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Rh finish. He died at his house in Great King Street, Edinburgh, on February 23, 1850. As a painter, Sir William Allan will long be gratefully remembered in the annals of Scottish art, for the impulse which he gave to historical composition. For this department he was eminently fitted; for his excellence in painting did not so much consist in character and colour, as in his admirable power in telling a story and his general skill in composition, by which each of his productions is a striking poetical narrative. Sir Walter Scott, a congenial spirit, who highly prized and affectionately loved him, was wont to speak of him under the familiar endearing name of "Willie Allan."

—This excellent divine, who, in spite of many obstacles by which his career was attended, and his position as minister of a sect little noticed and scarcely naturalized in Scotland, won for himself a respected name both as an author and minister, was born in the West Bow of Edinburgh, on the 19th of February, 1782. His father, William Anderson, iron-monger in Edinburgh, was not only prosperous in business, but esteemed for his piety and integrity. Being of delicate health, Christopher was sent in childhood to Lasswade, where he was reared in a comfortable cottage, and educated in the village school; and on his return to his native city, being intended for business, he was first apprenticed to the trade of an iron-monger; but not liking this occupation, he was subsequently entered as junior clerk in a thriving company called the Friendly Insurance Office. Hitherto he had been of rather a gay and thoughtless turn of mind, and was attached to those meetings for music and dancing which, at this time at least, and in such a city as Edinburgh, could scarcely be attended by the young with impunity; and this, with the religious training he received at home, produced within him that struggle which often constitutes the turning-point of the inner and spiritual life. "In the early part of 1799," says his biographer, "when about seventeen years of age, he was sometimes alarmed at the course he was pursuing, and shuddered at the thought of where it must end; but would not allow himself to think long enough on the subject, lest it should cost him those pleasures which he knew to be inconsistent with a godly life." This state did not continue long. He was in the practice of attending public worship at the Circus, lately opened by the Independents, and there the new style of preaching by Mr. James Haldane, the pastor of the church, as well as that of Rowland Hill, Burder of Coventry, Bogue of Gosport, and other distinguished English divines who officiated there during their occasional visits to the north, aroused his inquiries and confirmed his scruples. He abjured his former indulgences as incompatible with the Christian life, and joined in membership with the congregation meeting at the Circus. Scruples soon rose in his mind upon the views on Christian baptism held by the Scottish Baptist church, with which he could not wholly coincide, and conceiving that those of the English Baptist churches were of a more enlarged as well as more scriptural character, he was baptized into that communion in March, 1801, at the age of nineteen. A few others of the Circus congregation joined him in this step, and for this, he and they were excluded from the membership of their church as followers of divisive courses, and left to follow their own devices.

To a mind so sensitive, and so much in earnest as that of Christopher Anderson, this event was of paramount importance. He had shown his sincerity by forsaking the allurements of the world, and joining a cause so new and unpromising in Scotland as that of which the Haldanes were the leaders; and now, he had made a sacrifice perhaps still greater, by foregoing the privileges of their