'/ ft 'A y}/. i LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE - Ex Libris ISAAC FOOT EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS ESSAYS RAB AND HIS FRIENDS: "HORsE SUBSECIV&" THE PUBLISHERS OF SFSIirMtA^S LIBT^A^T WILL BE PLEASED TO SEND FREELY TO ALL APPLICANTS A LIST OF THE PUBLISHED AND PROJECTED VOLUMES TO BE COMPRISED UNDER THE FOLLOWING THIRTEEN HEADINGS: TRAVEL ^ SCIENCE ^ FICTION THEOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY HISTORY ^ CLASSICAL FOR YOUNG PEOPLE ESSAYS ^ ORATORY POETRY & DRAMA BIOGRAPHY REFERENCE ROMANCE IN FOUR STYLES OF BINDING : CLOTH, FLAT BACK, COLOURED TOP ; LEATHER, ROUND CORNERS, GILT TOP; LIBRARY BINDING IN CLOTH, & QUARTER PIGSKIN London : J. M. DENT & SONS, Ltd. New York: E. P. DUTTON & CO. 4feoR0iBM:i>» RAB & HIS FRIENDS^ & OTHER PAPERS & ESSAYS %® BY- JOHN BROWNE in \ LONDON:PUBLSSHED byJMDENT&SONSlS AND IN NEW YORK BY E- P DUTTON © CO PK 4 1 7S~ 3ZK33 First issue of this Edition igob Reprinted igoj, igu INTRODUCTION The divers papers by Dr. John Brown included in this volume were first published in the two first series of his Horce Subsecivce, 1858 and 1861. Since then certain favourite sketches and essays, preferred from these and other books of his, have appeared in various minor editions, and been reprinted again and again. Of these, Rab and his Friends has had an all but innumerable circulation in its detached form. Some of the other papers, on men, dogs, and places, cannot have fallen far short of it; and Marjorie Fleming has almost established a child's corner in literature. In this instance, writer and subject seemed absolutely made for one another. But, indeed, whether Dr. Brown was writing in brief the story of women like Miss Graham of the Mystifications, or of a child like Marjorie, he attained to a kind of biography personal to himself, which was humorous, heartily and richly sentimental, and everywhere suffused with his overflowing kind-heartedness and bonhomie. He wrote like an eloquent, well-primed, affluent talker; he is one of the few favoured and inspired gossips of literature. His own idea of his mercurial manner in his essays may be inferred from several hints and confessions in their pages. In the essay on John Leech, he begins by saying, "If man is made to mourn, he also, poor fellow! — and without doubt, therefore — is made to laugh." The sense 7 8 Introduction of laughter, and the play of humour crossed by pathos and imminent melancholy, in his reminiscent pages, lend his writing much of its individuality. But of his memoirs, the most important of all is the gravest, and that is his account of his father. It is one almost unique among the tributes which have been paid by distinguished sons to the memory of the sires whom they reverenced. Moreover, it gives us many tell-tale, inimitable glimpses of his own early life, and lets us see how the homely Scottish aroma came to be so natively and sweetly diffused from his intimate chronicles. He has written eloquently on other favourite subjects, but with him it is still at home, as it was with Sir Walter Scott, that his imagination struck deepest. To say this is to echo his friend, Professor Masson, who said : "... It was naturally in his own Scotland, and among the things and persons immediately round about him there, that his faculty of appreciation revelled most constantly. With the majority of his literary fellow- countrymen that have attained popularity in Scotland during the last fifty years, he derived many of his literary instincts from the immense influence of Scotticism that had been at work in the preceding generation, and is seen, in his choice of themes, following reverently in the wake of the great Sir Walter. He reminds one somewhat of Aytoun in this respect, though with a marked Presby- terian difference." We enter a new region with his Marjorie Fleming, which engages our wildest mixed emotions. Reading of her, it is impossible to avoid falling in love with Marjorie and entering into degrees of friendship with the people Introduction 9 inhabiting the little world of the magic child who kept her inimitable journals at six, who was the adored com- panion of Sir Walter Scott, and who died at eight years old, most passionately regretted. " It is melancholy to think," writes the tiny creature, "that I have so many talents." What they were, her childish pages that follow may sadly show. Dr. John Brown's own biography is written discursively by himself in many scattered passages of his recollections of his father, his friends and contemporaries. We have his 'prentice years as a medical student recalled in hi? paper on Mr. Syme. " He was my master — my ap- prentice-fee bought him his first carriage, a gig, and I got the first ride in it — and he was my friend. He was, I believe, the greatest surgeon Scotland ever produced." It was in 1828 that he became Syme's pupil. He was born at Biggar, Lanark, on September 22, 1810, the son of another Dr. John Brown, — the D.D. and biblical scholar. He went to school there, and at Edinburgh, whither his father moved in 1822, and then in due course went to Edinburgh University. Sixty years in all he lived at Edinburgh, and there he died, on May 11, 1882. It should be added, since his pages so often treat of the human nature and what he has called in one essay the " solar energy" of his chosen spirits, that he was remarkable for his friendships. His letter to John Cairns lets us far into the secret of his understanding of men. He counted Lord Jeffrey and Lord Cockburn, and greater than they, Ruskin, Thackeray and John Leech, in his personal circle ; and it is a circle which owing to the same cordial quality has gone on enlarging itself naturally since his death. A 2 io Introduction The following is the list of his published works : — Horse Subsecivse, first series (Locke and Sydenham, etc., including " Rab and his Friends "), 1858 ; second series, Vaughan's Poems, etc., 1861 ; third edition in 3 vols., with additional matter, 1882 (several papers were published separately, Rab and his Friends, 1859, etc. ; Letter to Dr. Cairns, i860; Our Dogs, 1862; Marjorie Fleming, 1863; Minchmore, 1864; Jeems, the Doorkeeper, a Lay Sermon, 1864; Locke and Sydenham, 1866). On the deaths of Rev. J. M. Gilchrist, J. Brown, and J. Henderson, i860; Health : Five Lay Sermons to Working-people, 1S62 ; John Leech, 1877 ; Thackeray, his Literary Career, 1877 ; Something about a Well with more of" Our Dogs," 1882. PREFACE TO FIRST SERIES OF "HOR^: SUBSECIViE" In that delightful and provoking book, The Doctor, etc., Southey says: "'Prefaces,' said Charles Blount, Gent., ' Prefaces,' according to this flippant, ill— opinioned, and unhappy man, ' ever were, and still are, but of two sorts, let the mode and fashions vary as they please, — let the long peruke succeed the godly cropt hair; the cravat, the ruff; presbytery, popery; and popery, presbytery again, — yet still the author keeps to his old and wonted method of prefacing; when at the be- ginning of his book he enters, either with a halter round his neck, submitting himself to his readers' mercy whether he shall be hanged or no, or else, in a huffing manner, he appears with the halter in his hand, and threatens to hang his reader, if he gives him not his good word. This, with the excitement of friends to his undertaking, and some few apologies for the want of time, books, and the like, are the constant and usual shams of all scribblers, ancient and modern.' This was not true then," says Southey, " nor is it now." I differ from Southey, in think- ing there is some truth in both ways of wearing the halter. For though it be neither manly nor honest to affect a voluntary humility (which is after all, a sneaking vanity, and would soon show itself if taken at its word), any more than it is well-bred, or seemly to put on ( for it generally is put on) the "huffing manner," both such being truly "shams," — there is general truth in Mr. Blount's flippancies. Every man should know and lament (to himself) his own shortcomings — should mourn over and mend, as he best can, the "confusions of his wasted youth;" he should feel how ill he has put out to usury the talent given him by the great Taskmaster — how far from being " a good and faithful servant;" and he should make this ii 1 2 Preface rather understood than expressed by his manner as a writer; while at the same time, every man should deny himself the luxury of taking his hat off to the public, unless he has something to say, and has done his best to say it aright ; and every man should pay not less attention to the dress in which his thoughts present themselves, than he would to that of his person on going into company. Bishop Butler, in his Preface to his Sermons, in which there is perhaps more solid living sense, than in the same number of words anywhere else, says, after making the division between " obscurity " and " perplexity and con- fusion of thought," — the first being in the subject, the others in its expression, — " confusion and perplexity are, in writing, indeed without excuse, because any one may, if he pleases, know whether he understands or sees through what he is about, and it is unpardonable in a man to lay his thoughts before others, when he is con- scious that he himself does not know whereabouts he is, or how the matter before him stands. It is coming abroad in disorder, wliich he ought to be dissatisfied to find him- self in at ho7ne. ,, There should therefore be in his Preface, as in the writer himself, two elements. A writer should have some assurance that he has something to say, and this assur- ance should, in the true sense, not the Milesian, be modest. My objects, in this volume of odds and ends, are, among others — I. To give my vote for going back to the old manly intellectual and literary culture of the days of Sydenham, Arbuthnot, and Gregory ; when a physician fed, enlarged, and quickened his entire nature ; when he lived in the world of letters as a freeholder, and reverenced the ancients, while, at the same time, he pushed on among his fellows, and lived in the present, believing that his pro- fession and his patients need not suffer, though his horce subsecivce were devoted occasionally to miscellaneous thinking and reading, and to a course of what is elsewhere Preface 13 called " fine confused feeding," or though, as his Gaelic historian says of Rob Roy at his bye hours, he be " a man of incoherent transactions." As I have said, system is not always method, much less progress. II. That the study in himself and others of the human understanding, its modes and laws as objective realities, and his gaining that power over mental action in himself and others, which alone comes from knowledge at first- hand, is one which every physician should not only begin in youth, but continue all his life long, and which in fact all men of sense and original thought do make, though it may lie in their minds, as it were, unformed and without a tongue. III. That physiology and the laws of health are the interpreters of disease and cure, over whose porch we may best inscribe hinc sanitas. That it is in watching Nature's methods of cure 1 in ourselves, and in the lower animals, — and in a firm faith in the self-regulative, re- cuperative powers of nature, that all our therapeutic intentions and means must proceed, and that we should watch and obey this truly Divine voice and finger, with reverence and godly fear, as well as with diligence and worldly wisdom — humbly standing by while He works, guiding, not stemming or withdrawing His current, and acting as His ministers and helps. Not, however, that we should go about making every man, and above all, every woman, his and her own doctor, by making them swallow a dose of science and physiology, falsely so called. 1 " ' That there is no curing diseases by art, without first knowing how they are to be cured by nature,' was the observa- tion of an ancient physician of great eminence, who very early in my life superintended my medical education, and by this axiom all my studies and practice have been regulated." — Grant on Fevers, Lond. 1771. An admirable book, and to be read still, as its worth, like that of nature, never grows old, naturam non pati senium. We would advise every young physician who is in practice, to read this unpretending and now little-known book, especially the introduction. Any " ancient physician," and the greater his eminence and his age the better, so that the eminence be real, who takes it up, will acknowledge that the author had done what he said, made " this axiom " the rule of his life and doctrine. 1 4 Preface There is much mischievous nonsense talked and acted on, in this direction. The physiology to be taught in schools, and to our clients the public, should be the physiology of common sense, rather than that of dogmatic and minute science; and should be of a kind, as it easily may be, which will deter from self-doctoring, while it guides in prevention and conduct ; and will make them understand enough of the fearful and wonderful machinery of life, to awe and warn, as well as to enlighten. Much of the strength and weakness of Homoeopathy lies in the paltry fallacy, that every mother, and every clergyman, and "loose woman," as a wife friend calls the restless public old maid, may know when to administer aconite, arsenicum, and nux, to her child, his entire parish, or her " circle." Indeed here, as elsewhere, man's great difficulty is to strive to walk through life, and through thought and practice, in a straight line ; to keep in medio — in that golden mean, which is our true centre of gravity, and which we lost in Eden. We all tend like children, or the blind, or the old, or the tipsy, to walk to one side, or wildly from one side to the other : one extreme breeds its opposite. Hydropathy sees and speaks some truth, but it is as in its sleep, or with one eye shut, and one leg lame ; its practice does good, its theory is sheer nonsense, and yet it is the theory that its masters and their constituents doat on. If all that is good in the Water-Cure, and in Rubbing, and in Homoeopathy, were winnowed from the false, the useless, and the worse, what an important and permanent addition would be made to our operative knowledge, — to our powers as healers ; and here it is, where I cannot help thinking that we have, as a profession, gone astray in our indiscriminate abuse of all these new practices and nostrums : they indicate, however coarsely and stupidly, some want in us. There is in them all something good, and if we could draw to us, instead of driving away from us, those men whom we call, and in the main truly call, quacks, — if we could absorb them with a difference, re jecting the ridiculous and mischievous much, and adopt- ing and sanctioning the valuable little, we and the public Preface 1 5 would be all the better off. Why should not " the Faculty " have under their control and advice, and at their command, rubbers, and shampooers, and water men, and milk men, and grape men, and cudgelling men, as they have cuppers, and the like, instead of giving them the advantage of crying out 4< persecution," and quoting the martyrs of science from Galileo downwards. IV. As my readers may find to their discontent, the natural, and, till we get into " an ampler aether and diviner air," the necessary difference between speculative science and practical art is iterated and reiterated with much persistency, and the necessity of estimating medicine more as the Art of healing than the Science of diseased action and appearance, 1 and its being more teachable and 1 When the modern scientific methods first burst on our medical world, and especially, when morbid anatomy in con- nexion with physical signs (as distinguished from purely vital symptoms, an incomplete, but convenient distinction), the stethoscope, microscope, &c, it, as a matter of course, became the rage to announce with startling minuteness what was the organic condition of the interior — as if a watchmaker would spend most of his own time and his workmen's, in debating on the beautiful ruins of his wheels, instead of teaching him- self and them to keep the totum quid clean, and going, and winding it up before it stopped. Renowned clinical professors would keep shivering, terrified, it might be dying, patients sitting up while they exhibited their powers in auscultation and pleximetry, &c, the poor students, honest fellows, stand- ing by all the while and supposing this to be their chief end ; and the same eager, admirable, and acute performer, after putting down everything in a book, might be seen moving on to the lecture-room, where he told the same youths what they would find on dissection, with more of minuteness than accuracy, deepening their young wonder into awe, and be- getting a rich emulation in all these arts of diagnosis, — while he forgot to order anything for the cure or relief of the disease 1 This actually happened in a Parisian hospital^ and an Englishman, with his practical turn, said to the lively, clear-headed professor, " But what are you going to give him?" "Oh!" shrugging his shoulders, "I quite forgot about that;" possibly little was needed, or could do good, but that little should have been the main thing, and not have been shrugged at. It is told of another of our Gallic brethren, that having discovered a specific for a skin disease, he pursued it with such keenness on the field of his patient's surface, that 1 6 Preface better by example than by precept, insisted on as one of the most urgent wants of the time. But I must stick to this. Regard for, and reliance on a person, is not less necessary for a young learner, than belief in a principle, or an abstract body of truth ; and here it is that we have given up the good of the old apprenticeship system, along with its evil. This will remedy, and is remedying itself. The abuse of huge classes of mere hearers of the law, under the Professor, has gone, I hope, to its utmost, and we may now look for the system breaking up into small bands of doers acting under the Master, rather than multi- tudes of mere listeners. Connected with this, I cannot help alluding to the crying and glaring sin of publicity, in medicine, as indeed in everything else. Every great epoch brings with it its own peculiar curse as well as blessing, and in religion, in medicine, in everything, even the most sacred and private, this sin of publicity most injuriously prevails. he perished just when it did. On going into the dead-house, our conqueror examined the surface of the subject with much interest, and some complacency — not a vestige of disease or life — and turning on his heel, said, " II est mort guirit" Cured indeed ! with the disadvantage, single, but in one sense infinite, of the man being dead ; dead, with the advantage, general, but at best finite, of the scaly tetter being cured. In a word, let me say to my young medical friends, give more attention to steady common observation — the old Hippo- cratic a.Kpl@eia, exactness, literal accuracy, precision, niceness of sense ; what Sydenham calls the natural history of disease. Symptoms are universally available ; they are the voice of nature : signs, by which I mean more artificial and refined means of scrutiny — the stethoscope, the microscope, &c. — are not always within the power of every man, and with all their help, are additions, not substitutes. Besides, the best natural and unassisted observer — the man bred in the constant prac- tice of keen discriminating insight — is the best man for all instrumental niceties ; and above all, the faculty and habit of gathering together the entire symptoms, and selecting what of these are capital and special ; and trusting in medicine as a tentative art, which even at its utmost conceivable perfection, has always to do with variable quantities, and is conjectural and helpful more than positive and all-sufficient, content with probabilities, with that measure of uncertainty which experi- ence teaches us attaches to everything human and conditioned. Preface 1 7 Every one talks of everything and everybody, and at all sorts of times, forgetting that the greater and the better — the inner part, of a man, is, and should be private — much of it more than private. Public piety, for instance, which means the looking after the piety of others and proclaiming our own — the Pharisee, when he goes up to the temple to pray, looking round and criticising his neighbour the publican, who does not so much as lift up his eyes, even to heaven — the watching and speculating on, and judging (scarcely ever with mercy or truth) the intimate and unspeakable relations of our fellow-creatures to their infinite Father, is often not co-existent with the inward life of God in the soul of man, with that personal state, which alone deserves the word piety. So also in medicine, every one is for ever looking after, and talking of everybody else's health, and advising and prescribing either his or her doctor or drug, and that Here are the candid and wise words of Professor Syme : — " In performing an operation upon the living body, we are not in the condition of a blacksmith or carpenter, who understands precisely the qualities of the materials upon which he works, and can depend on their being always the same. The varieties of human constitution must always expose our proceedings to a degree of uncertainty, and render even the slightest liberties possibly productive of the most serious consequences ; so that the extraction of a tooth, the opening of a vein, or the removal of a small tumour, has been known to prove fatal. Then it must be admitted that the most experienced, careful, and skilful operator may commit mistakes ; and I am sure that there is no one of the gentlemen present who can look back on his practice and say he has never been guilty of an error." This is the main haunt and region of his craft. This it is that makes the rational practitioner. Here again, as in religion, men now-a-days are in search of a sort of fixed point, a kind of demonstration and an amount of certainty which is plainly not intended, for from the highest to the lowest of these compound human knowledges, " probability," as the wise and modest Bishop of Durham says, " is the rule of life;" it suits us best, and keeps down our always budding self-conceit and self-confidence. Symptoms are the body's mother-tongue ; signs are in a foreign language ; and there is an enticing, absorbing something about them, which, unless feared and understood, I have sometimes found standing in the way of the others, which are the staple of our indications always at hand, and open to all. 1 8 Preface wholesome modesty and shame-facedness, which I regret to say is now old-fashioned, is vanishing like other things, and is being put off, as if modesty were a mode, or dress, rather than a condition and essence. Besides the bad moral habit this engenders, it breaks up what is now too rare, the old feeling of a family doctor — there are now as few old household doctors as servants — the familiar, kindly, welcome face, which has presided through genera- tions at births and deaths ; the friend who bears about, and keeps sacred, deadly secrets which must be laid silent in the grave, and who knows the kind of stuff his flock is made of, their " constitutions " — all this sort of thing is greatly gone, especially in large cities, and much from this love of change, of talk, of having everything ex- plained,! or at least named, especially if it be in Latin, of running from one "charming" specialist to another; of doing a little privately and dishonestly to one's-self or the children with the globules ; of going to see some notorious great man without telling or taking with them their old family friend, merely, as they say, " to satisfy their mind," and of course, ending in leaving, and affronting, and injuring the wife and good man. I don't say these evils are new, I only say they are large and active, and are fast killing their opposite virtues. Many a miserable and tragic story might be told of mothers, whose remorse will end only when they themselves lie beside some dead and beloved child, whom they, without thinking, without telling the father, without meaning anything, have, from some such grave folly, sent to the better country, leaving themselves desolate and convicted. Publicity, itching ears, want of reverence for the unknown, want of trust in goodness, want of what we call faith, want of gratitude and fair dealing, on the part of the public; and on the part of the profession, cupidity, curiosity, restlessness, 1 Dr. Cullen's words are weighty : " Neither the acutest genius, nor the soundest judgment, will avail in judging of a particular science, in regard to which they have not been exercised. 1 have been obliged to please my patients some- times with reasons, and I have found that any will pass, even with able divines and acute lawyers; the same will pass with the husbands as with the wives." Preface 19 ambition, false trust in self and in science, the lust and haste to be rich, and to be thought knowing and omni- scient, want of breeding and good sense, of common honesty and honour, these are the occasions and results of this state of things. I am not however a pessimist, I am, I trust, a rational optimist, or at least a meliorist. That as a race, and as a profession, we are gaining, I don't doubt; to disbelieve this, is to distrust the Supreme Governor, and to miss the lesson of the time, which is, in the main, enlargement and progress. But we should all do our best to keep of the old what is good, and detect, and moderate, and control, and remove what of the new is evil. In saying this, 1 would speak as much to myself as to my neighbours, It is in vain, that yvwOi ctavrov (know thyself), is for ever descend- ing afresh from heaven like dew, and silent dew ; all this in vain, if lywyt yiyvuaicoj (I myself know, I am as a god, what do I not know 1) is for ever speaking to us from the ground and from ourselves. Let me acknowledge — and here the principle or habit of publicity has its genuine scope and power — the immense good that is in our time doing by carrying Hygienic reform into the army, the factory, and the nursery — down rivers, and across fields. I see in all these great good; but I cannot help also seeing those private personal dangers I have spoken of, and the masses cannot long go on improving if the individuals deteriorate. There is one subject which may seem an odd one for a miscellaneous book like this, but in which I have long felt a deep and deepening concern. To be brief and plain, I refer to man-midwifery, in all its relations, professional, social, statistical, and moral. I have no space now to go into these fully. I may, if some one better able does not speak out, on some future occasion try to make it plain from reason and experience, that the management by accoucheurs, as they are called, of natural labour, and the separation of this department of the human economy from the general profession, has been a greater evil than a good; and that we have little to thank the Grand Monarque for, in this as in many other things, when tc 20 Preface conceal the shame of the gentle La Valliere, he sent for M. Chison. Any husband or wife, any father or mother, who will look at the matter plainly, may see what an inlet there is here to possible mischief, to certain unseemliness, and worse. Nature tells us with her own voice what is fitting in these cases; and nothing but the omnipotence of cus- tom, or the urgent cry of peril, and terror, and agony, what Luther calls miserrima miseria, would make her ask for the presence of a man on such an occasion, when she hides herself, and is in travail. And as in all such cases, the evil reacts on the men as a special class, and on the profession itself. It is not of grave moral delinquencies I speak, and the higher crimes in this region ; it is of affront to Nature, and of the revenge which she always takes on both parties, who actively or passively disobey her. Some of my best and most valued friends are honoured members of this branch; but I believe all the real good they can do, and the real evils they can prevent in these cases, would be attained, if instead of attending — to their own ludicrous loss of time, health, sleep, and temper, some 200 cases of delivery every year, the immense majority of which are natural, and require no interference, but have nevertheless wasted not a little of their life, their patience, and their understanding — they had, as I would always have them do, and as any well-educated resolute doctor of medicine ought to be able to do, confined themselves to giving their advice and assistance to the sage femtne when she needed it. I know much that may be said against this — ignorance of midwives ; dreadful effects of this, &c. ; but to all this I answer, take pains to educate carefully, and to pay well, and treat well these women, and you may safely regulate ulterior means by the ordinary general laws of surgical and medical therapeutics. Why should not " Peg Tamson, Jean Simson, and Alison Jaup "1 be sufficiently educated and paid to enable them to conduct victoriously the normal obstetrical business of " Middlemas " and its region, 1 Vide Sir Walter Scott's Surgeon's Daughter. Preface 2 1 leaving to Gideon Gray the abnormal, with time to culti- vate his mind and his garden, or even a bit of farm, and to live and trot less hard than he is at present obliged to do. Thus, instead of a man in general practice, and a man, it may be, with an area of forty miles for his beat, sitting for hours at the bed-side of a healthy woman, his other patients meanwhile doing the best or the worst they can, and it may be, as not unfrequently happens, two labours going on at once ; and instead of a timid, ignorant, trusting woman — to whom her Maker has given enough of "sorrow," and of whom Constance is the type, when she says, " I am sick, and capable of fears; I am full of fears, subject to fears; I am a woman, and therefore naturally born to fears," being in this hour of her agony and apprehension — subjected to the artificial misery of fearing the doctor may be too late, she might have the absolute security and womanly hand and heart of one of her own sex. This subject might be argued upon statistical grounds, and others; but I peril it chiefly on the whole system being unnatural. Therefore, for the sake of those who have borne and carried us, and whom we bind ourselves to love and cherish, to comfort and honour, and who suffer so much that is inevitable from the primal curse, and for its own sake, let the profession look into this entire subject in all its bearings, honestly, fearlessly, and at once. Child-bearing is a process of health ; the excep- tions are few indeed, and would, I believe, be fewer if we doctors would let well alone. One or two other things, and I am done. I could have wished to have done better justice to that noble class of men _our country practitioners, who dare not speak out for themselves. They are underpaid — often not paid at all — underrated, and treated in a way that the commonest of their patients would be ashamed to treat his cobbler. How is this to be mended? It is mending itself by the natural law of starvation, and descent per deliquium. Generally speaking, our small towns had three times too many doctors, and, therefore, each of their Gideon Grays had two-thirds too little to live on ; and being in this state 22 Preface of chronic hunger they were in a state of chronic anger at each other not less steady, with occasional seizures more active and acute; they had recourse to all sorts of shifts and meannesses to keep soul and body together for them- selves and their horse, whilst they were acting with a devotion, and generally speaking, with an intelligence and practical beneficence, such as I know, and I know them well, nothing to match. The gentry are in this, as in many country things, greatly to blame. They should cherish, and reward, and associate with those men who are in all essentials their equals, and from whom they would gain as much as they get ; but this will right itself as civilized mankind return as they are doing, to the country, and our little towns will thrive now that lands change, lairds get richer, and dread the city as they should. The profession in large towns might do much for their friends who can do so little for themselves. I am a voluntary in religion, and would have all State churches abolished ; but I have often thought that if there was a class that ought to be helped by the State, it is the country practitioners in wild districts ; or what would be better, by the voluntary association of those in the district who have means — in this case creeds would not be troublesome. However, I am not backing this scheme. I would leave all these things to the natural laws of supply and demand, with the exercise of common honesty, honour, and feeling, in this, as in other things. The taking the wind out of the rampant and abominable quackeries and patent medicines, by the State withdraw- ing altogether the protection and sanction of its stamp, its practical encouragement (very practical), and giving up their large gains from this polluted and wicked source, would, I am sure, be a national benefit. Quackery, and the love of being quacked, are in human nature as weeds are in our fields ; but they may be fostered into frightful luxuriance, in the dark and rich soil of our people, and not the less that Her Majesty's superscription is on the bottle or pot. I would beg the attention of my elder brethren to what 1 have said on Medical Reform and the doctrine of free Preface 23 competition. I feel every day more and more its import- ance and its truth. I rejoice many ways at the passing of the new Medical Bill, and the leaving so much to the discretion of the Council ; it is curiously enough almost verbatim, and altogether in spirit, the measure Professor Syme has been for many years advocating through good and through bad report, with his characteristic vigour and plainness. Holloway's Ointment, or Parr's Pills, or any such monstra horrenda, attain their gigantic proportions and power of doing mischief, greatly by their having Governmental sanction and protection. Men of capital are thus encouraged to go into them, and to spend thou- sands a year in advertisements, and newspaper proprietors degrade themselves into agents for their sale. One can easily see how harmless, if all this were swept away, the hundred Holloways, who would rise up and speedily kill nobody but each other, would become, instead of one huge inapproachable monopolist ; this is the way to put down quackery, by ceasing to hold it up. It is a disgrace to our nation to draw, as it does, hundreds of thousands a year from these wages of iniquity. I have to apologize for bringing in Rab and his Friends. I did so, remembering well the good I got from them long ago, as a man and as a doctor. It let me see down into the depths of our common nature, and feel the strong and gentle touch that we all need, and never forget, which makes the world kin ; and it gave me an opportunity of introducing, in a way which he cannot dislike, for he knows it is simply true, my old master and friend, Professor Syme, whose indenture I am thankful I possess, and whose first wheels I delight in thinking my apprenticeship purchased, thirty years ago. I remember as if it were yesterday, his giving me the first drive across the west shoulder of Corstorphine Hill. On starting, he said, " John, we'll do one thing at a time, and there will be no talk." I sat silent and rejoicing, and can remember the very complexion and clouds of that day and that matchless view : Damyat and Benledi resting couchant at the gate of the Highlands, with the huge Grampians, »*m- mane pecus, crowding down into the plain. 