Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

M'CRIE's 'life of KNOX.' 33
and brilliant success of its predecessor, though brought
into being with much more care, capital, and foresight,
and possessing writers quite as distinguished as those
of the rival camp. Murray was a very steady fighter,
very solid and immovable, standing like a tower ; but
he had nothing in him of the dare-devil, the reck-
less and dauntless spirit which at that period of
literary history certainly seems to have suited the
existing state of affairs better than the most care-
fully laid plans. The ' Edinburgh ' had started gaily,
taking all the risks with a temerity almost culpable
and so did the Magazine, of which Mr Blackwood
had scarcely as yet begun to think. They were both
Berserkers, wild riders of the North, incautious, dar-
ing, irresponsible : the ' Quarterly,' on the other hand,
was respectable—if not always in utterance, at least
in methods—from the beginning of its days, and ob-
served all the rules of success ; but did not, I think,
make any commotion to speak of, even in an eagerly
expectant world.
By this time our young bookseller had already
begun to publish cautiously on his own account, the
most conspicuous of his early publications being the
' Life of John Knox,' by the Bev. Thomas M'Crie,
— ;
a work which made much commotion in its day, and
was one of the first of the publications of a new
historical school, more pious, more reverential, less
elegant and classical, than the works of Bobertson
and Blair ; and starting from an altogether different
point of view from that which regarded Queen Mary
as a wronged heroine, and the Beformer as a fierce
fanatic. M'Crie was a Scottish Dissenting minister,
one of the Auld Licht upon which Burns was so
VOL. I. c