MASTER ROBERT BRUCE.
Master Robert Bruce, Minister in the Kirk of Edinburgh. By D. C. Macnicol. (Oliphant, Anderson, and Fortier, Edinburgh. 5s. net.)—This monograph on a former minister of Edinburgh whom a present minister of that city has described as "by fir the most finished figure among all the makers of Scotland" is one of the best specimens of that literature, at once historical and contro- versial, over which "typical Seotchmen" unaffectedly gloat. His volume is a very full and accurate account of the career of the distinguished Scotch cleric, who, although he is little known in modern days, occupied the pulpit of Knox, and was the disciple of Melville; in short, Mr. Macnicol is quite justified in saying that his career bridges the interval between Knox and Melville on the one side and Alexander Henderson on the other. Bruce was in many respects the Scotsman of his period, and although he certainly was not of the calibre of Knox, and never will be identified so closely as Knox with the life of Scotland as a whole, he performed a most important task in proclaiming the right of the Church of his day to be regarded as the true conscience of Scotland. He took his part as a critic in such incidents of his country's history as the Gowrie Conspiracy, and he had no fear of the King, in spite of his divine right. So far as character and the more purely pastoral aspect of Bruce's life are concerned, Mr. Macnicol is evidently correct in his view that the essence of both was a "practical mysticism" as pronounced as Cromwell's ; the glimpses we have in this volume of Bruce's "Thirty Sermons" will confirm this opinion, although they also exhibit their author as a minute and somewhat "literal" theologian. Altogether, this is a valuable contribution to Scottish historical and biographical literature, and may help towards the production of that "final" history for which the works of Tytler, Hill Burton, and even Mr. Andrew Lang and Mr. Hume Brown, are but preparations.
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