24 Preface This short and simple story shows, that here, as every- where else, personally, professionally, and publicly, reality is his aim and his attainment. He is one of the men — they are all too few — who desire to be on the side of truth more than to have truth on their side; and whose per- sonal and private worth are always better understood than expressed. It has been happily said of him, that he never wastes a word, or a drop of ink, or a drop of blood; and his is the strongest, exactest, truest, immediatest, safest intellect, dedicated by its possessor to the surgical cure of mankind, I have ever yet met with. He will, I firmly believe, leave an inheritance of good done, and mischief destroyed, of truth in theory and in practice established, and of error in the same exposed and ended, such as no one since John Hunter has been gifted to bequeath to his fellow-men. As an instrument for discovering truth, I have never seen his perspicacity equalled ; his mental eye is achromatic, and admits into the judging mind a pure white light, and records an undisturbed, uncoloured image, undiminished and unenlarged in its passage; and he has the moral power, courage, and conscience, to use and devote such an inestimable instrument aright. I need hardly add, that the story of Rab and his Friends is in all essentials strictly matter of fact. There is an odd sort of point, if it can be called a point, on which I would fain say something — and that is an occa- sional outbreak of sudden, and it may be felt, untimely humorousness. I plead guilty to this, sensible of the tendency in me of the merely ludicrous to intrude, and to insist on being attended to, and expressed : it is perhaps too much the way with all of us now-a-days, to be for ever joking. Mr. Punch, to whom we take off our hats, grateful for his innocent and honest fun, especially in his Leech, leads the way ; and our two great novelists, Thack- eray and Dickens, the first especially, are, in the deepest and highest sense, essentially humorists, — the best, nay, indeed the almost only good thing in the latter, being his broad and wild fun ; Swiveller, and the Dodger, and Sam. Weller, and Miggs, are more impressive far to my taste than the melo-dramatic, utterly unreal Dombey, or his Preface 25 strumous and hysterical son, or than all the latter dreary trash of Bleak House, etc. My excuse is, that these papers are really what they profess to be, done at bye-hours. Dulce est desipere, when in its fit place and time. Moreover, let me tell my young doctor friends, that a cheerful face, and step, and neck- cloth, and button-hole, and an occasional hearty and kindly joke, a power of executing and setting agoing a good laugh, are stock in our trade not to be despised. The merry heart does good like a medicine. Your pompous man, and your selfish man, don't laugh much, or care for laughter; it discomposes the fixed grandeur of the one, and has little room in the heart for the other, who is literally self-contained. My Edinburgh readers will recall many excellent jokes of their doctors — " Lang Sandie Wood," Dr. Henry Davidson our Guy Patin and better, &c. I may give an instance, when a joke was more and better than itself. A comely young wife, the " cynosure " of her circle, was in bed, apparently dying from swelling and inflammation of the throat, an inaccessible abscess stopping the way ; she could swallow nothing ; everything had been tried. Her friends were standing round bed in misery and helplessness. " Try her wi' a compliment, " said her husband, in a not uncomic despair. She had genuine humour, as well as he ; and as physiologists know, there is a sort of mental tickling which is beyond and above control, being under the reflex system, and instinctive as well as sighing. She laughed with her whole body and soul, and burst the abscess, and was well. Humour, if genuine (and if not, it is not humour), is the very flavour of the spirit, its rich and fragrant ozma- zome — having in its aroma something of everything in the man, his expressed juice : wit is but the laughing flower of the intellect or the turn of speech, and is often what we call a " gum-flower," and looks well when dry. Humour is, in a certain sense, involuntary in its origin in one man, and in its effect upon another; it is systemic, and not local. Sydney Smith, in his delightful and valuable Sketches 26 Preface of Lectures on Moral Philosophy, to which I have referred, makes a touching and impressive confession of the evil to the rest of a man's nature from the predominant power and cultivation of the ludicrous. I believe Charles Lamb could have told a like, and as true, but sadder story. He started on life with all the endowments of a great, ample, and serious nature, and he ended in being little else than the incomparable joker and humorist, and was in the true sense, " of large discourse." 1 1 Many good and fine things have been said of this wonder- ful and unique genius, but I know none better or finer than these lines by my friend John Hunter of Craigcrook. They are too little known, and no one will be anything but pleased to read them, except their author. The third line might have been Elia's own : — " ... Humour, wild wit, Quips, cranks, puns, sneers,— with clear sweet thought profound ;— And stinging jests, with honey for the wound ; — The subtlest lines of all fine powers, split To their last films, then marvellously spun In magic web, whose million hues are ONE 1" I knew one man who was almost altogether and absolutely comic, and yet a man of sense, fidelity, courage, and worth, but over his entire nature the comic ruled supreme — the late Sir Adam Ferguson, whose very face was a breach of solem- nity ; I daresay, even in sleep he looked a wag. This was the way in which everything appeared to him first, and often last too, with a serious enough middle. I saw him not long before his death, when he was of great age and knew he was dying ; there was no levity in his manner, or thoughtlessness about his state ; he was kind, and shrewd as ever ; but how he flashed out with utter merriment when he got hold of a joke, or rather when it got hold of him, and shook him, not an inch of his body was free of its power — it possessed him, not he it. The first attack was on showing me a calotype of himself by the late Adamson (of Hill and Adamson ; the Vandyke and Raeburn of photo- graphy), in the corner of which he had written, with a hand trembling with age and fun, " Adam's-sun fecit " — it came back upon him and tore him without mercy. Then, his blood being up, he told me a story of his uncle, the great Dr. Black the chemist ; no one will grudge the reading of it in my imperfect record, though it is to the reality, what reading music is to hearing it. Dr. Black, when Professor of Chemistry in Edinburgh Preface 27 It only remains now for me to thank my cousin and life-long- friend, John Taylor Brown, the author of the tract on St. Paul's Thorn in the Flesh. I am sure my readers will thank me not less heartily than I now do him. The theory that the thorn of the great apostle was an affection of the eyes is not new ; it will be found in Hannah More's Life, and in Conybeareand Howson ; but his argu- ment and his whole treatment, I have reason to believe, from my father and other competent judges, is thoroughly original; it is an exquisite monograph, and to me most University, had a gruff old man as his porter, a James Alston. James was one of the old school of chemistry, and held by phlogiston, but for no better reason than the endless trouble the new-fangled discoveries brought upon him in the way of apparatus. The professor was lecturing on Hydrogen Gas, and had made arrangements for showing its lightness, what our pre- ceptor, Dr. Charles Hope, called, in his lofty way, its " principle of absolute levity." He was greatly excited, the good old man of genius. James was standing behind his chair, ready and sulky. His master told his young friends that the bladder he had filled with the gas, must on principle, ascend ; but that they would see practically if it did, and he cut the string. Up it rushed, amid the shouts and upturned faces of the boys, and the quiet joy of their master ; James regarding it with a glum curiosity. Young Adam Ferguson was there, and left at the end of the hour with the rest, but finding he had forgotten his stick, went back; in the empty room, he found James perched upon a lofty and shaky ladder, trying, amid much perspiration, and blasphemy, and want of breath to hit down his enemy, who rose at each stroke — the old battling with the new. Sir Adam's reproduction of this scene, his voice and screams of rapture, I shall never forget. Let me give another pleasant story of Dr. Black and Sir Adam, which our Principal (Dr. Lee) delights to tell ; it is merely its bones. The doctor sent him to the bank for ^5 — four in notes, and one in silver ; then told him that he must be paid for his trouble with a shilling, and next proceeded to give him good advice about the management of money, par- ticularly recommending a careful record of every penny spent, holding the shilling up before him all the time. During this address, Sir Adam was turning over in his mind all the trash he would be able to purchase with the shilling, and his feelings may be imagined when the doctor finally put it into his waistcoat pocket. 28 Preface instructive and striking. Every one will ask why such a man has not written more — a question my fastidious friend will find is easier asked than answered. This Preface was written, and I had a proof ready for his pencil, when I was summoned to the death of him to whom I owe my life. He had been dying for months, but he and I hoped to have got and to have given into his hands a copy of these Horce, the correction of which had often whiled away his long hours of languor and pain. God thought otherwise. I shall miss his great knowledge, his loving and keen eye — his ne quid nimis — his sympathy — himself. Let me be thankful that it was given to me assidere valetudini, fovere deficientem, satiari vultu, complexu. Si quis piorum manibus locus; si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum corpore extinguuntur magnce animce; placide quiescasl Or, in more sacred and hopeful words, which, put there at my father's request, may be found at the close of the paper on young Hallam : " O man greatly beloved, go thou thy way till the end ; for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days." It is not for a son to speak what he thinks of his father so soon after his death. I leave him now with a portrait of his spiritual lineaments, by Dr. Cairns, — which is to them what a painting by Velasquez and Da Vinci com- bined would have been to his bodily presence. " As he was of the Pauline type of mind, his Christianity ran into the same mould. A strong, intense, and vehement nature, with masculine intellect and unyielding will, he accepted the Bible in its literal simplicity as an absolute revela- tion, and then showed the strength of his character in subju- gating his whole being to this decisive influence, and in projecting the same convictions into other minds. He was a believer in the sense of the old Puritans, and, amid the doubt and scepticism of the nineteenth century, held as firmly as any of them by the doctrines of atonement and grace. He had most of the idiosyncrasy of Baxter, though not without the contemplation of Howe. The doctrines of Calvinism, mitigated but not renounced, and received simply as dictates of Heaven, without any effort or hope to bridge over their Preface 29 inscrutable depths by philosophical theories, he translated into a fervent, humble, and resolutely active life. " There was a fountain of tenderness in his nature as well as a sweep of impetuous indignation ; and the one drawn out, and the other controlled by his Christian faith, made him at once a philanthropist and a reformer, and both in the highest departments of human interest. The union of these ardent ele- ments, and of a highly devotional temperament, not untouched with melancholy, with the patience of the scholar, and the sobriety of the critic, formed the singularity and almost the anomaly of his personal character. These contrasts were tempered by the discipline of experience ; and his life, both as man and a Christian, seemed to become more rich, genial, and harmonious as it approached its close." — Scotsman, October 20th. 23, Rutland Street, October 30, 1858. J. B. PREFACE TO THE SECOND SERIES OF "HOR/E SUBSECIV^" In making my bow, with this Second Series, I don't go the length of the man (an ancestor, I suppose, of Uriah Heep) of whom Robert Hall tells, " that he was for ever begging pardon of all flesh for being in the body;" but I sincerely wish this volume had been better than it is, or half as good as I wished it to be. There have been many reasons for this ; some good, some bad. Perhaps my wish was not strong enough to condense itself into will, and maybe could was not commensurate with would ; or, as it is in the last line of an odd doggrel verse that comes into my head as I write — " I wud nut lyv all ways, I wud nut ef I cud ; But, I kneed nut fret about it, 'Caws I cudn't ef I wild." These Hours must, I fear, appear to many Subseciviores 3° Preface —idler than ever ; and some of the studies— browner than brown. I had intended to sober them by two professional papers — one, on the Doctrine and Practice of Prevention in Medicine ; and the other, on the Management of Con- valescence, how to make the most of it; but these must wait for that season which we may hope Felix of old did after all encounter, and they will. For what is not mine, I am sure all my readers will thank me ; and thank still more the kind friend who has, through my importunity, allowed me to steal so much of her "Mystifications," which I am mistaken greatly if my readers do not relish and value. I have, by the kindness of Dr. Cairns, ap- pended my letter to him, which forms a supplementary chapter to his admirable Memoir of my father. I somehow wished it, lame and imperfect and wandering as it is, to be in these Hours. It is little else than an expansion, and often, I fear, a dilution of the noble passage, by the same friend and brother, which closes the Preface to the First Series. May my father's Master, and his, deal kindly with him, as he has dealt with the dead 1 February, 1861. CONTENTS RAB AND HIS FRIENDS 33 THE MYSTERY OF BLACK AND TAN (DICK MIHl) . 49 OUR DOGS 6l marjorie fleming ...... 83 jeems the doorkeeper . . . • .112 minchmoor . • • • • • -125 the black dwarf's bones i4 1 our gideon grays 159 'with brains, sir ' 173 her last half-crown 193 queen mary's child-garden . . • .198 •ArxiNoi'A — presence of mind, &c. . . .203 dr. chalmers 2 12 letter to john cairns, dd 239 a mystifications 319 'oh, i'm wat, wat' 331 arthur h. hallam 34 1 " // thou be a severe, sour-complextoned man, then I here disallow thee to be a competent judge." — izaak walton. " Non ulla nobis pagina gratior Quam quae severis ludicra jungere Novit, fatigatamque nugis Utilibus recreate mentem." DR. JOHNSON. " The treatment of the illustrious dead by the quick, often reminds me of the gravedigger in Hamlet, and the skull of poor defunct Yorick."—W. H. B. " A lady, resident in Devonshire, going into one of her parlours, discovered a young ass, who had found its way into the room, and carefully closed the door upon himself. He had evidently not been long in this situation before he had nibbled a part of Cicero's Orations, and eaten nearly all the index of a folio edition of Seneca in Latin, a large part of a volume of La Bruyere's Maxims in French, and several pages of Cecilia. He had done no other mischief whatever, and not a vestige remained of the leaves that he had devoured." — Pierce Egan. " Ce fagotage de tant si diverses pieces, se faict en cette condition : que je n'y mets la main, que lors qu'une trop lasche oysifveti me presse." — Michel de Montaigne. " Who made you?" was asked of a small girl. She replied, " God made me that length," indicating with her two hands the ordinary size of a new-born infant; " and I growcd the rest mysel'." This was before Topsy's time, and is wittier than even " 'Spects I growed," and not less philosophical than Descartes' nihil with Leibnitz's nisi as its rider. RAB AND HIS FRIENDS Four-and-thirty years ago, Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary Street from the High School, our heads together, and our arms inter- twisted, as only lovers and boys know how, or why. When we got to the top of the street, and turned north, we espied a crowd at the Tron Church. " A dog-fight!" shouted Bob, and was off; and so was I, both of us all but praying that it might not be over before we got up ! and is not this boy-nature ? and human nature too? and don't we all wish a house on fire not to be out before we see it? Dogs like fighting; old Isaac says they "delight" in it, and for the best of all reasons ; and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight. They see three of the great cardinal virtues of dog or man — - courage, endurance, and skill — in intense action. This is very different from a love of making dogs fight, and enjoying, and aggravating, and making gain by their pluck. A boy — be he ever so fond him- self of fighting, if he be a good boy, hates and despises all this, but he would have run off with Bob and me fast enough : it is a natural, and a not wicked interest, that all boys and men have in wit- nessing intense energy in action. Does any curious and finely-ignorant woman wish to know, how Bob's eye at a glance announced a dog-fight to his brain? He did not, he could not see the dogs fighting ; it was a flash of an inference, a rapid induction. The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting, is a crowd, masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman, flutter- ing wildly round the outside, and using her tongue 33 * 34 Rab and his Friends and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes;" it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile ; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus. Well, Bob and I are up, and find it is not over : a small, thoroughbred, white bull-terrier, is busy throttling a large shepherd's dog, unaccustomed to war, but not to be trifled with. They are hard at it ; the scientific little fellow doing his work in great style, his pastoral enemy fighting wildly, but with the sharpest of teeth and a great courage. Science and breeding, however, soon took their own ; the Game Chicken, as the premature Bob called him, working his way up, took his final grip of poor Yarrow's throat, — and he lay gasping and done for. His master, a brown, handsome, big young shepherd from Tweedsmuir, would have liked to have knocked down any man, "drunk up Esil, or eaten a cro- codile," for that part, if he had a chance : it was no use kicking the little dog ; that would only make him hold the closer. Many were the means shouted out in mouthfuls, of the best possible ways of ending it. "Water!" but there was none near, and many shouted for it who might have got it from the well at Blackfriars Wynd. " Bite the tail !" and a large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged man, more anxious than wise, with some struggle got the bushy end of Yarrow's tail into his ample mouth, and bit it with all his might. This was more than enough for the much-enduring, much-perspiring shepherd, who, with a gleam of joy over his broad visage, delivered a terrific facer upon our large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged friend, — who went down like a shot. Still the Chicken holds ; death not far off. " Snuff ! a pinch of snuff!" observed sharply a calm, highly- dressed young buck, with an eye-glass in his eye. " Snuff, indeed !" growled the angry crowd, affronted and glaring. "Snuff! a pinch of snuff!" again observes the buck, but with more urgency; whereon Rab and his Friends 35 were produced several open boxes, and from a mull which may have been at Culloden, he took a pinch, knelt down, and presented it to the nose of the Chicken. The laws of physiology and of snuff take their course; the Chicken sneezes, and Yarrow is free ! The young pastoral giant stalks off with Yarrow in his arms, — comforting him. But the Chicken's blood is up, and his soul un- satisfied; he grips the first dog he meets, but dis- covering she is not a dog, in Homeric phrase, he makes a brief sort of amende, and is off. The boys, with Bob and me at their head, are after him ; down Niddry Street he goes, bent on mischief; up the Cowgate like an arrow — Bob and I, and our small men, panting behind. There, under the large arch of the South Bridge, is a huge mastiff, sauntering down the middle of the causeway, as if with his hands in his pockets : he is old, grey, brindled ; as big as a little Highland bull, and has the Shakesperian dewlaps shaking as he goes. The Chicken makes straight at him, and fastens on his throat. To our astonishment, the great crea- ture does nothing but stand still, hold himself up, and roar — yes, roar; a long, serious, remonstrative roar. How is this? Bob and I are up to them. He is muzzled! The bailies had proclaimed a general muzzling, and his master, studying strength and economy mainly, had encompassed his huge jaws in a home-made apparatus, constructed out of the leather of some ancient breechin. His mouth was open as far as it could ; his lips curled up in rage — a sort of terrible grin; his teeth gleaming, ready, from out the darkness ; the strap across his mouth tense as a bowstring; his whole frame stiff with indignation and surprise; his roar asking us all round, " Did you ever see the like of this?" He looked a statue of anger and astonishment, done in Aberdeen granite. 36 Rab and his Friends We soon had a crowd : the Chicken held on. " A knife !" cried Bob; and a cobbler gave him his knife : you know the kind of knife, worn away obliquely to a point, and always keen. I put its edge to the tense leather ; it ran before it ; and then ! one sudden jerk of that enormous head, a sort of dirty mist about his mouth, no noise, — and the bright and fierce little fellow is dropped, limp, and dead. A solemn pause ; this was more than any of us had bargained for. I turned the little fellow over, and saw he was quite dead : the mastiff had taken him by the small of the back like a rat, and broken it. He looked down at his victim appeased, ashamed, and amazed ; snuffed him all over, stared at him, and taking a sudden thought, turned round and trotted off. Bob took the dead dog up, and said, " John, we'll bury him after tea." " Yes," said I ; and was off after the mastiff. He made up the Cowgate at a rapid swing : he had forgotten some engagement. He turned up the Candlemaker Row, and stopped at the Harrow Inn. There was a carrier's cart ready to start, and a keen, thin, impatient, black-a-vised little man, his hand at his grey horse's head, looking about angrily for something. " Rab, ye thief!" said he, aiming a kick at my great friend, who drew cringing up, and avoiding the heavy shoe with more agility than dignity, and watching his master's eye, slunk dis- mayed under the cart, — his ears down, and as much as he had of tail down too. What a man this must be — thought I — to whom my tremendous hero turns tail ! The carrier saw the muzzle hanging, cut and useless, from his neck, and I eagerly told him the story, which Bob and I always thought, and still think, Homer, or King David, or Sir Walter, alone were worthy to rehearse. The severe little man was mitigated, and condescended to say, " Rab, my man, puir Rabbie," — whereupon the stump of a tail rose up, the ears were cocked, the eyes filled, and were comforted ; the two friends Rab and his Friends 37 were reconciled. "Hupp!" and a stroke of the whip were given to Jess ; and off went the three. Bob and I buried the Game Chicken that night (we hadn't much of a tea) in the back-green of his house, in Melville Street, No. 17, with considerable gravity and silence ; and being at the time in the Iliad, and, like all boys, Trojans, we called him, of course, Hector. Six years have passed, — a long time for a boy and a dog : Bob Ainslie is off to the wars ; I am a medical student, and clerk at Minto House Hospital. Rab I saw almost every week, on the Wednesday; and we had much pleasant intimacy. I found the way to his heart by frequent scratching of his huge head, and an occasional bone. When I did not notice him he would plant himself straight before me, and stand wagging that bud of a tail, and look- ing up, with his head a little to the one side. His master I occasionally saw ; he used to call me " Maister John," but was laconic as any Spartan. One fine October afternoon, I was leaving the hospital, when I saw the large gate open, and in walked Rab, with that great and easy saunter of his. He looked as if taking general possession of the place ; like the Duke of Wellington entering a sub- dued city, satiated with victory and peace. After him came Jess, now white from age, with her cart ; and in it a woman, carefully wrapped up, — the carrier leading the horse anxiously, and looking back. When he saw me, James (for his name was James Noble) made a curt and grotesque " boo," and said, " Maister John, this is the mistress; she's got a trouble in her breest — some kind o* an income we're thinkin'." 