A SHETLAND MINISTER OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
A Shetland Minister of the Eighteenth Century. By Rev. John Wilcock. (The Leonards, Kirkwall.)—This is a well-looking volume, though we did not know that there were publishers at Kirkwall, to adapt Pliny, who "did not know that there were booksellers at Lugdunum." The Rev. John Mill, who was minister of three parishes in South Shetland, with Fair Isle thrown in, for sixty-two years down to 1804, left a diary. This has been published by the Scottish Historical Society, and Mr. Willeock, who holds the charge of Lerwick, has made out of it, and of the minutes of the Presbytery, &c., this readable little book. John Mill was a man of sterling character with some not very amiable ways, things which he reveals with absolute frankness in his diary. He kept straight on his course, and expressed his opinions of those who differed from him, or of whom he disapproved, with great vigour. One doubts whether his ministry was much of a success ; his own family certainly did not turn out very well; he seems to have been a tyrant, and to have met the usual fate of tyrants, being deceived. But he was conspicuously honest, and tenaz propositi, witness his long struggle to secure the " mortifica,- tion " which the widow of a certain James Forbes had made for the benefit of the four poorest widows in the parish. Forbes's heir seized it, asserting that the widow had had only a life-interest. Mr. Mill threatened to carry the matter to the Lords of Session, and prevailed. The endowment still exists. It is £7 Scots, or 11s. fld. sterling. Money, one would think, must have been very rare in Shetland. Mr. Mill was not before his time, possibly a little behind it. He was an exorcist, and had a lifelong struggle with the Devil, who, besides annoying him in other ways, showed himself the Prince of the power of the air, by making the 'wind always blow in his face. Mr. Willcock flippantly suggests that this might easily have been made useful on his boat journeys by the venerable man sitting with his face stern-wise.
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