The Life of James Cameron Lees. By Norman Maclean.
(Glasgow : Maclehose, Jackson. 21s. net.)—The late Dr. Cameron Lees, who died in 1913 at the age of seventy-nine, was minister of St. Giles's, Edinburgh, Dean of the Order of the Thistle, and Chaplain to Queen Victoria, her son and her grandson, the present King. Dr. Maclean in this long and able biography shows how Dr. Lees rose to his high position from very humble beginnings as a missioner in Mull, at a time when
the Established Kirk had very few adherents left in the High- lands. Incidentally, the book shows that the patronage system
had its merits. Dr. Lees might have spent his life in a poor Highland parish had not Lord Abercorn noticed his ability and offered him, in 1859, the second charge of Paisley Abbey. At Paisley Dr. Lees soon became well known as an able preacher and administrator, and his appointment to St. Giles's in 1877 was highly popular. Dr. Maclean relates with tolerable impartiality the ecclesiastical troubles in which Dr. Lees was more or less involved, and gives an attractive account of the minister himself, not forgetting some of the stories from his book, Tobersnorey.
• " There was a minister at Ballachulish at the time of the Disruption, when there was a terrible noise in the country, and he was preaching away that everything was going to de- struction, and when the people were coming out, the pensioner says : ' He minds one of Donald WCallum, he says, over at Carsaig. Donald was ploughing one day, and he turned up a mouse's nest, and he distinctly heard the mouse say the universe was coining to an end ; but here we are.' "
Dr. Lees, with his broad-minded tolerance and his humour, was a tower of strength to the Established Kirk, though the fanatics raged against him.
Previous page