38 Rab and his Friends By this time I saw the woman's face; she was sitting on a sack filled with straw, her husband's plaid round her, and his big-coat, with its large white metal buttons, over her feet. I never saw a more unforgetable face — pale, serious, lonely, 1 delicate, sweet, without being what we call fine. She looked sixty, and had on a mutch, white as snow, with its black ribbon ; her silvery smooth hair setting off her dark-grey eyes — eyes such as one sees only twice or thrice in a lifetime, full of suffering, but full also of the overcoming of it ; her eye-brows black and delicate, and her mouth firm, patient, and contented, which few mouths ever are. As I have said, I never saw a more beautiful countenance, or one more subdued to settled quiet. "Ailie," said James, "this is Maister John, the young doctor; Rab's freend, ye ken. We often speak aboot you, doctor." She smiled, and made a move- ment, but said nothing; and prepared to come down, putting her plaid aside and rising. Had Solomon, in all his glory, been handing down the Queen of Sheba at his palace gate, he could not have done it more daintily, more tenderly, more like a gentleman, than did James the Howgate carrier, when he lifted down Ailie, his wife. The contrast of his small, swarthy, weatherbeaten, keen, worldly face to hers — pale, sub- dued, and beautiful — was something wonderful. Rab looked on concerned and puzzled, but ready for any- thing that might turn up, — were it to strangle the nurse, the porter, or even me. Ailie and he seemed great friends. " As I was sayin', she's got a kind o' trouble in her breest, doctor; wull ye tak' a look at it?" We walked into the consulting-room, all four; Rab grim and comic, willing to be happy and confidential if cause could be shown, willing also to be quite the reverse, on the same terms. Ailie sat down, undid her open gown and her lawn handkerchief round her neck, and, 1 It is not easy giving this look by one word ; it was ex- pressive of her being so much of her life alone. Rab and his Friends 39 without a word, showed me her right breast. I looked at and examined it carefully, — she and James watch- ing me, and Rab eyeing all three. What could I say? there it was, that had once been so soft, so shapely, so white, so gracious and bountiful, " so full of all blessed conditions," — hard as a stone, a centre of horrid pain, making that pale face, with its grey, lucid, reasonable eyes, and its sweet resolved mouth, express the full measure of suffering overcome. Why was that gentle, modest, sweet woman, clean and lovable, condemned by God to bear such a burden? I got her away to bed. " May Rab and me bide?" said James. " You may; and Rab, if he will behave himself." " I'se warrant he's do that, doctor;" and in slunk the faithful beast. I wish you could have seen him. There are no such dogs now : he belonged to a lost tribe. As I have said, he was brindled, and grey like Aberdeen granite; his hair short, hard, and close, like a lion's ; his body thick set, like a little bull — a sort of compressed Hercules of a dog. He must have been ninety pounds' weight, at the least; he had a large blunt head ; his muzzle black as night ; his mouth blacker than any night, a tooth or two — being all he had — gleaming out of his jaws of darkness. His head was scarred with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of fields of battle all over it ; one eye out, one ear cropped as close as was Archbishop Leighton's father's — but for different reasons, — the remaining eye had the power of two ; and above it, and in constant communication with it, was a tattered rag of an ear, which was for ever unfurling itself, like an old flag; and then that bud of a tail, about one inch long, if it could in any sense be said to be long, being as broad as long — the mobility, the instantaneousness of that bud was very funny and surprising, and its expressive twinklings and winkings, the intercommunications between the eye, the ear, and it, were of the subtlest and swiftest. Rab had the dignity and simplicity of great size ; and having fought his way all along the road to absolute 4o Rab and his Friends supremacy, he was as mighty in his own line as Julius Caesar or the Duke of Wellington; and he had the gravity 1 of all great fighters. You must have often observed the likeness of cer- tain men to certain animals, and of certain dogs to men. Now, I never looked at Rab without thinking of the great Baptist preacher, Andrew Fuller. 2 The same large, heavy, menacing, combative, sombre, honest countenance, the same inevitable eye, the same look, — as of thunder asleep, but ready, — neither a dog nor a man to be trifled with. Next day, my master, the surgeon, examined Ailie. There was no doubt it must kill her, and soon. It could be removed — it might never return — it would give her speedy relief — she should have it done. She curtsied, looked at James, and said, " When ?" " To- morrow," said the kind surgeon, a man of few words. She and James and Rab and I retired. I noticed that he and she spoke little, but seemed to anticipate everything in each other. The following day, at noon, the students came in, hurrying up the great stair. At the first landing-place, on a small well-known black board, was a bit of paper fastened by wafers, and many remains of old wafers beside it. On the paper were the words, " An operation to-day. J. B. Clerk." 1 A Highland game-keeper, when asked why a certain terrier, of singular pluck, was so much graver than the other dogs, said, " Oh, Sir, life's full o' sairiousness to him — he just never can get enuff o' fechtin'." * Fuller was in early life, when a farmer lad at Soham, famous as a boxer ; not quarrelsome, but not without " the stern delight " a man of strength and courage feels in the exercise. Dr. Charles Stewart, of Dunearn, whose rare gifts and graces as a physician, a divine, a scholar, and a gentle- man, live only in the memory of those few who knew and survive him, liked to tell how Mr. Fuller used to say, that when he was in the pulpit, and saw a buirdly man, he would instinctively draw himself up, measure his imaginary anta- gonist, and forecast how he would deal with him, his hands meanwhile condensing into fists. He must have been a hard hitter if he boxed as he preached — what " The Fancy " would call " an ugly customer." Rab and his Friends 41 Up ran the youths, eager to secure good places : in they crowded, full of interest and talk. " What's the case ? " " Which side is it?" Don't think them heartless; they are neither better nor worse than you or I : they get over their profes- sional horrors, and into their proper work; and in them pity — as an emotion, ending in itself or at best in tears and a long-drawn breath, lessens, while pity as a motive, is quickened, and gains power and pur- pose. It is well for poor human nature that it is so. The operating theatre is crowded ; much talk and fun, and all the cordiality and stir of youth. The surgeon with his staff of assistants is there. In comes Ailie : one look at her quiets and abates the eager students. That beautiful old woman is too much for them ; they sit down, and are dumb, and gaze at her. These rough boys feel the power of her presence. She walks in quickly, but without haste ; dressed in her mutch, her neckerchief, her white dimity shortgown, her black bombazeen petticoat, showing her white worsted stockings and her carpet-shoes. Behind her was James, with Rab. James sat down in the dis- tance, and took that huge and noble head between his knees. Rab looked perplexed and dangerous ; for ever cocking his ear and dropping it as fast. Ailie stepped up on a seat, and laid herself on the table, as her friend the surgeon told her; arranged herself, gave a rapid look at James, shut her eyes, rested herself on me, and took my hand. The opera- tion was at once begun ; it was necessarily slow ; and chloroform — one of God's best gifts to his suffering children — was then unknown. The surgeon did his work. The pale face showed its pain, but was still and silent. Rab's soul was working within him; he saw that something strange was going on, — blood flowing from his mistress, and she suffering ; his ragged ear was up, and importunate ; he growled and gave now and then a sharp impatient yelp ; he would have liked to have done something to that man. But James had him firm, and gave him a glower from B 2 42 Rab and his Friends time to time, and an intimation of a possible kick; — all the better for James, it kept his eye and his mind off Ailie. It is over : she is dressed, steps gently and decently down from the table, looks for James ; then, turning to the surgeon and the students, she curtsies, — and in a low, clear voice, begs their pardon if she has be- haved ill. The students — all of us — wept like chil- dren ; the surgeon happed her up carefully, — and, resting on James and me, Ailie went to her room, Rab following. We put her to bed. James took off his heavy shoes, crammed with tackets, heel-capt and toe-capt, and put them carefully under the table, say- ing, " Maister John, I'm for nane o' yer strynge nurse bodies for Ailie. I'll be her nurse, and on my stockin' soles I'll gang about as canny as pussy." And so he did ; and handy and clever, and swift and tender as any woman, was that horny-handed, snell, peremptory little man. Everything she got he gave her : he sel- dom slept; and often I saw his small, shrewd eyes out of the darkness, fixed on her. As before, they spoke little. Rab behaved well, never moving, showing us how meek and gentle he could be, and occasionally, in his sleep, letting us know that he was demolishing some adversary. He took a walk with me every day, gener- ally to the Candlemaker Row; but he was sombre and mild ; declined doing battle, though some fit cases offered, and indeed submitted to sundry indignities ; and was always very ready to turn, and came faster back, and trotted up the stair with much lightness, and went straight to that door. Jess, the mare — now white — had been sent, with her weather-worn cart, to Howgate, and had doubtless her own dim and placid meditations and confusions, on the absence of her master and Rab, and her unnatural freedom from the road and her cart. For some days Ailie did well. The wound healed " by the first intention ;" as James said, " Oor Ailie's skin's ower clean to beil." The students came in Rab and his Friends 43 quiet and anxious, and surrounded her bed. She said she liked to see their young, honest faces. The surgeon dressed her, and spoke to her in his own short kind way, pitying her through his eyes, Rab and James outside the circle, — Rab being now recon- ciled, and even cordial, and having made up his mind that as yet nobody required worrying, but, as you may suppose, semper paratus. So far well : but, four days after the operation, my patient had a sudden and long shivering, a " groofin'," as she called it. I saw her soon after; her eyes were too bright, her cheek coloured; she was restless, and ashamed of being so; the balance was lost; mischief had begun. On looking at the wound, a blush of red told the secret : her pulse was rapid, her breathing anxious and quick, she wasn't herself, as she said, and was vexed at her restless- ness. We tried what we could. James did every- thing, was everywhere; never in the way, never out of it ; Rab subsided under the table into a dark place, and was motionless, all but his eye, which followed every one. Ailie got worse ; began to wander in her mind, gently; was more demonstrative in her ways to James, rapid in her questions, and sharp at times. He was vexed, and said, " She was never that way afore; no, never." For a time she knew her head was wrong, and was always asking our pardon — the dear, gentle old woman : then delirium set in strong, without pause. Her brain gave way, and that terrible spectacle, " The intellectual power, through words and things, Went sounding on its dim and perilous way;" she sang bits of old songs and Psalms, stopping suddenly, mingling the Psalms of David, and the diviner words of his Son and Lord, with homely odds and ends and scraps of ballads. Nothing more touching, or in a sense more strangely beautiful, did I ever witness. Her tremu- lous, rapid, affectionate, eager Scotch voice, — the 44 Rab and his Friends swift, aimless, bewildered mind, the baffled utterance, the bright and perilous eye ; some wild words, some household cares, something for James, the names of the dead, Rab called rapidly and in a " fremyt " voice, and he starting up, surprised, and slinking off as if he were to blame somehow, or had been dream- ing he heard. Many eager questions and beseech- ings which James and I could make nothing of, and on which she seemed to set her all and then sink back ununderstood. It was very sad, but better than many things that are not called sad. James hovered about, put out and miserable, but active and exact as ever ; read to her, when there was a lull, short bits from the Psalms, prose and metre, chanting the latter in his own rude and serious way, showing great know- ledge of the fit words, bearing up like a man, and doating over her as his "ain Ailie. " " Ailie, ma woman !" " Ma ain bonnie wee dawtie !" The end was drawing on : the golden bowl was breaking ; the silver cord was fast being loosed — that animula, blandula, vagula, hospes, comesque, was about to flee. The body and the soul — companions for sixty years — were being sundered, and taking leave. She was walking, alone, through the valley of that shadow, into which one day we must all enter, — and yet she was not alone, for we know whose rod and staff were comforting her. One night she had fallen quiet, and as we hoped, asleep ; her eyes were shut. We put down the gas, and sat watching her. Suddenly she sat up in bed, and taking a bedgown which was lying on it rolled up, she held it eagerly to her breast, — to the right side. We could see her eyes bright with a surprising tenderness and joy, bending over this bundle of clothes. She held it as a woman holds her sucking child ; opening out her night-gown impatiently, and holding it close, and brooding over it, and murmur- ing foolish little words, as over one whom his mother comforteth, and who is sucking, and being satisfied. It was pitiful and strange to see her wasted dying Rab and his Friends 45 look, keen and yet vague — her immense love. " Pre- serve me!" groaned James, giving way. And then she rocked back and forward, as if to make it sleep, hushing it, and wasting on it her infinite fondness. " Wae's me, doctor; I declare she's thinkin' it's that bairn." " What bairn?" " The only bairn we ever had; our wee Mysie, and she's in the Kingdom, forty years and mair. " It was plainly true: the pain in the breast, telling its urgent story to a bewildered, ruined brain ; it was misread and mistaken ; it sug- gested to her the uneasiness of a breast full of milk, and then the child ; and so again once more they were together, and she had her ain wee Mysie in her bosom. This was the close. She sunk rapidly ; the delirium left her ; but as she whispered, she was clean silly ; it was the lightening before the final darkness. After having for some time lain still — her eyes shut, she said "James!" He came close to her, and lifting up her calm, clear, beautiful eyes, she gave him a long look, turned to me kindly but shortly, looked for Rab but could not see him, then turned to her husband again, as if she would never leave off look- ing, shut her eyes, and composed herself. She lay for some time breathing quick, and passed away so gently, that when we thought she was gone, James, in his old-fashioned way, held the mirror to her face. After a long pause, one small spot of dimness was breathed out ; it vanished away, and never returned, leaving the blank clear darkness of the mirror without a stain. " What is our life? it is even a vapour, which appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." Rab all this time had been full awake and motion- less : he came forward beside us : Ailie's hand, which James had held, was hanging down; it was soaked with his tears ; Rab licked it all over carefully, looked at her, and returned to his place under the table. James and I sat, I don't know how long, but for some time, — saying nothing : he started up abruptly, 4 6 Rab and his Friends and with some noise went to the table, and putting his right fore and middle fingers each into a shoe, pulled them out, and put them on, breaking one of the leather latchets, and muttering in anger, " I never did the like o' that afore !" I believe he never did; nor after either. " Rab !" he said roughly, and pointing with his thumb to the bottom of the bed. Rab leapt up, and settled him- self; his head and eye to the dead face. " Maister John, ye'll wait for me," said the carrier; and dis- appeared in the darkness, thundering down stairs in his heavy shoes. I ran to a front window : there he was, already round the house, and out at the gate, fleeing like a shadow. I was afraid about him, and yet not afraid; so I sat down beside Rab, and being wearied, fell asleep. I awoke from a sudden noise outside. It was No- vember, and there had been a heavy fall of snow. Rab was in statu quo; he heard the noise too, and plainly knew it, but never moved. I looked out; and there, at the gate, in the dim morning — for the sun was not up, was Jess and the cart, — a cloud of steam rising from the old mare. I did not see James ; he was already at the door, and came up the stairs, and met me. It was less than three hours since he left, and he must have posted out — who knows how? — to Howgate, full nine miles off; yoked Jess, and driven her astonished into town. He had an armful of blankets, and was streaming with perspiration. He nodded to me, spread out on the floor two pairs of old clean blankets, having at their corners, "A. G. , 1794," in large letters in red worsted. These were the initials of Alison Graeme, and James may have looked in at her from without — unseen but not un- thought of — when he was " wat, wat, and weary," and had walked many a mile over the hills, and seen her sitting, vmile "a' the lave were sleepin';" and by the firelight putting her name on the blankets for her ain James's bed. He motioned Rab down, and taking his wife in his arms, laid her in the blankets, Rab and his Friends 47 and happed her carefully and firmly up, leaving the face uncovered ; and then lifting- her, he nodded again sharply to me, and with a resolved but utterly miser- able face, strode along the passage, and down stairs, followed by Rab. I also followed, with a light; but he didn't need it. I went out, holding stupidly the light in my hand in the frosty air; we were soon at the gate. I could have helped him, but I saw he was not to be meddled with, and he was strong, and did not need it. He laid her down as tenderly, as safely, as he had lifted her out ten days before — as tenderly as when he had her first in his arms when she was only "A. G.," — sorted her, leaving that beautiful sealed face open to the heavens ; and then taking Jess by the head, he moved away. He did not notice me, neither did Rab, who presided alone behind the cart. I stood till they passed through the long shadow of the College, and turned up Nicolson Street. I heard the solitary cart sound through the streets, and die away and come again ; and I returned, thinking of that company going up Libberton brae, then along Roslin muir, the morning light touching the Pent- lands and making them like on-looking ghosts; then down the hill through Auchindinny woods, past "haunted Woodhouselee ;" and as daybreak came sweeping up the bleak Lammermuirs, and fell on his own door, the company would stop, and James would take the key, and lift Ailie up again, laying her on her own bed, and, having put Jess up, would return with Rab and shut the door. James buried his wife, with his neighbours mourn- ing, Rab inspecting the solemnity from a distance. It was snow, and that black ragged hole would look strange in the midst of the swelling spotless cushion of white. James looked after everything ; then rather suddenly fell ill, and took to bed ; was insensible when the doctor came, and soon died. A sort of low fever was prevailing in the village, and his want of sleep, his exhaustion, and his misery, made him apt to take it. The grave was not difficult to re-open. A fresh 4 8 Rab and his Friends fall of snow had again made all things white and smooth ; Rab once more looked on, and slunk home to the stable. And what of Rab? I asked for him next week at the new carrier's who got the goodwill of James's business, and was now master of Jess and her cart. " How's Rab?" He put me off, and said rather rudely, " What's your business wi' the dowg?" I was not to be so put off. " Where's Rab?" He, get- ting confused and red, and intermeddling with his hair, said, " 'Deed, sir, Rab's deid." " Dead ! what did he die of?" " Weel, sir," said he, getting redder, ' he didna exactly die ; he was killed. I had to brain him wi' a rack-pin ; there was nae doin' wi' him. He lay in the treviss wi' the mear, and wadna come oot. I tempit him wi' kail and meat, but he wad tak' naething, and keepit me frae feedin' the beast, and he was aye gur gurrin', and grup gruppin' me by the legs. I was laith to mak* awa wi' the auld dowg, his like wasna atween this and Thornhill, — but 'deed, sir, I could do naething else." I believed him. Fit end for Rab, quick and complete. His teeth and his friends gone, why should he keep the peace and be civil ? DICK MIH1, OR CUR, WHY ? baing vestiges of the natural history of the creation of a Highland Terrier; with a new rendering of " de cespite vivo," and a theory of BLACK and TAN. " The reader must remember that my work is concerning the aspects of things only." — Ruskin. THE MYSTERY OF BLACK AND TAN We,— the Sine Qua Non, the Duchess, the Sput- chard, the Dutchard, the Ricapicticapic, Oz and Oz, the Maid of Lorn, and myself,— left Crieff some fifteen years ago, on a bright September morning, soon after daybreak, in a gig. It was a morning still and keen : the sun sending his level shafts across Strathearn, and through the thin mist over its river hollows, to the fierce Aberuchil Hills, and searching out the dark blue shadows in the corries of Benvor- lich. But who and how many are " we "? To make you as easy as we all were, let me tell you we were four ; and are not these dumb friends of ours persons rather than things? is not their soul ampler, as Plato would say, than their body, and contains rather than is contained? Is not what lives and wills in them, and is affectionate, as spiritual, as immaterial, as truly removed from mere flesh, blood, and bones, as that soul which is the proper self of their master? And when we look each other in the face, as I now look in Dick's, who is lying in his " corny ' by the fireside, and he in mine, is it not as much the dog within looking from out his eyes— the windows of his soul — as it is the man from his? The Sine Qua Non, who will not be pleased at being spoken of, is such an one as that vain-glorious and chivalrous Ulric von Hutten — the Reformation's man of wit, and of the world, and of the sword, who slew Monkery with the wild laughter of his Epistohe Obscurorum Virorum — had in his mind when he wrote thus to his friend Fredericus Piscator (Mr. Fred. Fisher), on the 19th May, 1519, " Da mihi 5* 52 Mystery of Black and Tan uxorem, Friderice, et ut scias qualem, venustam, adolescentulam, probe educatam, hilarem, verecun- dam, patientem." " Qualem," he lets Frederic understand in the sentence preceding, is one " qua cum ludam, qua jocos confer am, amoeniores et levi- usculas fabulas misceam, ubi sollicitudinis aciem obtundam, cur arum, cestus mitigetn." And if you would know more of the Sine QuA Non, and in Eng- lish, for the world is dead to Latin now, you will find her name and nature in Shakspere's words, when King Henry the Eighth says, "go thy ways." The Duchess, alias all the other names till you come to the Maid of Lorn, is a rough, gnarled, incomparable little bit of a terrier, three parts Dandie- Dinmont, and one part — chiefly in tail and hair — cocker: her father being Lord Rutherfurd's famous " Dandie," and her mother the daughter of a Skye, and a lighthearted Cocker. The Duchess is about the size and weight of a rabbit ; but has a soul as big, as fierce, and as faithful as had Meg Merrilees, with a nose as black as Topsy's; and is herself every bit as game and queer as that delicious imp of dark- ness and of Mrs. Stowe. Her legs set her long slim body about two inches and a half from the ground, making her very like a huge caterpillar or hairy oobit — her two eyes, dark and full, and her shining nose, being all of her that seems anything but hair. Her tail was a sort of stump, in size and in look very much like a spare fore-leg, stuck in anywhere to be near. Her colour was black above and a rich brown below, with two dots of tan above the eyes, which dots are among the deepest of the mysteries of Black and Tan. This strange little being I had known for some years, but had only possessed about a month. She and her pup (a young lady called Smoot, which means smolt, a young salmon), were given me by the widow of an honest and drunken — as much of the one as of the other — Edinburgh street-porter, a native of Badenoch, as a legacy from him and a fee from her Mystery of Black and Tan 53 for my attendance on the poor man's deathbed. But my first sight of the Duchess was years before in Broughton Street, when I saw her sitting bolt up- right, begging, imploring, with those little rough fore leggies, and those yearning, beautiful eyes, all the world, or any one, to help her master, who was lying " mortal " in the kennel. I raised him, and with the help of a ragged Samaritan, who was only less drunk than he, I got Macpherson — he held from Glen Truim — home ; the excited doggie trotting off, and looking back eagerly to show us the way. I never again passed the Porters' Stand without speak- ing to her. After Malcolm's burial I took possession of her; she escaped to the wretched house, but as her mistress was off to Kingussie, and the door shut, she gave a pitiful howl or two, and was forthwith back at my door, with an impatient, querulous bark. And so this is our second of the four; and is she not deserving of as many names as any other Duchess, from her of Medina Sidonia downwards? A fierier little soul never dwelt in a Queerer or stancher body : see her huddled up, and you would think her a bundle of hair, or a bit of old mossy wood, or a slice of heathery turf, with some red soil under- neath ; but speak to her, or give her a cat to deal with, be it bigger than herself, and what an incar- nation of affection, energy, and fury — what a fell unquenchable little ruffian ! The Maid of Lorn was a chestnut mare, a broken- down racer, thoroughbred as Beeswing, but less for- tunate in her life, and I fear not so happy occasione mortis: unlike the Duchess, her body was greater and finer than her soul ; still she was a ladylike creature, sleek, slim, nervous, meek, willing, and fleet. She had been thrown down by some brutal half-drunk Forfarshire laird, when he put her wildly and with her wind gone, at the last hurdle on the North Inch at the Perth races. She was done for, and bought for ten pounds by the landlord of the Drummond Arms, Crieff, who had been taking as 54 Mystery of Black and Tan much money out of her, and putting as little corn into her as was compatible with life, purposing to run her for the Consolation Stakes at Stirling. Poor young lady, she was a sad sight — broken in back, in knees, in character, and wind — in everything but temper, which was as sweet and all-enduring as Penelope's or our own Enid's. Of myself, the fourth, I decline making any account. Be it sufficient that I am the Dutchard's master, and drove the gig. It was, as I said, a keen and bright morning, and the S. Q. N. feeling chilly, and the Duchess being away after a cat up a back entry, doing a chance stroke of business, and the mare looking only half breakfasted, I made them give her a full feed of meal and water, and stood by and enjoyed her enjoyment. It seemed too good to be true, and she looked up every now and then in the midst of her feast, with a mild wonder. Away she and I bowled down the sleeping village, all overrun with sunshine, the dumb idiot man and the birds alone up, for the ostler was off to his straw. There was the S. Q. N. and her small panting friend, who had lost the cat, but had got what philosophers say is better — the chase. " Nous ne cherchons jamais les choses, mais la re- cherche des choses ," says Pascal. The Duchess would substitute for les choses — les chats. Pursuit, not possession, was her passion. We all got in, and off set the Maid, who was in excellent heart, quite gay, pricking her ears and casting up her head, and rattling away at a great pace. We baited at St. Fillans, and again cheered the heart of the Maid with unaccustomed corn — the S. Q. N., Duchie, and myself, going up to the beauti- ful rising ground at the back of the inn, and lying on the fragrant heather, looking at the Loch, with its mild gleams and shadows, and its second heaven looking out from its depths, the wild, rough moun- tains of Glenartney towering opposite. Duchie, I believe, was engaged in minor business close at hand, Mystery of Black and Tan 55 and caught and ate several large flies and a humble- bee ; she was very fond of this small game. There is not in all Scotland, or as far as I have seen in all else, a more exquisite twelve miles of scenery than that between Crieff and the head of Lochearn. Ochtertyre, and its woods ; Benchonzie, the head-quarters of the earthquakes, only lower than Benvorlich ; Strowan ; Lawers, with its grand old Scotch pines ; Comrie, with the wild Lednoch ; Du- nira; and St. Fillans, where we are now lying, and where the poor thoroughbred is tucking in her corn. We start after two hours of dreaming in the half sunlight, and rumble ever and anon over an earth- quake, as the common folk call these same hollow, resounding rifts in the rock beneath, and arriving at the old inn at Lochearnhead, have a tousie tea. In the evening, when the day was darkening into night, Duchie and I, — the S. Q. N. remaining to read and rest, — walked up Glen Ogle. It was then in its primeval state, the new road non-existent, and the old one staggering up and down and across that most original and Cyclopean valley, deep, threatening, savage, and yet beautiful — " Where rocks were rudely heaped, and rent As by a spirit turbulent ; Where sights were rough, and sounds were wild, And everything unreconciled ;" with flocks of mighty boulders, straying all over it. Some far up, and frightful to look at, others huddled down in the river, immane pecus, and one huge un- loosened fellow, as big as a manse, up aloft watch- ing them, like old Proteus with his calves, as if they had fled from the sea by stress of weather, and had been led by their ancient herd altos visere montes — a wilder, more "unreconciled" place I know not; and now that the darkness was being poured into it, those big fellows looked bigger, and hardly " canny." Just as we were turning to come home — Duchie unwillingly, as she had much multifarious, and as usual fruitless hunting to do — she and I were 56 Mystery of Black and Tan startled by seeing a dog in the side of the hill, where the soil had been broken. She barked and I stared ; she trotted consequentially up and snuffed more canino, and I went nearer : it never moved, and on coming quite close I saw as it were the image of a terrier, a something that made me think of an idea unrealized ; the rough, short, scrubby heather and dead grass, made a colour and a coat just like those of a good Highland terrier — a sort of pepper and salt this one was — and below, the broken soil, in which there was some iron and clay, with old gnarled roots, for all the world like its odd, bandy, and sturdy legs. Duchie seemed not so easily unbeguiled as I was, and kept staring, and snuffing, and growling, but did not touch it, — seemed afraid. I left and looked again, and certainly it was very odd the growing resemblance to one of the indigenous, hairy, low-legged dogs, one sees all about the High- lands, terriers, or earthy ones. We came home, and I told the S. Q. N. our joke. I dreamt of that visionary terrier, that son of the soil, all night ; and in the very early morning, leav- ing the S. Q. N. asleep, I walked up with the Duchess to the same spot. What a morning ! it was before sun-rise, at least before he had got above Benvorlich. The loch was lying in a faint mist, beautiful exceedingly, as if half veiled and asleep, the cataract of Edinample roaring less loudly than in the