Penelope's Experiences in Scotland by Kate Douglas Wiggin

Even at this time of Assemblies, when the atmosphere is almost exclusively clerical and ecclesiastical, the two great church armies represented here certainly conceal from the casual observer all rivalries and jealousies, if indeed they cherish any. As for the two dissenting bodies, the Church of the Disruption and the Church of the Secession have been keeping company, so to speak, for some years, with a distant eye to an eventual union. In the light of all this pleasant toleration, it seems difficult to realise that earlier Edinburgh, where, we learned from old parochial records of 1605, Margaret Sinclair was cited by the Session of the Kirk for being at the 'Burne' for water on the Sabbath; that Janet Merling was ordered to make public repentance for concealing a bairn unbaptized in her house for the space of twenty weeks and calling said bairn Janet; that Pat Richardson had to crave mercy for being found in his boat in time of afternoon service; and that Janet Walker, accused of having visitors in her house in sermon-time, had to confess her offence and on her knees crave mercy of God AND the Kirk Session (which no doubt was much worse) under penalty of a hundred pounds Scots. Possibly there are people yet who would prefer to pay a hundred pounds rather than hear a sermon, but they are few.

It was in the early seventeen hundred and thirties when Allan Ramsay, 'in fear and trembling of legal and clerical censure,' lent out the plays of Congreve and Farquhar from his famous High Street library. In 1756 it was, that the Presbytery of Edinburgh suspended all clergymen who had witnessed the representation of Douglas, that virtuous tragedy written, to the dismay of all Scotland, by a minister of the Kirk. That the world, even the theological world, moves with tolerable rapidity when once set in motion, is evinced by the fact that on Mrs. Siddons' second engagement in Edinburgh, in the summer of 1785, vast crowds gathered about the doors of the theatre, not at night alone, but in the day, to secure places. It became necessary to admit them first at three in the afternoon and then at noon, and eventually 'the General Assembly of the Church then in session was compelled to arrange its meetings with reference to the appearance of the great actress. ' How one would have enjoyed hearing that Scotsman say, after one of her most splendid flights of tragic passion, 'That's no bad! ' We have read of her dismay at this ludicrous parsimony of praise, but her self-respect must have been restored when the Edinburgh ladies fainted by dozens during her impersonation of Isabella in The Fatal Marriage.