, but this was bought and rebuilt, and the new premises are modern and excellent. By the close of the year 1901 the parent institution was also in permanent quarters. The site chosen was south of Castle Terrace, and directly west of the University, at Tolcross. In addition to a spacious large hall, one of the best auditoriums in Edinburgh, there is a smaller hall for lectures and like purposes, and about a dozen classrooms. The whole structure cost over a quarter of a million dollars. Mr. Jackson's work has given Methodism a dignified place in the life of Edinburgh which must be gratifying to all lovers of the cause. The great pulpit orator of the city, Dr. Alexander Whyte, has for

several years been lecturing on noted religious thinkers and leaders of religious movements. He devoted one winter to William Law, and another to John Henry Newman; and just at the time the Wesleyan Mission Hall was completed he chose John Wesley as his theme. These lectures presented a new and better estimate of the great leader to the thinking people of Edinburgh. Dr. Whyte has been friendly and sympathetic throughout, and has aided Mr. Jackson in every available way. His own church, Free Saint. George's, stands in Shandwick Place, where the mission work was first started. Mr. Jackson is now on this side of the Atlantic, engaged in similar work in the city of Toronto in Canada. His successor will have no light work in carrying on the enterprises that have been launched so nobly in the city of John Knox.

famerkrain Brain

ART. III.-AN ESTIMATE OF SIDNEY LANIER

SIDNEY LANIER was born in Macon, Georgia, February 3, 1842. Of Huguenot and English ancestry, he inherited some of the sterling qualities that are found in such sturdy stock, exhibiting withal a distinct individuality as a man and an author. Graduating at eighteen years of age with the first honors of his class at Oglethorpe College, Georgia, he remained a while as tutor in the college of which he had been a student, the opening of the Civil War in 1861 calling him to the field in actual military service. Acquitting himself with honor as a soldier he experienced all the privations and hardships then incident to the Southern soldiery, having been a prisoner for months at Fort Lookout and there revealing undoubted symptoms of that fatal disease which so soon was to terminate his promising life. From the close of the war, in 1865, to his death, 1881, he fought a brave and losing fight with disease, the marvel being that he did what he did as an author in the scattered intervals of freedom from suffering. A clerk in Montgomery, Alabama, the principal of an academy in Prattsville, Alabama, studying and practicing law at Macon, he made his home at length, in 1873, in Baltimore, devoting what little strength he possessed to his music and literary work, pressed as he was by the immediate pecuniary needs of himself and family. His appointment in 1879 as Lecturer on English Literature in Johns Hopkins University gave him unfeigned delight, and seemed for a time at least to renew his rapidly declining health. Immersing himself in the study of Old English and Elizabethan English, writing verse and prose, and lecturing at the University and in the city, waning strength made it at length necessary for him to remit all literary labors, so that, in May, 1881, as a last resort, he journeyed to the mountains of North Carolina, dying at forty years of age, when life seemed more desirable than ever, and when he stood at the border-line of the realization of the fondest ideals of his heart. The most casual survey of the life of Lanier thus reveals two characteristics of undoubted prominence.

The first is that he was, out and out, a Southern poet. A