night, and the old castle of the Lords of Lochow, in the shadow of the hills, among its trees, might be seen " Sole sitting by the shore of old romance." There was still gloom in Glen Ogle, though the beams of the morning were shooting up into the broad fields of the sky. I was looking back and down, when I heard the Duchess bark sharply, and then give a cry of fear, and on turning round, there was she with as much as she had of tail between her legs, where I never saw it before, and her small Grace, without noticing me or my cries, making down Mystery of Black and Tan 57 to the inn and her mistress, a hairy hurricane. I walked on to see what it was, and there in the same spot as last night, in the bank, was a real dog — no mistake ; it was not, as the day before, a mere sur- face or spectrum, or ghost of a dog ; it was plainly round and substantial ; it was much developed since eight p.m. As I looked, it moved slightly, and as it were by a sort of shiver, as if an electric shock (and why not?) was being administered by a law of nature ; it had then no tail, or rather had an odd amorphous look in that region ; its eye, for it had one — it was seen in profile — looked to my profane vision like (why not actually?) a huge blaeberry (vaccinium Myrtillius, it is well to be scientific) black and full ; and I thought, — but dare not be sure, and had no time or courage to be minute, — that where the nose should be, there was a small shining black snail, probably the Limax niger of M. de Ferussac, curled up, and if you look at any dog's nose you will be struck with the typical resemblance, in the corrugations and moistness and jetty blackness of the one to the other, and of the other to the one. He was a strongly-built, wiry, bandy, and short-legged dog. As I was staring upon him, a beam — Oh, first creative beam ! — sent from the sun — " Like as an arrow from a bow, Shot by an archer strong " — as he looked over Benvorlich's shoulder, and pierc- ing a cloudlet of mist which clung close to him, and filling it with whitest radiance, struck upon that eye or berry, and lit up that nose or snail : in an instant he sneezed (the nisus (sneezus?) formativus of the ancients) ; that eye quivered and was quickened, and with a shudder — such as a horse executes with that curious muscle of the skin, of which we have a mere fragment in our neck, the Platysma Myoides, and which doubtless has been lessened as we lost our dis- tance from the horse-type — which dislodged some dirt and stones and dead heather, and doubtless endless beetles, and, it may be, made some near weasel open 58 Mystery of Black and Tan his other eye, up went his tail, and out he came, lively, entire, consummate, warm, wagging his tail, I was going to say like a Christian, I mean like an ordin- ary dog. Then flashed upon me the solution of the Mystery of Black and Tan in all its varieties : the body, its upper part grey or black or yellow, accord- ing to the upper soil and herbs, heather, bent, moss, etc. ; the belly and feet, red or tan or light fawn, according to the nature of the deep soil, be it ochrey, ferruginous, light clay, or comminuted mica slate. And wonderfullest of all, the Dots of Tan above the eyes — and who has not noticed and wondered as to the philosophy of them? — I saw made by the two fore feet, wet and clayey, being put briskly up to his eyes as he sneezed that genetic, vivifying sneeze, and leaving their mark, for ever. He took to me quite pleasantly, by virtue of " natural selection," and has accompanied me thus far in our " struggle for life," and he, and the S. Q. N., and the Duchess, and the Maid, returned that day to Crieff, and were friends all our days. I was a little timid when he was crossing a burn lest he should wash away his feet, but he merely coloured the water, and every day less and less, till in a fort- night I could wash him without fear of his becoming a solution, or fluid extract of dog, and thus resolv- ing the mystery back into itself. The mare's days were short. She won the Con- solation Stakes at Stirling, and was found dead next morning in Gibb's stables. The Duchess died in a good old age, as may be seen in the history of " Our Dogs." The S. Q. N., and the parthenogenesic earth-born, the Cespes Vivus — whom we sometimes called Joshua, because he was the Son of None (Nun), and even Melchisedec has been whispered, but only that, and Fitz-Memnon, as being as it were a son of the Sun, sometimes the Autochthon airoxOovo's ; (in- deed, if the relation of the coup de soleil and the blae- berry had not been plainly causal and effectual, I might have called him Filius Gunni, for at the very Mystery of Black and Tan 59 moment of that shudder, by which he leapt out of non-life into life, the Marquis's gamekeeper fired his rifle up the hill, and brought down a stray young stag,) these two are happily with me still, and at this moment she is out on the grass in a low easy-chair, reading Emilie Carlen's Brilliant Marriage, and Dick is lying at her feet, watching, with cocked ears, some noise in the ripe wheat, possibly a chicken, for, poor fellow, he has a weakness for worrying hens, and such small deer, when there is a dearth of greater. If any, as is not unreasonable, doubt me and my story, they may come and see Dick. I assure them he is well worth seeing. OUR DOGS " The misery ef keeping a dog. is his dying so soon; but to be sure, if he lived for fifty years, and then died, what would become of me?" — Sir Walter Scott. " There is in every animal's eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flask of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the soul." — Rusiun. To Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan's glum and faithful " PETER," with much regard. OUR DOGS I was bitten severely by a little dog when with my mother at Moffat Wells, being then three years of age, and I have remained " bitten " ever since in the matter of dogs. I remember that little dog, and can at this moment not only recall my pain and terror — I have no doubt I was to blame — but also her face ; and were I allowed to search among the shades in the cynic Elysian fields, I could pick her out still. All my life I have been familiar with these faithful creatures, making friends of them, and speaking to them ; and the only time I ever addressed the public, about a year after being bitten, was at the farm of Kirklaw Hill, near Biggar, when the text, given out from an empty cart in which the ploughmen had placed me, was " Jacob's dog," and my entire sermon was as follows : — " Some say that Jacob had a black dog (the o very long), and some say that Jacob had a white dog, but I (imagine the presumption of four years !) say Jacob had a brown dog, and a brown dog it shall be." I had many intimacies from this time onwards — Bawtie, of the inn; Keeper, the carrier's bull-terrier; Tiger, a huge tawny mastiff from Edinburgh, which I think must have been an uncle of Rab's; all the sheep dogs at Callands — Spring, Mavis, Yarrow, Swallow, Cheviot, &c. ; but it was not till I was at college, and my brother at the High School, that we possessed a dog. TOBY Was the most utterly shabby, vulgar, mean-look- ing cur I ever beheld : in one word, a tyke. He had 63 64 Our Dogs not one good feature except his teeth and eyes, and his bark, if that can be called a feature. He was not ugiy enough to be interesting ; his colour black and white, his shape leggy and clumsy ; altogether what Sydney Smith would have called an extraor- dinarily ordinary dog : and, as I have said, not even greatly ugly, or, as the Aberdonians have it, bonnie wV illfauredness. My brother William found him the centre of attraction to a multitude of small black- guards who were drowning him slowly in Lochend Loch, doing their best to lengthen out the process, and secure the greatest amount of fun with the nearest approach to death. Even then Toby showed his great intellect by pretending to be dead, and thus gaining time and an inspiration. William bought him for twopence, and as he had it not, the boys accompanied him to Pilrig Street, when I happened to meet him, and giving the twopence to the biggest boy, had the satisfaction of seeing a general en- gagement of much severity, during which the two- pence disappeared ; one penny going off with a very small and swift boy, and the other vanishing hope- lessly into the grating of a drain. Toby was for weeks in the house unbeknown to any one but ourselves two and the cook, and from my grandmother's love of tidiness and hatred of dogs and of dirt, I believe she would have expelled " him whom we saved from drowning," had not he, in his straightforward way, walked into my father's bedroom one night when he was bathing his feet, and introduced himself with a wag of his tail, intimating a general willingness to be happy. My father laughed most heartily, and at last Toby, having got his way to his bare feet, and having begun to lick his soles and between his toes with his small rough tongue, my father gave such an unwonted shout of laughter, that we — grandmother, sisters, and all of us — went in. Grandmother might argue with all her energy and skill, but as surely as the pressure of Tom Jones' infantile fist upon Mr. Allworthy's fore- Our Dogs 65 finger undid all the arguments of his sister, so did Toby's tongue and fun prove too many for grand- mother's eloquence. I somehow think Toby must have been up to all this, for I think he had a peculiar love for my father ever after, and regarded grand- mother from that hour with a careful and cool eye. Toby, when full grown, was a strong, coarse dog : coarse in shape, in countenance, in hair, and in manner. I used to think that, according to the Pythagorean doctrine, he must have been, or been going to be a Gilmerton carter. He was of the bull- terrier variety, coarsened through much mongrelism and a dubious and varied ancestry. His teeth were good, and he had a large skull, and a rich bark as of a dog three times his size, and a tail which I never saw equalled — indeed it was a tail per se ; it was of immense girth and not short, equal throughout like a policeman's baton; the machinery for working it was of great power, and acted in a way, as far as I have been able to discover, quite original. We called it his ruler. When he wished to get into the house, he first whined gently, then growled, then gave a sharp bark, and then came a resounding, mighty stroke which shook the house; this, after much study and watching, we found was done by his bringing the entire length of his solid tail flat upon the door, with a sudden and vigorous stroke; it was quite a tour de force or a coup de queue, and he was perfect in it at once, his first bang authoritative, having been as masterly and telling as his last. With all this inbred vulgar air, he was a dog of great moral excellence — affectionate, faithful, honest up to his light, with an odd humour as peculiar and as strong as his tail. My father, in his reserved way, was very fond of him, and there must have been very funny scenes with them, for we heard bursts of laughter issuing from his study when they two were by themselves : there was something in him that took that grave, beautiful, melancholy face. c 66 Our Dogs One can fancy him in the midst of his books, and sacred work and thoughts, pausing and looking at the secular Toby, who was looking out for a smile to begin his rough fun, and about to end by coursing and gurriri' round the room, upsetting my father's books, laid out on the floor for consultation, and himself nearly at times, as he stood watching him — and off his guard and shaking with laughter. Toby had always a great desire to accompany my father up to town ; this my father's good taste and sense of dignity, besides his fear of losing his friend (a vain fear !), forbade, and as the decision of character of each was great and nearly equal, it was often a drawn game. Toby ultimately, by making it his entire object, triumphed. He usually was nowhere to be seen on my father leaving ; he however saw him, and lay in wait at the head of the street, and up Leith Walk he kept him in view from the opposite side like a detective, and then, when he knew it was hopeless to hound him home, he crossed unblush- ingly over, and joined company, excessively rejoiced of course. One Sunday he had gone with him to church, and left him at the vestry door. The second psalm was given out, and my father was sitting back in the pulpit, when the door at its back, up which he came from the vestry, was seen to move, and gently open, then, after a long pause, a black shining snout pushed its way steadily into the congregation, and was followed by Toby's entire body. He looked somewhat abashed, but snuffing his friend, he advanced as if on thin ice, and not seeing him, put his fore-legs on the pulpit, and behold there he was, his own familiar chum. I watched all this, and any- thing more beautiful than his look of happiness, of comfort, of entire ease when he beheld his friend, — the smoothing down of the anxious ears, the swing of gladness of that mighty tail, — I don't expect soon to see. My father quietly opened the door, and Toby was at his feet and invisible to all but himself : had Our Dogs 67 he sent old George Peaston, the " minister's man," to put him out, Toby would probably have shown his teeth, and astonished George. He slunk home as soon as he could, and never repeated that exploit. I never saw in any other dog the sudden transition from discretion, not to say abject cowardice, to blaz- ing and permanent valour. From his earliest years he showed a general meanness of blood, inherited from many generations of starved, bekicked, and down-trodden forefathers and mothers, resulting in a condition of intense abjectness in all matters of personal fear ; anybody, even a beggar, by a gowl and a threat of eye, could send him off howling by anticipation, with that mighty tail between his legs. But it was not always so to be, and I had the privi- lege of seeing courage, reasonable, absolute, and for life, spring up in Toby at once, as did Athen£ from the skull of Jove. It happened thus : — Toby was in the way of hiding his culinary bones in the small gardens before his own and the neigh- bouring doors. Mr. Scrymgeour, two doors off, a bulky, choleric, red-haired, red-faced man — torvo vultu — was, by the law of contrast, a great cultivator of flowers, and he had often scowled Toby into all but non-existence by a stamp of his foot and a glare of his eye. One day his gate being open, in walks Toby with a huge bone, and making a hole where Scrymgeour had two minutes before been planting some precious slip, the name of which on paper and on a stick Toby made very light of, substituted his bone, and was engaged covering it, or thinking he was covering it up with his shovelling nose (a very odd relic of paradise in the dog), when S. spied him through the inner glass door, and was out upon him like the Assyrian, with a terrific gowl. I watched them. Instantly Toby made straight at him with a roar too, and an eye more torve than Scrymgeour's, who, retreating without reserve, fell prostrate, there is reason to believe, in his own lobby. Toby con- tented himself with proclaiming his victory at the 68 Our Dogs door, and returning finished his bone planting at his leisure ; the enemy, who had scuttled behind the glass- door, glaring at him. From this moment Toby was an altered dog. Pluck at first sight was lord of all; from that time dated his first tremendous deliverance of tail against the door, which we called "come listen to my tail." That very evening he paid a visit to Leo, next door's dog, a big, tyrannical bully and coward, which its master thought a Newfoundland, but whose pedigree we knew better; this brute continued the same system of chronic extermination which was inter- rupted at Lochend, — having Toby down among his feet, and threatening him with instant death two or three times a day. To him Toby paid a visit that very evening, down into his den, and walked about, as much as to say " Come on, Macduff !" but Mac- duff did not come on, and henceforward there was an armed neutrality, and they merely stiffened up and made their backs rigid, pretended each not to see the other, walking solemnly round, as is the manner of dogs. Toby worked his new-found faculty thoroughly, but with discretion. He killed cats, astonished beggars, kept his own in his own garden against all comers, and came off victorious in several well-fought battles; but he was not quarrelsome or foolhardy. It was very odd how his carriage changed, holding his head up, and how much pleasanter he was at home. To my father, next to William, who was his Humane Society man, he re- mained stanch. And what of his end? for the misery of dogs is that they die so soon, or as Sir Walter says, it is well they do ; for if they lived as^ long as a Christian, and we liked them in proportion, and they then died, he said that was a thing he could not stand. His exit was miserable, and had a strange poetic or tragic relation to his entrance. My father was out of town ; I was away in England. Whether it was that the absence of my father had relaxed his Our Dogs 69 power of moral restraint, or whether through neglect of the servant he had been desperately hungry, or most likely both being true, Toby was discovered with the remains of a cold leg of mutton, on which he had made an ample meal j 1 this he was in vain endeavouring to plant as of old, in the hope of its remaining undiscovered till to-morrow's hunger re- turned, the whole shank bone sticking up unmistak- ably. This was seen by our excellent and Radaman- thine grandmother, who pronounced sentence on the instant; and next day, as William was leaving for the High School, did he in the sour morning, through an easterly haur, behold him " whom he saved from drowning," and whom, with better results than in the case of Launce and Crab, he had taught, as if one should say " thus would I teach a dog," — dang- ling by his own chain from his own lamp-post, one of his hind feet just touching the pavement, and his body preternaturally elongated. William found him dead and warm, and falling in with the milk-boy at the head of the street, ques- tioned him, and discovered that he was the execu- tioner, and had got twopence, he— Toby's every morning's crony, who met him and accompanied him up the street, and licked the outside of his can — had, with an eye to speed and convenience, and a want of taste, not to say principle and affection, horrible still to think of, suspended Toby's animation beyond all hope. William instantly fell upon him, upsetting his milk and cream, and gave him a thorough licking, to his own intense relief ; and, being late, he got from Pyper, who was a martinet, the customary palmies, which he bore with something approaching to pleasure. So died Toby : my father said little, but he missed and mourned his friend. There is reason to believe that by one of those 1 Toby was in the state of the shepherd boy whom George Webster met in Glenshee, and asked, " My man, were you ever fou'?" " Ay, aince "—speaking slowly, as if remem- bering— " Ay, aince." "What on?" " Cauld mutton!" 70 Our Dogs curious intertwistings of existence, the milk-boy was that one of the drowning party who got the penny of the twopence. WYLIE Our next friend was an exquisite shepherd's dog; fleet, thin-flanked, dainty, and handsome as a small greyhound, with all the grace of silky waving black and tan hair. We got him thus. Being then young and keen botanists, and full of the knowledge and love of Tweedside, having been on every hill top from Muckle Mendic to Hundleshope and the Lee Pen, and having fished every water from Tarth to the Leithen, we discovered early in spring that young Stewart, author of an excellent book on natural history, a young man of great promise and early death, had found the Buxbaumia aphylla, a beautiful and odd- looking moss, west of Newbie heights, in the very month we were that moment in. We resolved to start next day. We walked to Peebles, and then up Haystoun Glen to the cottage of Adam Cairns, the aged shepherd of the Newbie hirsel, of whom we knew, and who knew of us from his daughter, Nancy Cairns, a servant with Uncle Aitken of Callands. We found our way up the burn with difficulty, as the evening was getting dark ; and on getting near the cottage heard them at worship. We got in, and made ourselves known, and got a famous tea, and such cream and oat cake ! — old Adam looking on us as " clean dementit " to come out for "a bit moss," which, however, he knew, and with some pride said he would take us in the morning to the place. As we were going into a box bed for the night, two young men came in, and said they were " gaun to burn the water." Off we set. It was a clear, dark, starlight, frosty night. They had their leisters and tar torches, and it was something worth seeing — the wild flame, the young fellows striking the fish Our Dogs 71 coming to the light — how splendid they looked with the light on their scales, coming out of the darkness — the stumblings and quenchings suddenly of the lights, as the torch-bearer fell into a deep pool. We got home past midnight, and slept as we seldom sleep now. In the morning Adam, who had been long up, and had been up the " Hope " with his dog, when he saw we had wakened, told us there was four inches of snow, and we soon saw it was too true. So we had to go home without our crypto- gamic prize. It turned out that Adam, who was an old man and frail, and had made some money, was going at Whitsunday to leave, and live with his son in Glas- gow. We had been admiring the beauty and gentle- ness and perfect shape of Wylie, the finest colley I ever saw, and said, " What are you going to do with Wylie?" " 'Deed," says he, "I hardly ken. I canna think o' selling her, though she's worth four pound, and she'll no like the toun." I said, " Would you let me have her?" and Adam, looking at her fondly — she came up instantly to him, and made of him — said, "Ay, I wull, if ye'll be gude to her;" and it was settled that when Adam left for Glasgow she should be sent into Albany Street by the carrier. She came, and was at once taken to all our hearts, even grandmother liked her; and though she was often pensive, as if thinking of her master and her work on the hills, she made herself at home, and be- haved in all respects like a lady. When out with me, if she saw sheep in the streets or road, she got quite excited, and helped the work, and was curiously useful, the being so making her wonderfully happy. And so her little life went on, never doing wrong, always blithe and kind and beautiful. But some months after she came, there was a mystery about her : every Tuesday evening she disappeared ; we tried to watch her, but in vain, she was always off by nine p.m., and was away all night, coming back next day wearied and all over mud, as if she had travelled 72 Our Dogs far. She slept all next day. This went on for some months and we could make nothing of it. Poor dear creature, she looked at us wistfully when she came in, as if she would have told us if she could, and was especially fond, though tired. Well, one day I was walking across the Grass- market, with VVylie at my heels, when two shepherds started, and looking at her, one said, " That's her; that's the wonderfu' wee bitch that naebody kens." I asked him what he meant, and he told me that for months past she had made her appearance by the first daylight at the " buchts " or sheep pens in the cattle market, and worked incessantly, and to excel- lent purpose, in helping the shepherds to get their sheep and lambs in. The man said with a sort of transport, "She's a perfect meeracle ; flees about like a speerit, and never gangs wrang ; wears but never grups, and beats a' oor dowgs. She's a per- fect meeracle, and as soople as a maukin. " Then he related how they all knew her, and said, " There's that wee fell yin; we'll get them in noo. " They tried to coax her to stop and be caught, but no, she was gentle, but off; and for many a day that " wee fell yin " was spoken of by these rough fellows. She continued this amateur work till she died, which she did in peace. It is very touching the regard the south-country shepherds have to their dogs. Professor Syme one day, many years ago, when living in Forres Street, was looking out of his window, and he saw a young shepherd striding down North Charlotte Street, as if making for his house : it was midsummer. The man had his dog with him, and Mr. Syme noticed that he followed the dog, and not it him, though he con- trived to steer for the house. He came, and was ushered into his room ; he wished advice about some ailment, and Mr. Syme saw that he had a bit of twine round the dog's neck, which he let drop out of his hand when he entered the room. He asked him the meaning of this, and he explained that the Our Dogs 73 magistrates had issued a mad-dog proclamation, com- manding all dogs to be muzzled or led on pain of death. " And why do you go about as I saw you did before you came in to me?" " Oh," said he, looking awkward, " I didna want Birkie to ken he was tied." Where will you find truer courtesy and finer feeling? He didn't want to hurt Birkie's feelings. Mr. Carruthers of Inverness told me a new story of these wise sheep dogs. A butcher from Inver- ness had purchased some sheep at Dingwall, and giving them in charge to his dog, left the road. The dog drove them on, till coming to a toll, the toll- wife stood before the drove, demanding her dues. The dog looked at her, and, jumping on her back, crossed his fore-legs over her arms. The sheep passed through, and the dog took his place behind them, and went on his way. RAB Of Rab I have little to say, indeed have little right to speak of him as one of " our dogs;" but nobody will be sorry to hear anything of that noble fellow. Ailie, the day or two after the operation, when she was well and cheery, spoke about him, and said she would tell me fine stories when I came out, as I promised to do, to see her at Howgate. I asked her how James came to get him. She told me that one day she saw James coming down from Leadburn with the cart; he had been away west, getting eggs and butter, cheese and hens for Edinburgh. She saw he was in some trouble, and on looking, there was what she thought a young calf being dragged, or, as she called it, " haurled," at the back of the cart. James was in front, and when he came up, very warm and very angry, she saw that there was a huge young dog tied to the cart, struggling and pulling back with all his might, and as she said c 2 74 Our Dogs " lookin' fearsom. " James, who was out of breath and temper, being past his time, explained to Ailie, that this " muckle brute o' a whalp " had been worry- ing sheep, and terrifying everybody up at Sir George Montgomery's at Macbie Hill, and that Sir George had ordered him to be hanged, which, however, was sooner said than done, as " the thief " showed his intentions of dying hard. James came up just as Sir George had sent for his gun ; and as the dog had more than once shown a liking for him, he said he " wad gie him a chance;" and so he tied him to his cart. Young Rab, fearing some mischief, had been entering a series of protests all the way, and nearly strangling himself to spite James and Jess, besides giving Jess more than usual to do. " I wish I had let Sir George pit that charge into him, the thrawn brute," said James. But Ailie had seen that in his fore-leg there was a splinter of wood, which he had likely got when objecting to be hanged, and that he was miserably lame. So she got James to leave him with her, and go straight into Edinburgh. She gave him water, and by her woman's wit got his lame paw under a door, so that he couldn't sud- denly get at her, then with a quick firm hand she plucked out the splinter, and put in an ample meal. She went in some time after, taking no notice of him, and he came limping up, and laid his great jaws in her lap: from that moment they were "chief," as she said, James finding him mansuete and civil when he returned. She said it was Rab's habit to make his appear- ance exactly half-an-hour before his master, trotting in full of importance, as if to say, " He's all right, he'll be here." One morning James came without him. He had left Edinburgh very early, and in coming near Auchindinny, at a lonely part of the road, a man sprang out on him, and demanded his money. James, who was a cool hand, said, " Weel a weel, let me get it," and stepping back, he said to Rab, " Speak till him, my man." In an instant Rab Our Dogs 75 was standing over him, threatening strangulation if he stirred. James pushed on, leaving Rab in charge ; he looked back, and saw that every attempt to rise was summarily put down. As he was telling Ailie the story, up came Rab with that great swing of his. It turned out that the robber was a Howgate lad, the worthless son of a neighbour, and Rab knowing him had let him cheaply off; the only thing, which was seen by a man from a field, was, that before letting him rise, he quenched (pro tempore) the fire of the eyes of the ruffian, by a familiar Gulliverian applica- tion of Hydraulics, which I need not further particu- larize. James, who did not know the way to tell an untruth, or embellish anything, told me this as what he called " a fact positeevely." WASP Was a dark brindled bull-terrier, as pure in blood as Cruiser or Wild Dayrell. She was brought by my brother from Otley, in the West Riding. She was very handsome, fierce, and gentle, with a small, com- pact, finely-shaped head, and a pair of wonderful eyes — as full of fire and of softness as Grisi's; in- deed she had to my eye a curious look of that wonder- ful genius — at once wild and fond. It was a fine sight to see her on the prowl across Bowden Moor, now cantering with her nose down, now gathered up on the top of a dyke, and with erect ears, looking across the wild like a moss-trooper out on business, keen and fell. She could do everything it became a dog to do, from killing an otter or a polecat, to watching and playing with a baby, and was as docile to her master as she was surly to all else. She was not quarrelsome, but "being in," she would have pleased Polonius as much, as in being " ware of entrance." She was never beaten, and she killed on the spot several of the country bullies who came out upon her when following her master in his rounds. 76 Our Dogs She generally sent them off howling with one snap, but if this was not enough, she make an end of it. But it was as a mother that she shone ; and to see the gipsy, Hagar-like creature nursing her occasional Ishmael — playing with him, and fondling him all over, teaching his teeth to war, and with her eye and the curl of her lip daring any one but her master to touch him, was like seeing Grisi watching her dar- ling " Gennaro," who so little knew why and how much she loved him. Once when she had three pups, one of them died. For two days and nights she gave herself up to try- ing to bring it to life — licking it and turning it over and over, growling over it, and all but worrying it to awake it. She paid no attention to the living two, gave them no milk, flung them away with her teeth, and would have killed them, had they been allowed to remain with her. She was as one pos- sessed, and neither ate, nor drank, nor slept, was heavy and miserable with her milk, and in such a state of excitement that no one could remove the dead pup. Early on the third day she was seen to take the pup in her mouth, and start across the fields towards the Tweed, striding like a race-horse — she plunged in, holding up her burden, and at the middle of the stream dropped it and swam swiftly ashore : then she stood and watched the little dark lump floating away, bobbing up and down with the current, and losing it at last far down, she made her way home, sought out the living two, devoured them with her love, carried them one by one to her lair, and gave herself up wholly to nurse them : you can fancy her mental and bodily happiness and relief when they were pulling away — and theirs. On one occasion my brother had lent her to a woman who lived in a lonely house, and whose hus- band was away for a time. She was a capital watch. One day an Italian with his organ came — first beg- ging, then demanding money — showing that he knew Our Dogs 77 she was alone, and that he meant to help himself, if she didn't. She threatened to " lowse the dowg;" but as this was Greek to him, he pushed on. She had just time to set Wasp at him. It was very short work. She had him by the throat, pulled him and his organ down with a heavy crash, the organ giving a ludicrous sort of cry of musical pain. Wasp think- ing this was from some creature within, possibly a whittret, left the ruffian, and set to work tooth and nail on the box. Its master slunk off, and with mingled fury and thankfulness watched her disem- bowelling his only means of an honest living. The woman good-naturedly took her off, and signed to the miscreant to make himself and his remains scarce. This he did with a scowl ; and was found in the evening in the village, telling a series of lies to the watchmaker, and bribing him with a shilling to mend his pipes — "his kist o* whussels." JOCK Was insane from his birth ; at first an amabilis insania, but ending in mischief and sudden death. He was an English terrier, fawn coloured ; his mother's name Vamp (Vampire), and his father's Demon. He was more properly daft than mad ; his courage, muscularity, and prodigious animal spirits making him insufferable, and never allowing one sane feature of himself any chance. No sooner was the street door open, than he was throttling the first dog passing, bringing upon himself and me endless grief. Cats he tossed up into the air, and crushed their spines as they fell. Old ladies he upset by jumping over their heads ; old gentlemen by running between their legs. At home, he would think nothing of leap- ing through the tea-things, upsetting the urn, cream, etc., and at dinner the same sort of thing. I believe if I could have found time to thrash him sufficiently, and let him be a year older, we might have kept him; 78 Our Dogs but having upset an Earl when the streets were muddy, I had to part with him. He was sent to a clergyman in the island of Westray, one of the Ork- neys ; and though he had a wretched voyage, and was as sick as any dog, he signalized the first moment of his arrival at the manse, by strangling an ancient monkey, or " puggy," the pet of the minister, — who was a bachelor, — and the wonder of the island. Jock henceforward took to evil courses, extracting the kidneys of the best young rams, driving whole hirsels down steep places into the sea, till at last all the guns of Westray were pointed at him, as he stood at bay under a huge rock on the shore, and blew him into space. I always regret his end, and blame myself for sparing the rod. Of DUCHIE I have already spoken ; her oddities were endless. We had and still have a dear friend, — " Cousin Susan " she is called by many who are not her cousins — a perfect lady, and, though hopelessly deaf, as gentle and contented as was ever Griselda with the full use of her ears ; quite as great a pet, in a word, of us all as Duchie was of ours. One day we found her mourning the death of a cat, a great play- fellow of the Sputchard's, and her small Grace was with us when we were condoling with her, and we saw that she looked very wistfully at Duchie. I wrote on the slate, " Would you like her?" and she through her tears said, " You know that would never do." But it did do. We left Duchie that very night, and though she paid us frequent visits, she was Cousin Susan's for life. I fear indulgence dulled her moral sense. She was an immense happi- ness to her mistress, whose silent and lonely days she made glad with her oddity and mirth. And yet the small creature, old, toothless, and blind, domi- neered over her gentle friend — threatening her some- Our Dogs 79 times if she presumed to remove the small Fury from the inside of her own bed, into which it pleased her to creep. Indeed, I believe it is too true, though it was inferred only, that her mistress and friend spent a great part of a winter night in trying to coax her dear little ruffian out of the centre of the bed. One day the cook asked what she would have for dinner : " I would like a mutton chop, but then, you know, Duchie likes minced veal better!" The faithful and happy little creature died at a great age, of natural decay. But time would fail me, and I fear patience would fail you, my reader, were I to tell you of Crab, of John Pym, of Puck, and of the rest. Crab, the Mugger's dog, grave, with deep-set, melancholy eyes, as of a nobleman (say the Master of Ravens- wood) in disguise, large-visaged, shaggy, indomit- able, come of the pure Piper Allan's breed. This Piper Allan, you must know, lived some two hun- dred years ago in Cocquet Water, piping like Homer, from place to place, and famous not less for his dog than for his music, his news and his songs. The Earl of Northumberland, of his day, offered the piper a small farm for his dog, but after deliberating for a day, Allan said, " Na, na, ma Lord, keep yir ferum ; what wud a piper do wi' a ferum?" From this dog de- scended Davidson of Hyndlee's breed, the original Dandie Dinmont, and Crab could count his kin up to him. He had a great look of the Right Honour- able Edward Ellice, and had much of his energy and wecht; had there been a dog House of Commons, Crab would have spoken as seldom, and been as great a power in the house, as the formidable and faithful time-out-of-mind member for Coventry. John Pym was a smaller dog than Crab, of more fashionable blood, being a son of Mr. Somner's famous Shem, whose father and brother are said to have been found dead in a drain into which the hounds had run a fox. It had three entrances ; the 80 Our Dogs father was put in at one bole, the son at another, and speedily the fox bolted out at the third, but no appearance of the little terriers, and on digging, they were found dead, locked in each other's jaws ; they had met, and it being dark, and there being no time for explanations, they had throttled each other. John was made of the same sort of stuff, and was as combative and victorious as his great name< sake, and not unlike him in some of his not so credit- able qualities. He must, I think, have been related to a certain dog to whom " life was full o' sairious- ness," but in John's case the same cause produced an opposite effect. John was gay and light-hearted, even when there was not " enuff of fetchin," which, however, seldom happened, there being a market every week in Melrose, and John appearing most punctually at the cross to challenge all comers, and being short legged, he inveigled every dog into an engagement by first attacking him, and then falling down on his back, in which posture he latterly fought and won all his battles. What can I say of Puck 1 — the thoroughbred — the simple-hearted — the purloiner of eggs warm from the hen — the flutterer of all manner of Volscians — the bandy-legged, dear, old, dilapidated buffer? I got him from my brother, and only parted with him 1 In The Dog, by Stonehenge, an excellent book, there is a wood-cut of Puck, and " Dr. Wm. Brown's celebrated dog John Pym " is mentioned. Their pedigrees are given — here is Puck's, which shows his " strain " is of the pure azure blood — " Got by John Pym, out of Tib ; bred by Purves of Leaderfoot ; sire, Old Dandie, the famous dog of old John Stoddart of Selkirk — dam, Whin." How Homeric all this sounds ! I cannot help quoting what follows — " Sometimes a Dandie pup of a good strain may appear not to be game at an early age ; but he should not be parted with on this account, because many of them do not show their courage till nearly two years old, and then nothing can beat them : this apparent softness arising, as I suspect, front kindness of heart " — a suspicion, my dear " Stonehenge," which is true, and shows your own " kindness of heart," as well as sense. Our Dogs 8 1 because William's stock was gone. He had to the end of life a simplicity which was quite touching. One summer day — a dog-day — when all dogs found straying were hauled away to the police-office, and killed off in twenties with strychnine, I met Puck trotting along Princes Street with a policeman, a rope round his neck, he looking up in the fatal, official, but kindly countenance in the most artless and cheerful manner, wagging his tail and trotting along. In ten minutes he would have been in the next world ; for I am one of those who believe dogs have a next world, and why not? Puck ended his days as the best dog in Roxburghshire. Placide quiescas ! DICK Still lives, and long may he live ! As he was never born, possibly he may never die; be it so, he will miss us when we are gone. I could say much of him, but agree with the lively and admirable Dr. Tortin, when, in his dedication of his Remarks on Ecclesiastical History to the then (1752) Archbishop of Canterbury, he excuses himself for not following the modern custom of praising his Patron, by re- minding his Grace " that it was a custom amongst the ancients, not to sacrifice to heroes till after sun- set.'' I defer my sacrifice till Dick's sun is set. I think every family should have a dog : it is like having a perpetual baby ; it is the plaything and crony of the whole house. It keeps them all young. All unite upon Dick. And then he tells no tales, betrays no secrets, never sulks, asks no troublesome ques- tions, never gets into debt, never coming down late for breakfast, or coming in through his Chubb too early to bed — is always ready for a bit of fun, lies in wait for it, and you may, if choleric, to your re- lief, kick him instead of some one else, who would not take it so meekly, and, moreover, would certainly not, as he does, ask your pardon for being kicked. 82 Our Dogs Never put a collar on your dog — it only gets him stolen ; give him only one meal a day, and let that, as Dame Dorothy, Sir Thomas Browne's wife, would say, be " rayther under." Wash him once a week, and always wash the soap out ; and let him be care- fully combed and brushed twice a week. By the bye, I was wrong in saying that it was Burns who said Man is the God of the Dog — he got it from Bacon's Essay on Atheism. To MISS FLEMING tc whom I am indebted for all its materials THIS MEMORIAL of her dear and unforgotten MA1DIE is gratefully inscribed. MARJORIE FLEMING One November afternoon in 1810 — the year in which Waverley was resumed and laid aside again, to be finished off, its last two volumes in three weeks, and made immortal in 1814, and when its author, by the death of Lord Melville, narrowly escaped getting a civil appointment in India — three men, evidently lawyers, might have been seen escaping like school- boys from the Parliament House, and speeding arm- in-arm down Bank Street and the Mound, in the teeth of a surly blast of sleet. The three friends sought the bield of the low wall old Edinburgh boys remember well, and sometimes miss now, as they struggle with the stout west wind. The three were curiously unlike each other. One, " a little man of feeble make, who would be unhappy if his pony got beyond a foot pace," slight, with " small, elegant features, hectic cheek, and soft hazel eyes, the index of the quick, sensitive spirit within, as if he had the warm heart of a woman, her genuine enthusiasm, and some of her weaknesses." Another, as unlike a woman as a man can be ; homely, almost common, in look and figure; his hat and his coat, and indeed his entire covering, worn to the quick, but all of the best material ; what redeemed him from vulgarity and meanness, were his eyes, deep set, heavily thatched, keen, hungry, shrewd, with a slumbering glow far in, as if they could be danger- ous ; a man to care nothing for at first glance, but somehow, to give a second and not-forgetting look at. The third was the biggest of the three, and though lame, nimble, and all rough and alive with power; had you met him anywhere else, you would say he was a Liddesdale store-farmer, come of gentle blood; " a stout, blunt carle," as he says of 85 86 Marjorie Fleming himself, with the swing and stride and the eye of a man of the hills — a large, sunny, out-of-door air all about him. On his broad and somewhat stooping shoulders, was set that head which, with Shakspere's and Bonaparte's, is the best known in all the world. He was in high spirits, keeping his companions and himself in roars of laughter, and every now and then seizing them and stopping, that they might take their fill of the fun ; there they stood shaking with laughter, " not an inch of their body free " from its grip. At George Street they parted, one to Rose Court, behind St. Andrew's Church, one to Albany Street, the other, our big and limping friend, to Castle Street. We need hardly give their names. The first was William Erskine, afterwards Lord Kinnedder, chased out of the world by a calumny, killed by its foul breath, — " And at the touch of wrong, without a strife, Slipped in a moment out of life." There is nothing in literature more beautiful or more pathetic than Scott's love and sorrow for this friend of his youth. The second was William Clerk, — the Darsie Latimer of R edg auntie t ; " a man," as Scott says, " of the most acute intellects and powerful apprehen- sion," but of more powerful indolence, so as to leave the world with little more than the report of what he might have been, — a humorist as genuine, though not quite so savagely Swiftian as his brother Lord Eldin, neither of whom had much of that commonest and best of all the humours, called good. The third we all know. What has he not done for every one of us? Who else ever, except Shakspere, so diverted mankind, entertained and entertains a world so liberally, so wholesomely? We are fain to say, not even Shakspere, for his is something deeper than diversion, something higher than plea- sure, and yet who would care to split this hair? Marjorie Fleming 87 Had any one watched him closely before and after the parting, what a change he would see ! The bright, broad laugh, the shrewd jovial word, the man of the Parliament House and of the world ; and next step, moody, the light of his eye withdrawn, as if seeing things that were invisible ; his shut mouth, like a child's, so impressionable, so innocent, so sad; he was now all within, as before he was all without; hence his brooding look. As the snow blattered in his face, he muttered, " How it raves and drifts ! On- ding o' snaw — ay, that's the word — on-ding — " He was now at his own door, " Castle Street, No. 39." He opened the door, and went straight to his den ; that wondrous workshop, where, in one year, 1823, when he was fifty-two, he wrote Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward, and St. Ronan's Well, besides much else. We once took the foremost of our novelists, the greatest, we should say, since Scott, into this room, and could not but mark the solemniz- ing effect of sitting where the great magician sat so often and so long, and looking out upon that little shabby bit of sky and that back green, where faith- ful Camp lies. 1 He sat down in his large, green morocco elbow- chair, drew himself close to his table, and glowered and gloomed at his writing apparatus, " a very hand- some old box, richly carved, lined with crimson velvet, and containing ink-bottles, taper-stand, etc., in silver, the whole in such order, that it might have come from the silversmith's window half-an-hour before." He took out his paper, then starting up angrily, said, " ' Go spin, you jade, go spin.' No, d — it, it won't do, — 1 This favourite dog " died about January 1809, and was buried in a fine moonlight night in the little garden behind the house in Castle Street. My wife tells me she remembers the whole family in tears about the grave as her father himself smoothed the turf above Camp, with the saddest face she had ever seen. He had been engaged to dine abroad that day, but apologized, on account of the death of ' a dear old friend.'" — Lockhart's Life of Scott. 88 Marjorie Fleming ' My spinnin' wheel is auld and stiff, The rock o't wunna stand, sir, To keep the temper-pin in tiff Employs ower aft my hand, sir." I am off the fang. 1 I can make nothing of Waverley to-day; I'll awa' to Marjorie. Come vvi' me, Maida, you thief." The great creature rose slowly, and the pair were off, Scott taking a maud (a plaid) with him. " White as a frosted plum-cake, by jingo !" said he, when he got to the street. Maida gambolled and whisked among the snow, and his master strode across to Young Street, and through it to i, North Charlotte Street, to the house of his dear friend, Mrs. William Keith of Corstorphine Hill, niece of Mrs. Keith of Ravelston, of whom he said at her death, eight years after, " Much tradition, and that of the best, has died with this excellent old lady, one of the few persons whose spirits and cleanliness and fresh- ness of mind and body made old age lovely and desir- able." Sir Walter was in that house almost every day, and had a key, so in he and the hound went, shaking themselves in the lobby. "Marjorie! Marjorie!" shouted her friend, " where are ye, my bonnie wee croodlin doo?" In a moment a bright, eager child of seven was in his arms, and he was kissing her all over. Out came Mrs. Keith. " Come yer ways in, Wattie. " " No, not now. I am going to take Marjorie wi' me, and you may come to your tea in Duncan Roy's sedan, and bring the bairn home in your lap." " Tak' Marjorie, and it on-ding o' snaw!" said Mrs. Keith. He said to himself, " On- ding — that's odd — that is the very word." " Hoot, awa ! look here," and he displayed the corner of his plaid, made to hold lambs — (the true shepherd's plaid, consisting of two breadths sewed together, and uncut at one end, making a poke or cul de sac). " Tak' yer lamb," said she, laughing at the contriv- 1 Applied to a pump when it is dry, and its valve has lost its " fang;" from the German, fangen, to hold. Marjorie Fleming 89 ance, and so the Pet was first well happit up, and then put, laughing silently, into the plaid neuk, and the shepherd strode off with his lamb, — Maida gambolling through the snow, and running races in her mirth. Didn't he face " the angry airt," and make her bield his bosom, and into his own room with her, and lock the door, and out with the warm, rosy, little wifie, who took it all with great composure 1 There the two remained for three or more hours, making the house ring with their laughter ; you can fancy the big man's and Maidie's laugh. Having made the fire cheery, he set her down in his ample chair, and standing sheepishly before her, began to say his lesson, which happened to be — " Ziccotty, diccotty, dock, the mouse ran up the clock, the clock struck wan, down the mouse ran, ziccotty, diccotty, dock." This done repeatedly till she was pleased, she gave him his new lesson, gravely and slowly, timing it upon her small fingers, — he saying it after her, — " Wonery, twoery, tickery, seven ; Alibi, crackaby, ten, and eleven ; Pin, pan, musky, dan ; Tweedle-um, twoddle-um, Twenty-wan ; eerie, orie, ourie, You, are, out." He pretended to great difficulty, and she rebuked him with most comical gravity, treating him as a child. He used to say that when he came to Alibi Crackaby he broke down, and Pin-Pan, Musky- Dan, Tweedle-um Twoddle-um made him roar with laughter. He said Musky-Dan especially was beyond endurance, bringing up an Irishman and his hat fresh from the Spice Islands and odoriferous Ind ; she getting quite bitter in her displeasure at his ill behaviour and stupidness. Then he would read ballads to her in his own glori- ous way, the two getting wild with excitement over Gil Mortice or the Baron of Smailholm; and he would take her on his knee, and make her repeat Con- 90 Marjorie Fleming stances 's speeches in King John, till he swayed to and fro, sobbing his fill. Fancy the gifted little creature, like one possessed, repeating — " For I am sick and capable of fears, Oppressed with wrong, and therefore, full of fears ; A widow, husbandless, subject to fears ; A woman, naturally born to fears." " If thou that bidst me be content, wert grim. Ugly and slanderous to thy mother's womb, Lame, foolish, crooked, swart, prodigious — ". Or, drawing herself up " to the height of her great argument " — " I will instruct my sorrows to be proud, For grief is proud, and makes his owner stout. Here I and sorrow sit." Scott used to say that he was amazed at her power over him, saying to Mrs. Keith, " She's the most extraordinary creature I ever met with, and her repeating of Shakspere overpowers me as nothing else does." Thanks to the unforgetting sister of this dear child, who has much of the sensibility and fun of her who has been in her small grave these fifty and more years, we have now before us the letters and journals of Pet Marjorie — before us lies and gleams her rich brown hair, bright and sunny as if yesterday's, with the words on the paper, " Cut out in her last illness," and two pictures of her by her beloved Isabella, whom she worshipped ; there are the faded old scraps of paper, hoarded still, over which her warm breath and her warm little heart had poured themselves ; there is the old water-mark, " Lingard, 1808." The two portraits are very like each other, but plainly done at different times ; it is a chubby, healthy face, deep- set, brooding eyes, as eager to tell what is going on within as to gather in all the glories from without ; quick with the wonder and the pride of life ; they are eyes that would not be soon satisfied with seeing ; eyes that would devour their object, and yet childlike Marjorie Fleming 91 and fearless; and that is a mouth that will not be soon satisfied with love; it has a curious likeness to Scott's own, which has always appeared to us his sweetest, most mobile and speaking feature. There she is, looking straight at us as she did at him — fearless and full of love, passionate, wild, wil- ful, fancy's child. One cannot look at it without thinking of Wordsworth's lines on poor Hartley Coleridge : " O blessed vision, happy child ! Thou art so exquisitely wild, I thought of thee with many fears, Of what might be thy lot in future years. I thought of times when Pain might be thy guest, Lord of thy house and hospitality ; And Grief, uneasy lover! ne'er at rest, But when she sat within the touch of thee. Oh, too industrious folly 1 Oh, vain and causeless melancholy 1 Nature will either end thee quite, Or, lengthening out thy season of delight, Preserve for thee by individual right, A young lamb's heart among the full-grown flock." And we can imagine Scott, when holding his warm plump little playfellow in his arms, repeating that stately friend's lines : — " Loving she is, and tractable, though wild, And Innocence hath privilege in her, To dignify arch looks and laughing eyes, And feats of cunning ; and the pretty round Of trespasses, affected to provoke Mock chastisement and partnership in play. And, as a fagot sparkles on the hearth, Not less if unattended and alone, Than when both young and old sit gathered round, And take delight in its activity, Even so this happy creature of herself Is all sufficient ; solitude to her Is blithe society ; she fills the air With gladness and involuntary songs." But we will let her disclose herself. We need hardly say that all this is true, and that these letters are as really Marjorie's as was this light brown hair; 92 Marjorie Fleming indeed you could as easily fabricate the one as the other. There was an old servant — Jeanie Robertson — who was forty years in her grandfather's family. Mar- jorie Fleming, or, as she is called in the letters, and by Sir Walter, Maidie, was the last child she kept. Jeanie's wages never exceeded ^3 a year, and, when she left service, she had saved ^40. She was devotedly attached to Maidie, rather despising and ill-using her sister Isabella — a beautiful and gentle child. This partiality made Maidie apt at times to domineer over Isabella. " I mention this " (writes her surviving sister) " for the purpose of telling you an instance of Maidie 's generous justice. When only five years old — when walking in Raith grounds, the two children had run on before, and old Jeanie remembered they might come too near a dangerous mill-lade. She called to them to turn back. Maidie heeded her not, rushed all the faster on, and fell, and would have been lost, had her sister not pulled her back, saving her life, but tearing her clothes. Jeanie flew on Isabella to ' give it her ' for spoiling her favourite's dress; Maidie rushed in between crying out, ' pay (whip) Maidjie as much as you like, and I'll not say one word; but touch Isy, and I'll roar like a bull !' Years after Maidie was resting in her grave, my mother used to take me to the place, and told the story always in the exact same words." This Jeanie must have been a character. She took great pride in exhibiting Maidie's brother William's Cal- vinistic acquirements when nineteen months old, to the officers of a militia regiment then quartered in Kirkcaldy. This performance was so amusing that it was often repeated, and the little theologian was presented by them with a cap and feathers. Jeanie's glory was " putting him through the carritch " (cate- chism) in broad Scotch, beginning at the beginning with " Wha made ye, ma bonnie man?" For the correctness of this and the three next replies Jeanie had no anxiety, but the tone changed to menace, and Marjorie Fleming 93 the closed nieve (fist) was shaken in the child's face as she demanded, " Of what are you made?" " Dirt " was the answer uniformly given. " Wull ye never learn to say dust, ye thrawn deevil?" with a cuff from the opened hand, was the as inevitable rejoinder. Here is Maidie's first letter before she was six. The spelling unaltered, and there are no " commoes. " 11 My dear Isa, — I now sit down to answer all your kind and beloved letters which you were so good as to write to me. This is the first time I ever wrote a letter in my Life. There are a great many Girls in the Square and they cry just like a pig when we are under the painful necessity of putting it to Death. Miss Potune a Lady of my acquaintance praises me dreadfully. I repeated something out of Dean Swift, and she said I was fit for the stage, and you may think I was primmed up with majestick Pride, but upon my word I felt myselfe turn a little birsay — birsay is a word which is a word that William com- posed which is as you may suppose a little enraged. This horrid fat simpliton says that my Aunt is beauti- full which is intirely impossible for that is not her nature." What a peppery little pen we wield ! What could that have been out of the Sardonic Dean? what other child of that age would have used " beloved " as she does? This power of affection, this faculty of belov- ing, and wild hunger to be beloved, comes out more and more. She perilled her all upon it, and it may have been as well — we know, indeed, that it was far better — for her that this wealth of love was so soon withdrawn to its one only infinite Giver and Receiver. This must have been the law of her earthly life. Love was, indeed " her Lord and King;" and it was per- haps well for her that she found so soon that her and our only Lord and King, Himself is Love. Here are bits from her Diary at Braehead : — " The day of my existence here has been delightful and enchanting. On Saturday I expected no less than 94 Marjorie Fleming three well made Bucks the names of whom is here advertised. Mr. Geo. Crakey (Craigie), and Wm. Keith and Jn. Keith — the first is the funniest of every one of them. Mr. Crakey and walked to Crakyhall (Craigiehall) hand in hand in Innocence and matita- tion (meditation) sweet thinking on the kind love which flows in our tender hearted mind which is overflowing with majestic pleasure no one was ever so polite to me in the hole state of my existence. Mr. Craky you must know is a great Buck and pretty good-looking. " I am at Ravelston enjoying nature's fresh air. The birds are singing sweetly — the calf doth frisk and nature shows her glorious face." Here is a confession: — "I confess I have been very more like a little young divil than a creature for when Isabella went up stairs to teach me religion and my multiplication and to be good and all my other lessons I stamped with my foot and threw my new hat which she had made on the ground and was sulky and was dreadfully passionate, but she never whiped me but said Marjory go into another room and think what a great crime you are committing letting your temper git the better of you. But I went so sulkily that the Devil got the better of me but she never never never whips me so that I think I would be the better of it and the next time that I behave ill I think she should do it for she never never does it. . . . Isabella has given me praise for checking my temper for I was sulky even when she was kneeling an hole hour teaching me to write." Our poor little wifie, she has no doubts of the personality of the Devil ! " Yesterday I behave extremely ill in God's most holy church for I would never attend myself nor let Isabella attend which was a great crime for she often, often tells me that when to or three are geathered together God is in the midst of them, and it was the very same Divil that tempted Job that tempted me I am sure ; but he resisted Satan though he had boils and many many Marjorie Fleming 95 other misfortunes which I have escaped. ... I am now going- to tell you the horible and wretched plaege (plague) that my multiplication gives me you can't conceive it the most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7 it is what nature itself cant endure." This is delicious ; and what harm is there in her " Devilish "? it is strong language merely; even old Rowland Hill used to say " he grudged the Devil those rough and ready words." " I walked to that delightful place Crakyhall with a delightful young man beloved by all his friends espacially by me his loveress, but I must not talk any more about him for Isa said it is not proper for to speak of gentalmen but I will never forget him ! . . . I am very very glad that satan has not given me boils and many other misfortunes — In the holy bible these words are written that the Devil goes like a. roaring lyon in search of his pray but the lord lets us escape from him but we" (pauvre petite!) "do not strive with this awfull Spirit. . . . To-day I pronunced a word which should never come out of a lady's lips it was that I called John a Impudent Bitch. I will tell you what I think made me in so bad a humor is I got one or two of that bad bad sina (senna) tea to-day," — a better excuse for bad humour and bad language than most. She has been reading the Book of Esther : " It was a dreadful thing that Haman was hanged on the very gallows which he had prepared for Mordeca to hang him and his ten sons thereon and it was very wrong and cruel to hang his sons for they did not commit the crime-; but then Jesus was not then come to teach us to he merciful." This is wise and beautiful — has upon it the very dew of youth and of holiness. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings He perfects His praise. " This is Saturday and I am very glad of it be- cause I have play half the Day and I get money too but alas I owe Isabella 4 pence for I am finned 2 pence whenever I bite my nails. Isabella is teach- 96 Marjorie Fleming ing me to make simme colings nots of interrigations peorids commoes, etc. ... As this is Sunday I will meditate upon Senciable and Religious subjects. First I should be very thankful I am not a begger. " This amount of meditation and thankfulness seems to have been all she was able for. " I am going to-morrow to a delightfull place, Braehead by name, belonging to Mrs. Crraford, where there is ducks cocks hens bubblyjocks 2 dogs 2 cats and swine which is delightful. I think it is shocking to think that the dog and cat should bear them " (this is a meditation physiological), " and they are drowned after all. I would rather have a man-dog than a woman-dog, because they do not bear like women-dogs ; it is a hard case — it is shocking. I cam here to enjoy natures delightful breath it is sweeter than a rial (phial) of rose oil." Braehead is the farm the historical Jock Howison asked and got from our gay James the Fifth, " the gudeman o' Ballengiech," as a reward for the ser- vices of his flail when the King had the worst of it at Cramond Brig with the gipsies. The farm is unchanged in size from that time, and still in the un- broken line of the ready and victorious thrasher. Braehead is held on the condition of the possessor being ready to present the King with a ewer and basin to wash his hands, Jock having done this for his unknown king after the splore, and when George the Fourth came to Edinburgh this ceremony was performed in silver at Holyrood. It is a lovely neuk this Braehead, preserved almost as it was 200 years ago. " Lot and his wife " mentioned by Maidie — two quaintly cropped yew-trees — still thrive, the burn runs as it did in her time, and sings the same quiet tune — as much the same and as different as Now and Then. The house full of old family relics and pictures, the sun shining on them through the small deep windows with their plate glass ; and there, blinking at the sun, and chattering contentedly, is a parrot, that might, for its looks of eld, have been Marjorie Fleming 97 in the ark, and domineered over and deaved the dove. Everything about the place is old and fresh. This is beautiful : — " I am very sorry to say that I forgot God — that is to say I forgot to pray to-day and Isabella told me that I should be thankful that God did not forget me — if he did, O what become of me if I was in danger and God not friends with me — I must go to unquenchable fire and if I was tempted to sin — how could I resist it O no I will never do it again — no no — if I can help it." (Canny wee wifie !) 14 My religion is greatly falling off because I dont pray with so much attention when I am saying my prayers, and my charecter is lost among the Brae- head people. I hope I will be religious again — but as for regaining my charecter I despare for it." (Poor little " habit and repute !") Her temper, her passion, and her " badness " are almost daily confessed and deplored : — " I will never again trust to my own power, for I see that I cannot be good without God's assistance — I will not trust in my own selfe, and Isa's health will be quite ruined by me — it will indeed." " Isa has given me advice,, which is, that when I feal Satan beginning to tempt me, that I flea him and he would flea me." " Re- morse is the worst thing to bear, and I am afraid that I will fall a marter to it." Poor dear little sinner ! — Here comes the world again : — " In my travels I met with a handsome lad named Charles Balfour Esq., and from him I got ofers of marage — offers of marage, did I say? Nay plenty heard me." A fine scent for "breach of promise !•" This is abrupt and strong : — " The Divil is curced and all works. 'Tis a fine work Newton on the pro- fecies. I wonder if there is another book of poems comes near the Bible. The Divil always girns at the sight of the Bible." "Miss Potune " (her " simpliton " friend) " is very fat ; she pretends to be very learned. She says she saw a stone that dropt from the skies; but she is a good Christian." Here D 98 Marjorie Fleming come her views on church government : — " An Anni- babtist is a thing- I am not a member of — I am a Pis- plekan (Episcopalian) just now, and " (Oh you little Laodicean and Latitudinarian !) "a Prisbeteran at Kirkcaldy I" — (Blandula ! Vagula! coelum et animum mutas quae trans mare (i.e., trans Bodotriam)-curris !) — " my native town." " Sentiment is not what I am acquainted with as yet, though I wish it, and should like to practise it " ( !) "I wish I had a great, great deal of gratitude in my heart, in all my body. " " There is a new novel published, named Self-Control (Mrs. Brunton's) — " a very good maxim forsooth!" This is shocking : " Yesterday a marrade man, named Mr. John Balfour, Esq., offered to kiss me, and offered to marry me, though the man " ( a fine directness this !) " was espused, and his wife was present and said he must ask her permission ; but he did not. I think he was ashamed and confounded before 3 gentelmen — Mr. Jobson and 2 Mr. Kings." "Mr. Banesters' (Bannister's) " Budjet is to-night; I hope it will be a good one. A great many authors have expressed themselves too sentimentally." You are right, Marjorie. " A Mr. Burns writes a beautiful song on Mr. Cunhaming, whose wife desarted him — truly it is a most beautiful one." " I like to read the Fabulous historys, about the histerys of Robin, Dickey, flapsay, and Peccay, and it is very amusing, for some were good birds and others bad, but Peccay was the most dutiful and obedient to her parients. " " Thomson is a beautiful author, and Pope, but nothing to Shakespear, of which I have a little knolege. Macbeth is a pretty composition, but awful one." "The Newgate Calendar is very instruct- ive" (!) "A sailor called here to say farewell; it must be dreadful to leave his native country when he might get a wife ; or perhaps me, for I love him very much. But O I forgot, Isabella forbid me to speak about love." This antiphlogistic regimen and lesson is ill to learn by our Maidie, for here she sins again : — *' Love is a very papithatick thing " (it is almost Marjorie Fleming 99 a pity to correct this into pathetic), " as well as troublesome and tiresome — but O Isabella forbid me to speak of it." Here are her reflections on a pine- apple: — " I think the price of a pine-apple is very dear : it is a whole bright goulden guinea, that might have sustained a poor family." Here is a new vernal simile : — " The hedges are sprouting like chicks from the eggs when they are newly hatched, or, as the vulgar say, clacked." "Doctor Swift's works are very funny; I got some of them by heart." " Moreheads sermons are I hear much praised, but I never read sermons of any kind ; but I read novelettes and my Bible, and I never forget it, or my prayers." Bravo Marjorie! She seems now, when still about six, to have broken out into song : — "Ephibol (Epigram or Epitaph — who knows which?) on My Dear Love Isabella. " Here lies sweet Isabell in bed, With a night-cap on her head ; Her skin is soft, her face is fair, And she has very pretty hair ; She and I in bed lies nice, And undisturbed by rats or mice; She is disgusted with Mr. Worgan, Though he plays upon the organ. Her nails are neat, her teeth are white. Her eyes are very, very bright ; In a conspicuous town she lives, And to the poor her money gives ; Here ends sweet Isabella's story, And may it be much to her glory." Here are some bits at random : — " Of summer I am very fond, And love to bathe into a pond ; The look of sunshine dies away, And will not let me out to play ; I love the morning's sun to spy Glittering through the casement's eye, The rays of light are very sweet, And puts away the taste of meat ; The balmy breeze comes down from heaven. And makes us like for to be living." ioo Marjorie Fleming " The casawary is an curious bird, and so is the gigantic crane, and the pelican of the wilderness, whose mouth holds a bucket of fish and water. Fight- ing is what ladies is not qualyfied for, they would not make a good figure in battle or in a duel. Alas ! we females are of little use to our country. The history of all the malcontents as ever was hanged is amus- ing. " Still harping on the Newgate Calendar ! " Braehead is extremely pleasant to me by the companie of swine, geese, cocks, &c. , and they are the delight of my soul." " I am going to tell you of a melancholy story. A young turkie of 2 or 3 months old, would you believe it, the father broke its leg, and he killed another ! I think he ought to be transported or hanged." " Queen Street is a very gay one, and so is Princes Street, for all the lads and lasses, besides bucks and beggars, parade there." " I should like to see a play very much, for I never saw one in all my life, and don't believe I ever shall; but I hope I can be content without going to one. I can be quite happy without my desire being granted. " " Some days ago Isabella had a terrible fit of the toothake, and she walked with a long night-shift at dead of night like a ghost, and I thought she was one. She prayed for nature's sweet restorer — balmy sleep — but did not get it — a ghostly figure indeed she was, enough to make a saint tremble. It made me quiver and shake from top to toe. Superstition is a very mean thing, and should be despised and shunned." Here is her weakness and her strength again : — " In the love-novels all the heroines are very desper- ate. Isabella will not allow me to speak about lovers and heroins, and 'tis too refined for my taste." " Miss Egward's (Edgeworth's) tails are very good, particularly some that are very much adapted for youth ( !) as Laz Laurance and Tarelton, False Keys, &c. &c." " Tom Jones and Grey's Elegey in a country church- Marjorie Fleming 101 yard are both excellent, and much spoke of by both sex, particularly by the men." Are our Marjories now-a-days better or worse because they cannot read Tom Jones unharmed? More better than worse; but who among- them can repeat Gray's Lines on a distant prospect of Eton College as could our Maidie? Here is some more of her prattle : — " I went into Isabella's bed to make her smile like the Genius Demedicus " (the Venus de Medicis) " or the statute in an ancient Greece, but she fell asleep in my very face, at which my anger broke forth, so that I awoke her from a comfortable nap. All was now hushed up again, but again my anger burst forth at her biding me get up." She begins thus loftily : — " Death the righteous love to see, But from it doth the wicked flee." Then suddenly breaks off (as if with laughter) — " I am sure they fly as fast as their legs can carry them J" " There is a thing I love to see, That is our monkey catch a flee." " I love in Isa's bed to lie, Oh, such a joy and luxury 1 The bottom of the bed I sleep, And with great care within I creep ; Oft I embrace her feet of lillys, But she has goton all the pillys. Her neck I never can embrace, But I do hug her feet in place." How childish and yet how strong and free is her use of words ! — " I lay at the foot of the bed because Isabella said I disturbed her by continial fighting and kicking, but I was very dull, and continially at work reading the Arabian Nights, which I could not have done if I had slept at the top. I am reading the Mysteries of Udolpho. I am much interested in the fate of poor, poor Emily." Here is one of her swains — 102 Marjorie Fleming " Very soft and white his cheeks, His hair is red, and grey his breeks ; His tooth is like the daisy fair, His only fault is in his hair." This is a higher flight : — " Dedicated to Mrs. H. Crawford by the Author, M. F. " Three turkeys fair their last have breathed, And now this world for ever leaved ; Their father, and their mother too, They sigh and weep as well as you ; Indeed, the rats their bones have crunched, Into eternity theire laanched. A direful death indeed they had, As wad put any parent mad ; But she was more than usual calm, She did not give a single dam." This last word is saved from all sin by its tender age, not to speak of the want of the n. We fear " she " is the abandoned mother, in spite of her previous sighs and tears. " Isabella says when we pray we should pray fervently, and not rattel over a prayer — for that we are kneeling at the footstool of our Lord and Creator, who saves us from eternal damnation, and from unquestionable fire and brimston. " She has a long poem on Mary Queen of Scots : — " Queen Mary was much loved by all, Both by the great and by the small, But hark ! her soul to heaven doth rise ! And I suppose she has gained a prize — For I do think she would not go Into the awful place below ; There is a thing that I must tell, Elizabeth went to fire and hell ; Fie who would teach her to be civil, It must be her great friend the divil 1" She hits off Darnley well : — " A noble's son, a handsome lad, By some queer way or other, had Got quite the better of her heart, With him she always talked apart ; Silly he was, but very fair, A greater buck was not found there." Marjorie Fleming 103 "By some queer way or other;" is not this the general case and the mystery, young ladies and gentlemen? Goethe's doctrine of "elective affini- ties " discovered by our Pet Maidie. Sonnet to a Monkey. " O lively, O most charming pug Thy graceful air, and heavenly mug ; The beauties of his mind do shine, And every bit is shaped and fine. Your teeth are whiter than the snow, Your a great buck, your a great beau ; Your eyes are of so nice a shape, More like a Christian's than an ape; Your cheek is like the rose's blume, Your hair is like the raven's plume ; His nose's cast is of the Roman, He is a very pretty woman. I could not get a rhyme for Roman, So was obliged to call him woman." This last joke is good. She repeats it when writing of James the Second being killed at Roxburgh : — " He was killed by a cannon splinter, Quite in the middle of the winter ; Perhaps it was not at that time, But I can get no other rhyme 1" Here is one of her last letters, dated Kirkcaldy, 12th October 1811. You can see how her nature is deepening and enriching: — "My Dear Mother, — You will think that I entirely forget you but I assure you that you are greatly mistaken. I think of you always and often sigh to think of the distance be- tween us two loving creatures of nature. We have regular hours for all our occupations first at 7 o'clock we go to the dancing and come home at 8 we then read our Bible and get our repeating and then play till ten then we get our music till 11 when we get our writing and accounts we sew from 12 till 1 after which I get my gramer and then work till five. At 7 we come and knit till 8 when we dont go to the dancing. This is an exact description. I must take 104 Marjorie Fleming a hasty farewell to her whom I love, reverence and doat on and who I hope thinks the same of 11 Marjory Fleming. " P.S. — An old pack of cards (!) would be very exeptible. " This other is a month earlier: — " My dear little Mama, — I was truly happy to hear that you were all .well. We are surrounded with measles at present on every side, for the Herons got it, and Isabella Heron was near Death's Door, and one night her father lifted her out of bed, and she fell down as they thought lifeless. Mr. Heron said, ' That lassie's deed noo ' — ' I 'm no deed yet. ' She then threw up a big worm nine inches and a half long. I have begun dancing, but am not very fond of it, for the boys strikes and mocks me. — I have been another night at the dancing ; I like it better. I will write to you as often as I can ; but I am afraid not every week. J long for you with the longings of a child to embrace you — to fold you in my arms. I respect you with all the respect due to a mother. You dont know how I love you. So I shall remain, your loving child, — M. Fleming." What rich involution of love in the words marked ! Here are some lines to her beloved Isabella, in July 1811 :— << There is a thing that I do want, With you these beauteous walks to haunt, We would be happy if you would Try to come over if you could. Then I would all quite happy be Now and for all eternity. My mother is so very sweet, And checks my appetite to eat; My father shows us what to do ; But O I'm sure that I want you. I have no more of poetry ; O Isa do remember me, And try to love your Marjory." Marjorie Fleming 105 In a letter from " Isa " to " Miss Muff Maidie Marjory Fleming, favored by Rare Rear-Admiral Fleming," she says — " I long much to see you, and talk over all our old stories together, and to hear you read and repeat. I am pining for my old friend Cesario, and poor Lear, and wicked Richard. How is the dear Multiplication table going on? are you still as much attached to 9 times 9 as you used to be?" But this dainty, bright thing is about to flee — to come " quick to confusion." The measles she writes of seized her, and she died on the 19th of December 181 1. The day before her death, Sunday, she sat up in bed, worn and thin, her eye gleaming as with the light of a coming world, and with a tremulous, old voice repeated the following lines by Burns — heavy with the shadow of death, and lit with the phantasy of the judgment-seat — the publican's prayer in paraphrase : — " Why am I loth to leave this earthly scene? Have I so found it full of pleasing charms? Some drops of joy, with draughts of ill between, Some gleam of sunshine mid renewing storms. Is it departing pangs my soul alarms? Or death's unlovely, dreary, dark abode? For guilt, for guilt my terrors are in arms ; I tremble to approach an angry God, And justly smart beneath his sin-avenging rod. Fain would I say, forgive my foul offence, Fain promise never more to disobey ; But should my Author health again dispense, Again I might forsake fair virtue's way, Again in folly's path might go astray, Again exalt the brute and sink the man. Then how should I for heavenly mercy pray, Who act so counter heavenly mercy's plan, Who sin so oft have mourned, yet to temptation ran? O thou great Governor of all below, If I might dare a lifted eye to thee, Thy nod can make the tempest cease to blow, And still the tumult oT the raging sea ; D 2 106 Marjorie Fleming With that controlling power assist even me Those headstrong furious passions to confine, For all unfit I feel my powers to be To rule their torrent in the allowed line ; O aid me with thy help, Omnipotence Divine." It is more affecting than we care to say to read her Mother's and Isabella Keith's letters written immedi- ately after her death. Old and withered, tattered and pale they are now : but when you read them, how quick, how throbbing - with life and love ! how rich in that language of affection which only women, and Shakspere, and Luther can use — that power of detaining the soul over the beloved object and its loss. " K. Philip to Constance — You are as fond of grief as of your child. Const. — Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me ; Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form. Then I have reason to be fond of grief." What variations cannot love play on this one string ! In her first letter to Miss Keith, Mrs. Fleming says of her dead Maidie : — " Never did I behold so beautiful an object. It resembled the finest wax- work. There was in the countenance an expression of sweetness and serenity which seemed to indicate that the pure spirit had anticipated the joys of heaven ere it quitted the mortal frame. To tell you what your Maidie said of you would fill volumes ; for you was the constant theme of her discourse, the subject of her thoughts, and ruler of her actions. The last time she mentioned you was a few hours before all sense save that of suffering was suspended, when she said to Dr. Johnstone, ' If you will let me out at the New Year, I will be quite contented. ' I asked what made her so anxious to get out then? ' I want to purchase a New Year's gift for Isa Keith with the sixpence you gave me for being patient in the measles ; and I would like to choose it myself. ' Marjorie Fleming 107 I do not remember her speaking afterwards, except to complain of her head, till just before she expired, when she articulated, ' O, mother ! mother ! Do we make too much of this little child, who has been in her grave in Abbotshall Kirkyard these fifty and more years? We may of her cleverness — not of her affectionateness, her nature. What a picture the animosa infans gives us of herself, her vivacity, her passionateness, her precocious love-making, her passion for nature, for swine, for all living things, her reading, her turn for expression, her satire, her frankness, her little sins and rages, her great repent- ances ! We don't wonder Walter Scott carried her off in the neuk of his plaid, and played himself with her for hours. The year before she died, when in Edinburgh, she was at a Twelfth Night supper at Scott's, in Castle Street. The company had all come — all but Mar- jorie. Scott's familiars, whom we all know, were there — all were come but Marjorie ; and all were dull because Scott was dull. " Where's that bairn? what can have come over her? I'll go myself and see." And he was getting up, and would have gone ; when the bell rang, and in came Duncan Roy and his hench* man Tougald, with the sedan chair, which was brought right into the lobby, and its top raised. And there, in its darkness and dingy old cloth, sat Maidie in white, her eyes gleaming, and Scott bending over her in ecstasy — " hung over her enamoured." " Sit ye there, my dautie, till they all see you;" and forth- with he brought them all. You can fancy the scene. And he lifted her up and marched to his seat with her on his stout shoulder, and set her down beside him ; and then began the night, and such a night ! Those who knew Scott best said, that night was never equalled ; Mr "die and he were the stars ; and she gave them Constance's speeches and Helvellyn, the ballad then much in vogue — and all her repertoire — Scott showing her off, and being ofttimes rebuked by her for his intentional blunders. io8 Marjorie Fleming We are indebted for the following — and our readers will not be unwilling to share our obligations — to her sister : — " Her birth was 15th January 1803 ; her death 19th December 181 1. I take this from her Bibles. 1 I believe she was a child of robust health, of much vigour of body, and beautifully formed arms, and until her last illness, never was an hour in bed. She was niece to Mrs. Keith, residing in No. 1, North Charlotte Street, who was not Mrs. Murray Keith, although very intimately acquainted with that old lady. My aunt was a daughter of Mr. James Rae, surgeon, and married the younger son of old Keith of Ravelstone. Corstorphine Hill belonged to my aunt's husband; and his eldest son, Sir Alexander Keith, succeeded his uncle to both Ravel- stone and Dunnottar. The Keiths were not con- nected by relationship with the Howisons of Brae- head, but my grandfather and grandmother (who was), a daughter of Cant of Thurston and Giles- Grange, were on the most intimate footing with our Mrs. Keith's grandfather and grandmother; and so it has been for three generations, and the friendship consummated by my cousin William Keith marrying Isabella Craufurd. "As to my aunt and Scott, they were on a very intimate footing. He asked my aunt to be god- mother to his eldest daughter Sophia Charlotte. I had a copy of Miss Edgeworth's Rosamund, and Harry and Lucy for long, which was ' a gift to Marjorie from Walter Scott,' probably the first edition of that attractive series, for it wanted 4 Frank,' which is always now published as part of the series, under the title of Early Lessons. I regret to say these little volumes have disappeared. " Sir Walter was no relation of Marjorie's, but of the Keiths, through the Swintons; and, like Mar- jorie, he stayed much at Ravelstone in his early days, with his grand-aunt Mrs. Keith ; and it was while 1 " Her Bible is before me ; a pair, as then called ; the faded marks are just as she placed them. There is one at David's lament over Jonathan." Marjorie Fleming 109 seeing him there as a boy, that another aunt of mine composed, when he was about fourteen, the lines prognosticating- his future fame that Lockhart ascribes in his Life to Mrs. Cockburn, authoress of * The Flowers of the Forest ' :— " Go on, dear youth, the glorious path pursue Which bounteous Nature kindly smooths for you ; Go bid the seeds her hands have sown arise, By timely culture, to their native skies ; Go, and employ the poet's heavenly art, Not merely to delight, but mend the heart." Mrs. Keir was my aunt's name, another of Dr. Rae's daughters." We cannot better end than in words from this same pen : — " I have to ask you to forgive my anxiety in gathering up the fragments of Marjorie 's last days, but I have an almost sacred feeling to all that pertains to her. You are quite correct in stating that measles were the cause of her death. My mother was struck by the patient quiet- ness manifested by Marjorie during this illness, un- like her ardent, impulsive nature ; but love and poetic feeling were unquenched. When Dr. Johnstone rewarded her submissiveness with a sixpence, the request speedily followed that she might get out ere New Year's day came. When asked v/hy she was so desirous of getting out, she immediately rejoined, ' Oh, I am so anxious to buy something with my six- pence for my dear Isa Keith.' Again, when lying very still, her mother asked her if there was anything she wished : ' Oh, yes ! if you would just leave the room door open a wee bit, and play " The Land o' the Leal," and I will lie and think, and enjoy myself ' (this is just as stated to me by her mother and mine). Well, the happy day came, alike to parents and child, when Marjorie was allowed to come forth from the nursery to the parlour. It was Sabbath evening, and after tea. My father, who idolized this child, and never afterwards in my hearing mentioned her name, took her in his arms ; and while walking her up and down the room, she said, ' Father, I will repeat iio Marjorie Fleming something- to you; what would you like?' He said, 'Just choose yourself, Maidie. ' She hesitated for a moment between the paraphrase, ' Few are thy days and full of woe,' and the lines of Burns already quoted, but decided on the latter, a remarkable choice for a child. The repeating- these lines seemed to stir up the depths of feeling in her soul. She asked to be allowed to write a poem ; there was a doubt whether it would be right to allow her, in case of hurting her eyes. She pleaded earnestly, ' Just this once;' the point was yielded, her slate was given her, and with great rapidity she wrote an address of fourteen lines, ' to her loved cousin on the author's recovery,' her last work on earth : — ' Oh ! Isa, pain did visit me, I was at the last extremity ; How often did I think of you, 1 wished your graceful form to view, To clasp you in my weak embrace, Indeed I thought I'd run my race: Good care, I'm sure, was of me taken, But still indeed I was much shaken, At last I daily strength did gain, And oh ! at last, away went pain ; At length the doctor thought I might Stay in the parlor all the night ; I now continue so to do, Farewell to Nancy and to you.' " She went to bed apparently well, awoke in the middle of the night with the old cry of woe to a mother's heart, 'My head, my head!' Three days of the dire malady, ' water in the head,' followed, and the end came." " Soft, silken promise, fading timelessly." It is needless, it is impossible, to add anything to this : the fervour, the sweetness, the flush of poetic ecstasy, the lovely and glowing eye, the perfect nature of that bright and warm intelligence, that darling child, — Lady Nairne's words, and the old tune, stealing up from the depths of the human heart, Marjorie Fleming in deep calling unto deep, gentle and strong like the waves of the great sea hushing themselves to sleep in the dark ; — the words of Burns, touching the kindred chord, her last numbers " wildly sweet " traced, with thin and eager fingers, already touched by the last enemy and friend, — moriens canit, — and that love which is so soon to be her everlasting light, is her song's burden to the end, " She set as sets the morning star, which goes Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides Obscured among the tempests of the sky, But melts away into the light of heaven." JEEMS THE DOORKEEPER When my father was in Broughton Place Church, we had a doorkeeper called Jeems, and a formidable little man and doorkeeper he was ; of unknown age and name, for he existed to us, and indeed still exists to me — though he has been in his grave these sixteen years — as Jeems, absolute and per se, no more need- ing a surname than did or do Abraham or Isaac, Sam- son or Nebuchadnezzar. We young people of the congregation believed that he was out in the '45, and had his drum shot through and quenched at Culloden ; and as for any indication on his huge and grey visage, of his ever having been young, he might safely have been Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer NigJit's Dream, or that excellent, ingenious, and " wise- hearted " Bezaleel, the son of Uri, whom Jeems regarded as one of the greatest of men and of weavers, and whose " ten curtains of fine twined linen, and blue, and purple, and scarlet, each of them with fifty loops on the edge of the selvedge in the coupling, with their fifty taches of gold," he, in con- fidential moments, gave it to be understood were the sacred triumphs of his craft ; for, as you may infer, my friend was a man of the treddles and the shuttle, as well as the more renowned grandson of Hur. Jeems' s face was so extensive, and met you so for- midably and at once, that it mainly composed his whole ; and such a face ! Sydney Smith used to say of a certain quarrelsome man, " His very face is a breach of the peace." Had he seen our friend's, he would have said he was the imperative mood on two (very small) legs, out on business in a blue greatcoat. It was in the nose and the keen small eye that his strength lay. Such a nose of power, so undeniable, I 112 Jeems the Doorkeeper 113 never saw, except in what was said to be a bust from the antique, of Rhadamanthus, the well-known Justice-Clerk of the Pagan Court of Session ! Indeed, when I was in the Rector's class, and watched jeems turning interlopers out of the church seats, by merely presenting before them this tremendous organ, it struck me that if Rhadamanthus had still been here, and out of employment, he would have taken kindly to jeems' s work, — and that possibly he was that potentate in a U. P. disguise. Nature having fashioned the huge face, and laid out much material and idea upon it, had finished oft the rest of jeems somewhat scrimply, as if she had run out of means ; his legs especially were of the shortest, and, as his usual dress was a very long blue great- coat, made for a much taller man, its tails resting upon the ground, and its large hind buttons in a totally preposterous position, gave him the look of being planted, or rather after the manner of Milton's beasts at the creation, in the act of emerging painfully from his mother earth. Now, you may think this was a very ludicrous old object. If you had seen him, you would not have said so; and not only was he a man of weight and authority, — he was likewise a genuine, indeed a deeply spiritual Christian, well read in his Bible, in his own heart, and in human nature and life, knowing both its warp and woof ; more peremptory in making himself obey his Master, than in getting himself obeyed, and this is saying a good deal; and, like all complete men, he had a genuine love and gift of humour, 1 kindly and uncouth, lurking in those small, deep-set grey eyes, shrewd and keen, which, like two sharpest of shooters, enfiladed that massive and re- doubtable bulwark, the nose. 1 On one occasion a descendant of Nabal having put a crown piece into " the plate " instead of a penny, and staring at its white and precious face, asked to have it back, and was refused — " In once, in for ever." " A weel, a weel," grunted he, " I'll get credit for it in heaven." " Na, na," said Jeems, " ye'll get credit only for the penny I" ii4 Jeems the Doorkeeper One day two strangers made themselves over to Jeems to be furnished with seats. Motioning them to follow, he walked majestically to the farthest in corner, where he had decreed they should sit. The couple found seats near the door, and stepped into them, leaving Jeems to march through the passages alone, the whole congregation watching him with some relish and alarm. He gets to his destination, opens the door, and stands aside; nobody appears. He looks sharply round, and then gives a look of general wrath "at lairge. " No one doubted his victory. His nose and eye fell, or seemed to fall, on the two culprits, and pulled them out instantly, hurry- ing them to their appointed place; Jeems snibbed them slowly in, and gave them a parting look they were not likely to misunderstand or forget. At that time the crowds and the imperfect ventila- tion made fainting a common occurrence in Broughton Place, especially among " thae young hizzies," as Jeems called the servant girls. He generally came to me, " the young Doctor," on these occasions with a look of great relish. I had indoctrinated him in the philosophy of syncopes, especially as to the pro- priety of laying the " hizzies " quite flat on the floor of the lobby, with the head as low as the rest of the body ; and as many of these cases were owing to what Jeems called " that bitter yerkin " of their boddices, he and I had much satisfaction in relieving them, and giving them a moral lesson, by cutting their stay-laces, which ran before the knife, and cracked " like a bowstring," as my coadjutor said. One day a young lady was our care. She was lying out, and slowly coming to. Jeems, with that huge terrific visage, came round to me with his open gully in his hand, whispering, " Wull oo ripp 'er up noo?" It happened not to be a case for ripping up. The gully was a great sanitary institution, and made a decided inroad upon the yerking system — Jeems having, thanks to this and Dr. Coombe, every year fewer opportunities of displaying and enjoying its powers. Jeems the Doorkeeper 115 He was sober in other things besides drink, could be generous on occasion, but was careful of his siller ; sensitive to fierceness (" we're uncommon zeelyous the day," was a favourite phrase when any church matter was stirring) for the honour of his church and minister, and to his too often worthless neighbours a perpetual moral protest and lesson — a living epistle. He dwelt at the head of Big Lochend's Close in the Canongate, at the top of a long stair — ninety-six steps, as I well know — where he had dwelt, all by himself, for five-and-thirty years, and where, in the midst of all sorts of Sittings and changes, not a day opened or closed without the well-known sound of Jeems at his prayers, — his "exercise," — at "the Books." His clear, fearless, honest voice in psalm and chapter, and strong prayer, came sounding through that wide " land," like that of one crying in the wilderness. Jeems and I got great friends ; he called me John, as if he was my grandfather ; and though as plain in speech as in feature, he was never rude. I owe him much in many ways. His absolute downrightness and yaefauldness ; his energetic, unflinching fulfilment of his work; his rugged, sudden tenderness; his look of sturdy age, as the thick silver-white hair lay on his serious and weatherworn face, like moonlight on a stout old tower ; his quaint Old Testament exegetics, his lonely and contented life, his simple godliness, — it was no small privilege to see much of all this. But I must stop. I forget that you didn't know him ; that he is not your Jeems. If it had been so, you would not soon have wearied of telling or of being told of the life and conversation of this " fell body." He was not communicative about his early life. He would sometimes speak to me about " her," as if I knew who and where she was, and always with a gentleness and solemnity unlike his usual gruff ways. I found out that he had been married when young, and that " she " (he never named her) and their child died on the same day, — the day of its birth. 1 1 6 Jeems the Doorkeeper The only indication of married life in his room, was an old and strong cradle, which he had cut down so as to rock no more, and which he made the depository of his books — a queer collection. I have said that he had what he called, with a grave smile, family worship, morning and evening, never failing. He not only sang his psalm, but gave out or chanted the line in great style; and on seeing me one morning surprised at this, he said, " Ye see John, oo," meaning himself and his wife, "began that way." He had a firm, true voice, and a genuine though roughish gift of singing, and being methodical in all things, he did what I never heard of in any one else, — he had seven fixed tunes, one of which he sang on its own set day. Sabbath morning it was French, which he went through with great birr. Monday, Scarborough, which, he said, was like my father cantering. Tuesday, Coleshill, that soft exquisite air, — monotonous and melancholy, soothing and vague, like the sea. This day, Tuesday, was the day of the week on which his wife and child died, and he always sang more verses then than on any other. Wednes- day was Irish; Thursday, Old Hundred; Friday, Bangor; and Saturday, Blackburn, that humdrum- mest of tunes, " as long, and lank, and lean, as is the ribbed sea-sand." He could not defend it, but had some secret reason for sticking to it. As to the evenings, they were just the same tunes in reversed order, only that on Tuesday night he sang Coleshill again, thus dropping Blackburn for evening work. The children could tell the day of the week by Jeems's tune, and would have been as much astonished at hearing Bangor on Monday, as at finding St. Giles's half-way down the Canongate. I frequently breakfasted with him. He made capital porridge, and I wish I could get such butter- milk, or at least have such a relish for it, as in those days. Jeems is away — gone over to the majority; and I hope I may never forget to be grateful to the dear and queer old man. I think I see and hear him Jeems the Doorkeeper 117 saying his grace over our bickers with their brats on, then taking his two books out of the cradle and reading, not without a certain homely majesty, the first verse of the 99th Psalm, " Th' eternal Lord doth reign as king, Let all the people quake ; He sits between the eherubims, Let th' earth be mov'd and shake ;" then launching out into the noble depths of Irish. His chapters were long, and his prayers short, very scriptural, but by no means stereotyped, and wonder- fully real, immediate, as if he was near Him whom he addressed. Any one hearing the sound and not the words, would say, " That man is speaking to some one who is with him — who is present," — as he often said to me, " There's nae gude dune, John, till ye get to close grups. " Now, I dare say you are marvelling — first, Why I brought this grim, old Rhadamanthus, Belzaleel, U. P. Naso of a doorkeeper up before you ; and secondly, How I am to get him down decorously in that ancient blue greatcoat, and get at my own proper text. And first of the first. I thought it would do you young men — the hope of the world — no harm to let your affections go out toward this dear, old-world specimen of homespun worth. And as to the second, I am going to make it my excuse for what is to come. One day soon after I knew him, when I thought he was in a soft, confidential mood, I said : " Jeems, what kind of weaver are you?" " I'm in the fancical line, maister John," said he somewhat stiffly; " I like its leecence." So exit Jeems — impiger, iracundus, acer — torvus visu — placide quiescat ! Now, my dear friends, I am in the fancical line as well as Jeems, and in virtue of my leecence, I begin my exegetical remarks on the pursuit of truth. By the bye, I should have told Sir Henry that it was truth, not knowledge, I was to be after. Now all n8 Jeems the Doorkeeper knowledge should be true, but it isn't; much of what is called knowledge is very little worth even when true, and much of the best truth is not in a strict sense knowable, — rather it is felt and believed. Exegetical, you know, is the grand and fashionable word now-a-days for explanatory ; it means bringing out of a passage all that is in it, and nothing more. For my part, being in Jeems' s line, I am not so par- ticular as to the nothing more. We fancical men are much given to make somethings of nothings; indeed, the noble Italians call imagination and poetic fancy the little more; its very function is to embellish and intensify the actual and the common. Now you must not laugh at me, or it, when I announce the passage from which I mean to preach upon the pursuit of truth, and the possession of wisdom : — " On Tintock tap there is a Mist, And in the Mist there is a Kist, And in the Kist there is a Cap ; Tak* up the Cap and sup the drap, And set the Cap on Tintock tap." And as to what Sir Henry 1 would call the context, we are saved all trouble, there being none, the pas- sage being self-contained, and as destitute of relations as Melchisedec. Tintock, you all know, or should know, is a big porphyrinic hill in Lanarkshire, standing alone, and dominating like a king over the Upper Ward. Then we all understand what a mist is ; and it is worth remembering that as it is more difficult to penetrate, to illuminate, and to see through mist than darkness, so it is easier to enlighten and overcome ignorance, than error, confusion, and mental mist. Then a kist is Scotch for chest, and a cap the same for cup, and drap for drop. Well, then, I draw out of these queer old lines — First, That to gain real knowledge, to get it at first-hand, you must go up the Hill Difficulty — some 1 This was read to Sir Henry W. Moncreiff's Young Men's Association, November 1862. Jeems the Doorkeeper 119 Tintock, something- you see from afar — and you must climb; you must energize, as Sir William Hamilton and Dr. Chalmers said and did ; you must turn your back upon the plain, and you must mainly go alone, and on your own legs. Two boys may start together on going up Tinto, and meet at the top; but the journeys are separate, each takes his own line. Secondly, You start for your Tintock top with a given object, to get into the mist and get the drop, and you do this chiefly because you have the truth- hunting instinct ; you long to know what is hidden there, for there is a wild and urgent charm in the unknown ; and you want to realize for yourself what others, it may have been ages ago, tell they have found there. Thirdly, There is no road up; no omnibus to the top of Tinto; you must zigzag it in your own way, and as I have already said, most part of it alone. Fourthly, This climbing, this exaltation, and buck- ling to of the mind, of itself does you good j 1 it is capital exercise, and you find out many a thing by the way. Your lungs play freely ; your mouth fills with the sweet waters of keen action; the hill tries your wind and mettle, supples and hardens your joints and limbs; quickens and rejoices, while it tests your heart. Fifthly, You have many a fall, many a false step ; you slip back, you tumble into a moss-hag g ; you stumble over the baffling stones; you break your shins and lose your temper, and the finding of it makes you keep it better the next time ; you get more patient, and yet more eager, and not unoften you come to a stand-still ; run yourself up against, or to the edge of, some impossible precipice, some insoluble problem, and have to turn for your life ; and you may find yourself over head in a treacherous wellee, whose soft inviting cushion of green has decoyed many a one before you. 1 " In this pursuit, whether we take or whether we lose our game, the chase is certainly of service." — Burke. 1 20 Jeems the Doorkeeper Sixthly, You are for ever mistaking the top ; thinking you are at it, when, behold ! there it is, as if farther off than ever, and you may have to humble yourself in a hidden valley before reascending ; and so on you go, at times flinging yourself down on the elastic heather, stretched panting with your face to the sky, or gazing far away athwart the widening horizon. Seventhly, As you get up, you may see how the world below lessens and reveals itself, comes up to you as a whole, with its just proportions and rela- tions ; how small the village you live in looks, and the house in which you were born ; how the plan of the place comes out; there is the quiet churchyard, and a lamb is nibbling at that infant's grave; there, close to the little church, your mother rests till the great day ; and there far off you may trace the river winding through the plain, coming like human life, from dark- ness to darkness, — from its source in some wild, upland solitude to its eternity, the sea. But you have rested long enough, so, up and away ! take the hill once again ! Every effort is a victory and joy — new skill and power and relish — takes you farther from the world below, nearer the clouds and heavens ; and you may note that the more you move up towards the pure blue depths of the sky — the more lucid and the more unsearchable — the farther off, the more with- drawn into their own clear infinity do they seem. Well, then, you get to the upper story, and you find it less difficult, less steep than lower down ; often so plain and level that you can run off in an ecstasy to the crowning cairn, to the sacred mist — within whose cloudy shrine rests the unknown secret; some great truth of God and of your own soul; something that is not to be gotten for gold down on the plain, but may be taken here ; something that no man can give or take away ; something that you must work for and learn yourself, and which, once yours, is safe beyond the chances of time. Eighthly, You enter that luminous cloud, stooping and as a little child — as, indeed, all the best king- Jeems the Doorkeeper 121 doms are entered — and pressing on, you come in the shadowy light to the long-dreamt-of ark, — the chest. It is shut, it is locked ; but if you are the man I take you to be, you have the key, put it gently in, steadily, and home. But what is the key? It is the love of truth ; neither more nor less ; no other key opens it ; no false one, however cunning, can pick that lock ; no assault of hammer, however stout, can force it open. But with its own key a little child may open it, often does open it, it goes so sweetly, so with a will. You lift the lid ; you are all alone ; the cloud is round you with a sort of tender light of its own, shutting out the outer world, filling you with an eerie joy, as if alone and yet not alone. You see the cup within, and in it the one crystalline, unimaginable, inesti- mable drop ; glowing and tremulous, as if alive. You take up the cup, you sup the drop ; it enters into, and becomes of the essence of yourself ; and so, in humble gratitude and love, " in sober certainty of waking bliss," you gently replace the cup. It will gather again, — it is for ever gathering; no man, woman, or child ever opened that chest, and found no drop in the cup. It might not be the very drop expected ; it will serve their purpose none the worse, often much the better. And now, bending down, you shut the lid, which you hear locking itself afresh against all but the sacred key. You leave the now hallowed mist. You look out on the old familiar world again, which some- how looks both new and old. You descend, making your observations over again, throwing the light of the present on the past ; and past and present set against the boundless future. You hear coming up to you the homely sounds — the sheep-dog's bark, " the cock's shrill clarion " — from the farm at the hill-foot; you hear the ring of the blacksmith's study, you see the smoke of his forge; your mother's grave has the long shadows of evening lying across it, the sunlight falling on the letters of her name, and on the number of her years ; the lamb is asleep in the bield 122 Jeems the Doorkeeper of the infant's grave. Speedily you are at your own door. You enter with wearied feet, and thankful heart; you shut the door, and you kneel down and pray to your Father in heaven, the Father of lights, your reconciled Father, the God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and our God and Father in and through him. And as you lie down on your own delightful bed, before you fall asleep, you think over again your ascent of the Hill Difficulty, — its baffling heights, its reaches of dreary moorland, its shifting gravel, its precipices, its quagmires, its little wells of living waters near the top, and all its " dread magnificence;" its calm, restful summit, the hush of silence there, the all-aloneness of the place and hour; its peace, its sacredness, its divineness. You see again the mist, the ark, the cup, the gleam- ing drop, and recalling the sight of the world below, the earth and all its fulness, you say to yourself, — " These are thy glorious works, Parent of good, Almighty, thine this universal frame, Thus wondrous fair ; Thyself how wondrous then ! Unspeakable, who sitt'st above these heavens." And finding the burden too heavy even for these glorious lines, you take refuge in the Psalms — "Praise ye the Lord. Praise ye the Lord from the heavens : praise him in the heights. Praise him in the firmament of his power. Praise ye him, all his angels : praise ye him, all his hosts. Praise ye him, sun and moon : praise him, all ye stars of light. Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps ; Fire and hail ; snow and vapour ; stormy wind fulfilling his word : Mountains, and all hills ; fruitful trees, and all cedars ; Beasts, and all cattle ; creeping things, and flying fowl : Kings of the earth, and all people ; princes and all judges of the earth : Both young men and maidens ; old men and children : Let them praise the name of the Lord : For his name alone is excellent ; his glory is above the earth and heaven. Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord. Bless the Lord, O my soul!" Jeems the Doorkeeper 123 I need hardly draw the moral of this, our somewhat fancical exercitation and exegesis. You can all make it out, such as it is. It is the toil, and the joy, and the victory in the search of truth ; not the taking on trust, or learning by rote, not by heart, what other men count or call true ; but the vital appropriation, the assimilation of truth to ourselves, and of ourselves to truth. All truth is of value, but one truth differs from another in weight and in brightness, in worth ; and you need not me to tell you that spiritual and eternal truth, the truth as it is in Jesus, is the best. And don't think that your own hand has gotten you the victory, and that you had no unseen, and it may be unfelt and unacknowledged hand guiding you up the hill. Unless the Lord had been at and on your side, all your labour would have been in vain, and worse. No two things are more inscrutable or less uncertain than man's spontaneity and man's helpless- ness, — Freedom and Grace as the two poles. It is His doing that you are led to the right hill and the right road, for there are other Tintocks, with other kists, and other drops. Work out, therefore, your own knowledge with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do, and to know of His good pleasure. There is no explaining and there is no disbelieving this. And now, before bidding you good-bye, did you ever think of the spiritual meaning of the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night, as con- nected with our knowledge and our ignorance, our light and darkness, our gladness and our sorrow? The everyday use of this divine alternation to the wandering children of Israel, is plain enough. Dark- ness is best seen against light, and light against dark- ness ; and its use, in a deeper sense of keeping for ever before them the immediate presence of God in the midst of them, is not less plain; but I sometimes think, that we who also are still in the wilderness, and coming up from our Egypt and its fleshpots, and on our way let us hope, through God's grace, to the 124 Jeems the Doorkeeper celestial Canaan, may draw from these old-world signs and wonders, that, in the mid-day of know- ledge, with daylight all about us, there is, if one could but look for it, that perpetual pillar of cloud — that sacred darkness which haunts all human know- ledge, often the most at its highest noon; that " look that threatens the profane;" that something, and above all, that sense of Some One, — that Holy One, who inhabits eternity and its praises, who makes darkness His secret place, His pavilion round about, darkness and thick clouds of the sky. And again, that in the deepest, thickest night of doubt, of fear, o( sorrow, of despair ; that then, and all the most then — if we will but look in the right airt, and with the seeing eye and the understanding heart — there may be seen that Pillar of fire, of light and of heat, to guide and quicken and cheer; know- ledge and love, that everlasting love which we know to be the Lord's. And how much better off are we than the chosen people; their pillars were on earth, divine in their essence, but subject doubtless to earthly perturbations and interferences ; but our guiding light is in the heavens, towards which we take earnest heed that we are journeying. "Once on the raging seas I rode, The storm was loud, the night was dark ; The ocean yawned, and rudely blowed The wind that toss'd my foundering bark. Deep horror then my vitals froze, Death-struck, I ceased the tide to stem, When suddenly a star arose, It was the Star of Bethlehem ! It was my guide, my light, my all, It bade my dark foreboding cease ; And through the storm and danger's thrall It led me to the port in peace. Now safely moored, my perils o'er, I'll sing first in night's diadem, For ever and for evermore The Star, the Star of Bethlehem!" MINCHMOOR Sweet smells the birk, green grows, green grows the grass. Yellow on Yarrow's banks the gowan, Fair hangs the apple frae the rock, Sweet the wave of Yarrow flowan. Flows Yarrow sweet? as sweet, as sweet flows Tweed, As green Us grass, its gowan yelloiv, As sweet smells on its braes the birk, The apple frae the rock as mellow." Hamilton o* Bangour. There is moral as well as bodily wholesomeness in a mount- tain walk, if the walker has the understanding heart, and eschews pic-nics. It is good for any man to be alone with nature and himself, or with a friend who knows when silence is more sociable than talk — " In the wilderness alone, There where nature worships God." It is well to be in places where man is little and Cod is great — where what he sees all around him has the same look as it had a thousand years ago, and will have the same, in all like- lihood, when he has been a thousand years in his grave. It •bates and rectifies a man, if he is worth the process. " It is not favourable to religious feeling to hear only of the actions and interference of man, and to behold nothing but what human ingenuity has completed. There is an image of God's greatness impressed upon the outward face of nature fitted to make us all pious, and to breathe into our hearts a purifying and salutary fear. " In cities everything is man, and man alone. He seems to move and govern all, and be the Providence of cities; and there we do not render unto Ccesar the things which are Ccesar's, and unto God the things which are God's; but God is forgotten, and Ccesar is supreme — all is human policy, human foresight, human power; nothing reminds us of in- visible dominion, and concealed omnipotence— it is all earth, and no heaven. One cure of this is prayer and the solitary place. As the body, harassed with the noxious air of cities, seeks relief in the freedom and the purity of the fields and hills, so the mind, wearied by commerce with men, resumes its vigour in solitude, and repairs its dignity."— From Sydney Smith's Sermon "On the effects which the tumultuous life passed in £reat cities produces upon the moral and religious character." — 1809. MINCHMOOR Now that everybody is out of town, and every place in the guide-books is as well known as Princes Street or Pali-Mall, it is something to discover a hill everybody has not been to the top of, and which is not in Black. Such a hill is Minchmoor, nearly three times as high as Arthur's Seat, and lying be- tween Tweed and Yarrow. The best way to ascend it is from Traquair. You go up the wild old Selkirk road, which passes almost right over the summit, and by which Mont- rose and his cavaliers fled from Philiphaugh, where Sir Walter's mother remembered crossing, when a girl, in a coach-and-six, on her way to a ball at Peebles, several footmen marching on either side of the carriage to prop it up or drag it out of the moss haggs ; and where, to our amazement, we learned that the Duchess of Buccleuch had lately driven her ponies. Before this we had passed the grey, old- world entrance to Traquair House, and looked down its grassy and untrod avenue to the pallid, forlorn mansion, stricken all o'er with eld, and noticed the wrought-iron gate embedded in a foot deep and more of soil, never having opened since the '45. There are the huge Bradwardine bears on each side — most grotesque supporters — with a superfluity of ferocity and canine teeth. The whole place, like the family whose it has been, seems dying out — everything sub- dued to settled desolation. The old race, the old religion, the gaunt old house, with its small, deep, comfortless windows, the decaying trees, the still- ness about the doors, the grass overrunning every- thing, nature reinstating herself in her quiet way — all this makes the place look as strange and pitiful 127 128 Minchmoor among its fellows in the vale as would the Earl who built it three hundred years ago if we met him tot- tering along our way in the faded dress of his youth ; but it looks the Earl's house still, and has a dignity of its own. We soon found the Minchmoor road, and took at once to the hill, the ascent being, as often is with other ascents in this world, steepest at first. No- thing could be more beautiful than the view as we ascended, and got a look of the " eye-sweet " Tweed hills, and their " silver stream." It was one of the five or six good days of this summer — in early morn- ing, "soft" and doubtful; but the mists drawing up, and now the noble, tawny hills were dappled with gleams and shadows — " Sunbeams upon distant hills gliding apace " — the best sort of day for mountain scenery — that ripple of light and shadow brings out the forms and the depths of the hills far better than a cloudless sky ; and the horizon is generally wider. Before us and far away was the round flat head of Minchmoor, with a dark, rich bloom on it from the thick, short heather — the hills around being green. Near the top, on the Tweed side, its waters trotting away cheerily to the glen at Bold, is the famous Cheese Well — always full, never overflowing. Here every traveller — Duchess, shepherd, or houseless mugger — stops, rests, and is thankful; doubtless so did Montrose, poor fellow, and his young nobles and their jaded steeds, on their scurry from Lesly and his Dragoons. It is called the Cheese Well from those who rest there dropping in bits of their provi- sions, as votive offerings to the fairies whose especial haunt this mountain was. After our rest and drink, we left the road and made for the top. When there we were well rewarded. The great round-backed, kindly, solemn hills of Tweed, Yarrow, and Ettrick lay all about like sleeping mastiffs — too plain to be grand, too ample and beautiful to be commonplace. Minchmoor 129 There, to the north-east, is the place — William- hope ridge — where Sir Walter Scott bade farewell to his heroic friend Mungo Park. They had come up from Ashestiel, where Scott then lived, and where " Marmion " was written and its delightful epistles inspired — where he passed the happiest part of his life — leaving it, as Hogg said, " for gude an' a';" for his fatal " dreams about his cottage " were now begun. He was to have " a hundred acres, two spare bed-rooms, with dressing rooms, each of which will on a pinch have a couch-bed." We all know what the dream, and the cottage, and the hundred acres came to — the ugly Abbotsford ; the over-bur- dened, shattered brain driven wild, and the end, death, and madness. Well, it was on that ridge that the two friends — each romantic, but in such different ways — parted never to meet again. There is the ditch Park's horse stumbled over and all but fell. " I am afraid, Mungo, that's a bad omen," said the Sheriff ; to which he answered, with a bright smile on his handsome, fearless face — " Freits (omens) follow those who look to them." With this expression, he struck the spurs into his horse, and Scott never saw him again. He had not long been married to a lovely and much-loved woman, and had been speaking to Scott about his new African scheme, and how he meant to tell his family he had some business in Edinburgh — send them his blessing, anc* be off — alas ! never to return 1 Scott used to say, when speaking of this parting, " I stood and looked back, but he did not." A more memorable place for two such men to part in would not easily be found. Where we are standing is the spot Scott speaks of when writing to Joanna Baillie about her new tragedies — " Were it possible for me to hasten the treat I expect in such a composition with you, I would promise to read the volume at the silence of noonday upon the top of Minchmoor. The hour is allowed, by those skilful in demonology, to be as full E 130 Minchmoor of witching as midnight itself ; and I assure you I have felt really oppressed with a sort of fearful lone- liness when looking around the naked towering ridges of desolate barrenness, which is all the eye takes in from the top of such a mountain, the patches of cultivation being hidden in the little glens, or only appearing to make one feel how feeble and ineffectual man has been to contend with the genius of the soil. It is in such a scene that the unknown and gifted author of Albania places the superstition which con- sists in hearing the noise of a chase, the baying of the hounds, the throttling sobs of the deer, the wild hollos of the huntsmen, and the ' hoof thick beating on the hollow hill.' I have often repeated his verses with some sensations of awe, in this place." The lines — and they are noble, and must have sounded wonderful with his voice and look — are as follows. Can no one tell us anything more of their author? — " There oft is heard, at midnight, or at noon, Beginning faint, but rising still more loud, And nearer, voice of hunters, and of hounds ; And horns, hoarse-winded, blowing far and keen ! Forthwith the hubbub multiplies; the gale Labours with wilder shrieks, and rifer din Of hot pursuit ; the broken cry of deer Mangled by throttling dogs ; the shouts of men, And hoofs thick beating on the hollow hill. Sudden the grazing heifer in the vale Starts at the noise, and both the herdman's ears Tingle with inward dread — aghast he eyes The mountain's height, and all the ridges round, Yet not one trace of living wight discerns, Nor knows, o'erawed and trembling as he stands, To what or whom he owes his idle fear — To ghost, to witch, to fairy, or to fiend ; But wonders, and no end of wondering finds." We listened for the hunt, but could only hear the wind sobbing from the blind " Hopes." 1 The view from the top reaches from the huge Harestane Broadlaw — nearly as high as Ben Lomond 1 The native word for hollows in the hills : thus, Dryhope, Gameshope, Chapelhope, &c. Minchmoor 131 — whose top is as flat as a table, and would make a race-course of two miles, and where the clouds are still brooding, to the Cheviot; and from the Maiden Paps in Liddesdale, and that wild huddle of hills at Moss Paul, to Dunse Law, and the weird Lamtner- moors. There is Ruberslaw, always surly and dark. The Dunion, beyond which lies Jedburgh. There are the Eildons, with their triple heights ; and you can get a glimpse of the upper woods of Abbotsford, and the top of the hill above Cauldshiels Loch, that very spot where the " wondrous potentate," — when suffering from langour and pain, and beginning to break down under his prodigious fertility, — composed those touching lines : — " The sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill In Ettrick's vale is sinking sweet ; The westland wind is hushed and still ; The lake lies sleeping at my feet. Yet not the landscape to mine eye Bears those bright hues that once it bore, Though evening, with her richest dye, Flames o'er the hills of Ettrick's shore. With listless look along the plain I see Tweed's silver current glide, And coldly mark the holy fane Of Melrose rise in ruined pride. The quiet lake, the balmy air, The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree, Are they still such as once they were, Or is the dreary change in me? Alas 1 the warped and broken board, How can it bear the painter's dye I The harp of strained and tuneless chord, How to the minstrel's skill reply I To aching eyes each landscape lowers, To feverish pulse each gale blows chill ; And Araby or Eden's bowers Were barren as this moorland hill." There, too, is Minto Hill, as modest and shapely and smooth as Clyde's shoulders, and Earlsion Black Hill, with Cowdenknowes at its foot; and there, 132 M inch moor standing stark and upright as a warder, is the stout old Smailholme Tower, seen and seeing all around. It is quite curious how unmistakable and important it looks at what must be twenty and more miles. It is now ninety years since that " lonely infant," who has sung its awful joys, was found in a thunder- storm, as we all know, lying on the soft grass at the foot of the grey old Strength, clapping his hands at each flash, and shouting, " Bonny! bonny!" We now descended into Yarrow, and forgathered with a shepherd who was taking his lambs over to the great Melrose fair. He was a fine specimen of a border herd — young, tall, sagacious, self-contained, and free in speech and air. We got his heart by praising his dog Jed, a very fine collie, black and comely, gentle and keen — " Ay, she's a fell yin ; she can do a' but speak." On asking him if the sheep dogs needed much teaching — " Whyles ay and whyles no; her kind (Jed's) needs nane. She sooks 't in wi' her mither's milk." On asking him if the dogs were ever sold, he said — " Never, but at an orra time. Naebody wad sell a gude dowg, and naebody wad buy an ill ane. " He told us with great feeling, of the death of one of his best dogs by poison. It was plainly still a grief to him. " What was he poisoned with?" " Strychnia," he said, as decidedly as might Dr. Christison. " How do you know?" " I opened him, puir fallow, and got him analeezed !" Now we are on Birkindale Brae, and are looking down on the same scene as did "James Boyd (the Earle of Arran, his brother was he)," when he crossed Minchmoor on his way to deliver James the Fifth's message to " Yon outlaw Murray, Surely whaur bauldly bideth he." " Down Birkindale Brae when that he cam He saw the feir Foroste wi' his ee." Minchmoor 133 How James Boyd fared, and what the outlaw said, and what James and his nobles said and did, and how the outlaw at last made peace with his King, and rose up " Sheriffe of Ettricke Foreste," and how the bold ruffian boasted, " Fair Philiphaugh is mine by right, And Lewinshope still mine shall be ; Newark, Foulshiels, and Tinnies baith My bow and arrow purchased me. And I have native steads to me The Newark Lee o' Hangingshaw. I have many steads in the Forest schaw, But them by name I dinna knaw." And how King James snubbed " The kene Laird of Buckscleuth, A stalwart man and sterne was he." When the Laird hinted that, " For a king to gang an outlaw till Is beneath his state and dignitie. The man that wins yon forest intill He lives by reif and felony." " Then out and spak the nobil King, And round him cast a wilie ee. ' Now haud thy tongue, Sir Walter Scott, Nor speak o' reif or felonie — For, had every honest man his awin kye, A richt puir clan thy name wud be I ' " (by-the-bye, why did Professor Aytoun leave out this excellent hit in his edition?) — all this and much more may you see if you take up The Border Min- strelsy, and read " The Sang of the Outlaw Murray," with the incomparable notes of Scott. But we are now well down the hill. There to the left, in the hollow, is Permanscore, where the King and the outlaw met : — " Bid him mete me at Permanscore, And bring four in his companie ; Five Erles sail cum wi' mysel', Gude reason I sud honoured be." 134 Minchmoor And there goes our Shepherd with his long- swing- ing stride. As different from his dark, wily com- panion, the Badenoch drover, as was Harry Wake- field from Robin Oig ; or as the big, sunny Cheviot is from the lowering Ruberslaw ; and there is Jed trotting meekly behind him — may she escape strych- nia, and, dying at the fireside among the children, be laid like " Paddy Tims — whose soul at aise is — With the point of his nose And the tips of his toes Turn'd up to the roots of the daisies " — unanaleezed, save by the slow cunning of the grave. And may her master get the top price for his lambs ! Do you see to the left that little plantation on the brow of Foulshiels Hill, with the sunlight lying on its upper corner? If you were there you might find among the brackens and foxglove a little head- stone with "I. T. " rudelv carved on it. That is Tibbie Tamson's grave, known and feared all the country round. This poor outcast was a Selkirk woman, who, under the stress of spiritual despair — that sense of perdition, which, as in Cowper's case, often haunts and overmasters the deepest and gentlest natures, making them think themselves " Damn'd below Judas, more abhorred than he was," — committed suicide ; and being, with the gloomy, cruel superstition of the time, looked on by her neigh- bours as accursed of God, she was hurried into a rough white deal coffin, and carted out of the town, the people stoning it all the way till it crossed the Etterick. Here, on this wild hillside, it found its rest, being buried where three lairds' lands meet. May we trust that the light of God's reconciled coun- tenance has for all these long years been resting on that once forlorn soul, as his blessed sunshine now lies on her moorland grave ! For " the mountains Minchmoor 135 shall depart, and the hills be removed ; but my kind- ness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee." Now, we see down into the Yarrow — there is the famous stream twinkling in the sun. What stream and valley was ever so be-sung ! You wonder at first why this has been, but the longer you look the less you wonder. There is a charm about it — it is not easy to say what. The huge sunny hills in which it is embosomed give it a look at once gentle and serious. They are great, and their gentleness makes them greater. Wordsworth has the right words, "pastoral melancholy;" and besides, the region is " not uninformed with phantasy and looks that threaten the profane "—the Flowers of Yarrow, the Douglas Tragedy, the Dowie Dens, Wordsworth's Yarrow UnvTsited, Visited, and Re-Visited, and, above all, the glamour of Sir Walter, and Park's fatal and heroic story. Where can you find eight more exquisite lines anywhere than Logan's, which we all know by heart : — " His mother from the window looked, With all the longing of a mother ; His little sister, weeping, walked The greenwood path to meet her brother. They sought him east, they sought him west. They sought him all the forest thorough — They only saw the cloud of night, They only heard the roar of Yarrow." And there is Newark Tower among the rich woods ; and Harehead, that cosiest, loveliest, and hospitablest of nests. Methinks I hear certain young voices among the hazels ; out they come on the little haugh by the side of the deep, swirling stream, fabulosus as was ever Hydaspes. There they go " running races in their mirth," and is not that — an me ludit amabilis insania? — the voice of ma panvre petite — animosa infans — the wilful, rich-eyed, delicious Eppie? 136 Minchmoor " Oh blessed vision, happy child, Thou art so exquisitely wild 1" And there is Black Andro and Glowr owr'em and Foulshiels, where Park was born and bred ; and there is the deep pool in the Yarrow where Scott found him plunging one stone after another into the water, and watching anxiously the bubbles as they rose to the surface. "This," said Scott to him, "appears but an idle amusement for one who has seen so much adventure." "Not so idle, perhaps, as you sup- pose," answered Mungo, " this was the way I used to ascertain the depth of a river in Africa." He was then meditating his second journey, but had said so to no one. We go down by Broadmeadows , now held by that Yair " Hoppringle " — who so well governed Scinde — and into the grounds of Bowhill, and passing Philiphaugh, see where stout David Lesly crossed in the mist at daybreak with his heavy dragoons, many of them old soldiers of Gustavus, and routed the gallant Graeme; and there is Slainmen's Lee, where the royalists lie; and there is Carterhaugh, the scene of the strange wild story of Tamlane and Lady Janet, when " She prinked hersell and prinned hersell By the ae light of the moon, And she's awa' to Carterhaugh To speak wi' young Tamlane." Noel Paton might paint that night, when " Twixt the hours of twelve and yin A north wind tore the bent;" when " fair Janet " in her green mantle " heard strange elritch sounds Upon the wind that went." And straightway " About the dead hour o' the night She heard the bridles ring ; Minchmoor 137 Their oaten pipes blew wondrous shrill, The hemlock small blew clear ; And louder notes from hemlock large And bog reed, struck the ear," and then the fairy cavalcade swept past, while Janet, filled with love and fear, looked out for the milk-white steed, and " gruppit it fast," and " pu'd the rider doon," the young Tamlane, whom, after dipping " in a stand of milk and then in a stand of water," " She wrappit ticht in her green mantle, And sae her true love won !" This ended our walk. We found the carriage at the Philiphaugh home-farm, and we drove home by Yair and Fernilee, Ashestiel and Elibank, and passed the bears as ferocious as ever, " the orange sky of evening " glowing through their wild tusks, the old house looking even older in the fading light. And is not this a walk worth making? One of our num- ber had been at the Land's End and Johnnie Groat's, and now on Minchmoor ; and we wondered how many other men had been at all the three, and how many had enjoyed Minchmoor more than he. But we must end, and how can we do it better, and more to our readers' and our own satisfaction, than by giving them the following unpublished lines by Professor Shairp, 1 which, by means we do not care to mention, are now before us? — The Bush aboon Traquair. Will ye gang wi' me and fare To the bush aboon Traquair? Owre the high Minchmuir we'll up and awa\ This bonny simmer noon, While the sun shines fair aboon, And the licht sklents saftly doun on holm and ha'. 1 No longer unpublished. The reader will find them, along with much else that is delightful, in Kilmahoe, a Highland Pastoral, with other Poems. E 2 1 3 8 Minchmoor And what wad ye do there, At the bush aboon Traquair? A lang dreich road, ye had better let it be ; Save some auld scrunts o' birk P the hill-side lirk, 1 There's nocht i' the warld for man to see. But the blythe lilt o' that air, " The Bush aboon Traquair," I need nae mair, it's eneuch for me; Owre my cradle its sweet chime Cam sughin' frae auld time, Sae tide what may, I'll awa' and see. And what saw ye there, At the bush aboon Traquair? Or what did ye hear that was worth your heed? I heard the cushies croon Thro' the gowden afternoon, And the Quair burn singing doun to the vale o' Tweed. And birks saw I three or four, Wi' grey moss bearded owre, The last that are left o' the birken shaw, Whar mony a simmer e'en Fond lovers did convene, Thae bonny, bonny gloamins that are lang awa'. Frae mony a but and ben, By muirland, holm, and glen, They cam ane hour to spen' on the greenwood swaird ; But lang ha'e lad an' lass Been lying 'neth the grass, The green green grass o' Traquair kirkyard. They were blest beyond compare, When they held their trysting there, Amang thae greenest hills shone on by the sun ; And then they wan a rest, The lownest and the best, P Traquair kirkyard when a' was dune. Now the birks to dust may rot, Names o' luvers be forgot, Nae lads and lasses there ony mair convene ; But the blythe lilt o' yon air Keeps the bush aboon Traquair, And the luve that ance was there, aye fresh and green. 1 " The hills were high on ilka side, And the bucht i' the lirk o' the hill." Ballad of Cowdenknowes. Minchmoor 139 Have not these the true flavour of that gentle place and life, — as musical and as melancholy as their streams and glens, as fragrant as their birks and gale? 1 They have the unexpectedness of nature, of genius, and of true song. The " native wood-notes wild " of " the mountain nymph, sweet Liberty." There must surely be more of this " lilting " in our minstrel's wallet; and he may be assured that such a gift of genuine Scottish feeling and verse will be welcomed if revealed. It breathes the caller, strong air of the south country hills, and is a wild " flouir o' the forest " not likely soon to be " wede a wae. ' ' " Sweet smells the birk, green grows, green grows the grass, Yellow on Yarrow's banks the go wan, Fair hangs the apple frae the rock, Sweet the wave of Yarrow flowan. Flows Yarrow sweet? as sweet, as sweet flows Tweed As green its grass, its gowan yellow, As sweet smells on its braes the birk, The apple frae the rock as mellow." 1 The Bog-Myrtle. THE BLACK DWARF'S BONES " If thou wert grim, Lame, ugly, crooked, swart, prodigious." King John. THE BLACK DWARFS BONES These gnarled, stunted, useless old bones, were all that David Ritchie, the original of the Black Dwarf, had for left femur and tibia, and we have merely to look at them and add poverty, to know the misery summed up in their possession. They seem to have been blighted and rickety. The femur is very short and slight, and singularly loose in texture; the tibia is dwarfed, but dense and stout. They were given to me many years ago by the late Andrew Ballantyne, Esq. of Woodhouse (the Wudess, as they call it on Tweedside), and their genuineness is unquestionable. As anything must be interesting about one once so forlorn and miserable, and whom our great wizard 143 144 The Black Dwarfs Bones has made immortal, I make no apology for printing the following - letters from my old friend, Mr. Craig, long surgeon in Peebles, and who is now spending his evening, after a long, hard, and useful day's work, in the quiet vale of Manor, within a mile or two of " Cannie Elshie's " cottage. The picture he gives is very affecting, and should make us all thankful that we are " wiselike." There is much that is additional to Sir Walter's account, in his " Author's Edition " of the Waverley Novels. << " Hall Manor, Thursday, May 20, 1858. My dear Sir, — David Ritchie, alias Bowed Davie, was born at Easter Happrew, in the parish of Stobo, in the year 1741. He was brought to Wood- house, in the parish of Manor, when very young. His father was a labourer, and occupied a cottage on that farm; his mother, Anabel Niven, was a delicate woman, severely afflicted with rheumatism, and could not take care of him when an infant. To this cause he attributed his deformity, and this, if added to im- perfect clothing, and bad food, and poverty, will account for the grotesque figure which he became. He never was at school, but he could read tolerably ; had many books ; was fond of poetry, especially Allan Ramsay ; he hated Burns. His father and mother both died early, and poor Davie became a homeless wanderer; he was two years at Broughton Mill, employed in stirring the husks of oats, which were used for drying the corn on the kiln, and required to be kept constantly in motion ; he boasted, with a sort of rapture, of his doings there. From thence he went to Lyne's Mill, near his birthplace, where he continued one year at the same employment, and from thence he was sent to Edinburgh to learn brush-making, but made no progress in his education there ; was annoyed by the wicked boys, or keelies, as he called them, and found his way back to Manor and Woodhouse. The farm now possessed by Mr. Ballantyne, was then occupied by four tenants, among whom he lived ; but The Black Dwarfs Bones 145 his house was at Old Woodhouse, where the late Sir James Nasmyth built him a house with two apart- ments, and separate outer doors, one for himself exactly his own height when standing- upright in it; and this stands as it was built, exactly four feet. A Mr. Ritchie, the father of the late minister of Athel- staneford, was then tenant ; his wife and Davie could not agree, and she repeatedly asked her husband to put him away, by making the highest stone of his house the lowest. Ritchie left, his house was pulled down, and Davie triumphed in having the stones of his chimney-top made a step to his door, when this new house was built. He was not a little vindictive at times when irritated, especially when any allusion was made to his deformity. On one occasion, he and some other boys were stealing pease in Mr. Gibson's field, who then occupied Woodhouse ; all the others took leg-bail, but Davie's locomotion being tardy, he was caught, shaken, and scolded by Gibson for all the rest. This he never forgot, and vowed to be avenged on the ' auld sinner and deevil;' and one day when Gibson was working about his own door, Davie crept up to the top of the house, which was low, and threw a large stone down on his head, which brought the old man to the ground. Davie crept down the other side of the house, got into bed beside his mother, and it was never known where the stone came from, till he boasted of it long afterwards. He only prayed that it might sink down through his 4 ham-pan ' (his skull). His personal appearance seems to have been almost indescribable, not bearing any likeness to anything in this upper world. But as near as I can learn, his forehead was very narrow and low, sloping upwards and backward, something of the hatchet shape ; his eyes deep set, small, and piercing ; his nose straight, thin as the end of a cut of cheese, sharp at the point, nearly touching his fearfully projecting chin ; and his mouth formed nearly a straight line ; his shoulders rather high, but his body otherwise the size of ordinary men ; his arms were 146 The Black Dwarf's Bones remarkably strong. With very little aid he built a high garden wall, which still stands, many of his stones of huge size ; these the shepherds laid to his directions. His legs beat all power of description; they were bent in every direction, so that Mungo Park, then a surgeon at Peebles, who was called to operate on him for strangulated hernia, said he could compare them to nothing but a pair of cork-screws ; but the principal turn they took was from the knee outwards, so that he rested on his inner ankles, and the lower part of his tibias. The position of the bones in the woodcut, gives some, but a very imperfect idea of this ; the thrawn twisted limbs must have crossed each other at the knees, and looked more like roots than legs, " And his knotted knees play'd ay knoit between." " He had never a shoe on his feet; the parts on which he walked were rolled in rags, old stockings, etc., but the toes always bare, even in the most severe weather. His mode of progressing was as extraordi- nary as his shape. He carried a long pole, or " kent," like the Alpenstock, tolerably polished, with a turned top on it, on which he rested, placed it before him, he then lifted one leg, something in the manner that the oar of a boat is worked, and then the other, next advanced his staff, and repeated the operation, by diligently doing which he was able to make not very slow progress. He frequently walked to Peebles, four miles, and back again in one day. His arms had no motion at the elbow-joints, but were active enough otherwise. He was not generally ill-tempered, but furious when roused. " Robert Craig." " Hall Manor, June 15, 1858. " My dear Sir, — I have delayed till now to finish Bowed Davie, in the hope of getting more informa- tion, and to very little purpose. His contemporaries are now so few, old, and widely scattered, that they The Black Dwarf's Bones 147 are difficult to be got at, and when come at, their memories are failed, like their bodies. I have forgotten at what stage of his history I left off ; but if I repeat, you can omit the repetitions. Sir James Nasmyth, late of Posso, took compassion on the houseless, homeless lusus natures, and had a house built for him to his own directions ; the door, window, and every- thing- to suit his diminished, grotesque form ; the door four feet high, the window twelve by eighteen inches, without glass, closed by a wooden board, hung on leathern hinges, which he used to keep shut. Through it he reconnoitred all visitors, and only admitted ladies and particular favourites ; he was very superstitious ; ghosts, fairies, and robbers he dreaded most. I have forgotten if I mentioned how he contrived to be fed and warmed. He had a small allowance from the parish poor-box, about fifty shillings ; this was eked out by an annual peregrination through the parish, when some gave him food, others money, wool, etc., which he hoarded most miserly. How he cooked his food I have not been able to learn, for his sister, who lived in the same cottage with him, was separated by a stone and lime wall, and had a separate door of the usual size, and window to match, and was never allowed to enter his dwelling ; but he brought home such loads, that the shepherds had to be on the out- look for him, when on his annual eleemosynary ex- peditions, to carry home part of his spoil. On one occasion a servant was ordered to give him some salt, for containing which he carried a long stocking ; he thought the damsel had scrimped him in quantity, and he sat and distended the stocking till it appeared less than half full, by pressing down the salt, and then called for the gudewife, showed it her, and asked if she had ordered Jenny only to give him that wee pickle saut; the maid was scolded, and the stocking filled. He spent all his evenings at the back of the Woodhouse kitchen fire, and got at least one meal every day, where he used to make the rustics gape and stare at the many ghost, fairy, and robber stories 148 The Black Dwarfs Bones which he had either heard of or invented, and poured out with unceasing- volubility, and so often, that he believed them all true. But the Ballantyne family had no great faith in his veracity, when it suited his convenience to fib, exaggerate, or prevaricate, par- ticularly when excited by his own lucubrations, or the waggery of his more intellectual neighbours and com- panions. He had a seat in the centre, which he always occupied, and a stool for his deformed feet and legs; they all rose at times, asking Davie to do likewise, and when he got upon his pins, he was shorter than when sitting, his body being of the ordinary length, and the deficiency all in his legs. On one occasion, a wag named Elder put up a log of wood opposite his loophole, made a noise, and told Davie that the robbers he dreaded so much were now at his house, and would not go away ; he peeped out, and saw the log, exclaimed, ' So he is, by the Lord God and my soul; Willie Elder, gi'e me the gun, and see that she is weel charged. ' Elder put in a very large supply of powder without shot, rammed it hard, got a stool, which Davie mounted, Elder handing him the gun, charging him to take time, and aim fair, for if he missed him, he would be mad at being shot at, be sure to come in, take everything in the house, cut their throats, and burn the house after. Davie tremblingly obeyed, presented the gun slowly and cautiously, drew the trigger ; off went the shot, the musket rebounded, and back went Davie with a rattle on the floor. Some accomplice tumbled the log ; Davie at length was en- couraged to look out, and actually believed that he had shot the robber; said he had done for him now, ' that ane wad plague him nae mair at ony rate.' He took it into his head at one time that he ought to be married, and having got the consent of a haverel wench to yoke with him in the silken bonds of matri- mony, went to the minister several times, and asked him to perform the ceremony. At length the minister sent him away, saying, that he could not and would not accommodate him in the matter. Davie swung The Black Dwarfs Bones 149 himself out at the door on his kent, much crest-fallen, and in great wrath, shutting the door with a bang behind him, but opening it again, he shook his clenched fist in the parson's face, and said, ' Weel, weel, ye'll no let decent, honest folk marry; but, 'od, lad, I'se plenish your parish wi' bastards, to see what ye'll mak o' that,' and away he went. He read Hooke's Pantheon, and made great use of the heathen deities. He railed sadly at the taxes ; some one ob- served that he need not grumble at them as he had none to pay. ' Hae I no'?' he replied, ' I can naither get a pickle snuff to my neb, nor a pickle tea to my mouth, but they maun tax it.' His sister and he were on very unfriendly terms. She was ill on one occasion ; Miss Ballantyne asked how she was to-day. He replied, ' I dinna ken, I ha'na been in, for I hate folk that are aye gaun to dee and never do't. ' In 181 1 he was seized with obstruction of the bowels and consequent inflammation ; blisters and various remedies were applied for three days without effect. Some one came to Mrs. Ballantyne and said that it was ' just about a' owre wi' Davie noo. ' She went, and he breathed his last almost immediately. His sister, without any delay, got his keys, and went to his secret repository ; Mrs. Ballantyne thought to get dead- clothes, but instead, to the amazement of all present, she threw three money-bags, one after another, into Mrs. Ballantyne 's lap, telling her to count that, and that, and that. Mrs. B. was annoyed and astonished at the multitude of half-crowns and shillings, all arranged according to value. He hated sixpences, and had none, but the third contained four guineas in gold. Mrs. B. was disgusted with the woman's greed, and put them all up, saying, what would anybody think if they came in and found them counting the man's money and his breath scarcely out, — took it all home to her husband, who made out £\ 2s. in gold, ;£io in a bank receipt, and ^7 185. in shillings and half-crowns, in all ^22. How did he get this? He had many visitors, the better class of whom gave him 150 The Black Dwarfs Bones half-crowns, others shillings and sixpences ; the latter he never kept, but converted them into shillings and half-crowns whenever he got an opportunity. I asked the wright how he got him into a coffin. He replied, ' Easily; they made it deeper than ordinary, and wider, so as to let in his distorted legs, as it was impossible to streek him like others.' He often ex- pressed a resolve to be buried on the Woodhill top, three miles up the water from the churchyard, as he could never ' lie amang the common trash ;' however, this was not accomplished, as his friend, Sir James Nasmyth, who had promised to carry this wish into effect, was on the Continent at the time. When Sir James returned he spoke of having his remains lifted and buried where he had wished ; but this was never done, and the expense of a railing and plantation of rowan-trees (mountain-ash), his favourite prophylactic against the spells of witches and fairies, was aban- doned. The Woodhill is a romantic, green little mount, situated at the west side of the Manor, which washes its base on the east, and separates it from Langhaugh heights, part of a lofty, rocky and heathery mountain range, and on the west is the ruin of the ancient peel-house of old Posso, long the resi- dence of the Nasmyth family. And now that we have the Dwarf dead and buried, comes the history of his resurrection in 182 1. His sister died exactly ten years after him. A report had been spread that he had been lifted and taken to dissecting-rooms in Glasgow, which at that period was the fate of many a more seemly corpse than Davie's; and the young men — for Manor had no sexton — who dug the sister's grave in the vicinity of her brother's, stimulated by curiosity to see if his body had really been carried off, and if still there what his bones were like, lifted them up, and carried them to Woodhouse, where they lay a considerable time, till they were sent to Mr. Ballan- tyne, then in Glasgow. Miss Ballantyne thinks the skull was taken away with the other bones, but put back again. I have thus given you all the information The Black Dwarfs Bones 151 I can gather about the Black Dwarf that I think worth narrating. It is reported that he sometimes sold a gill, but if this is true the Ballantynes never knew it. Miss Ballantyne says that he was not ill-tempered, but on the contrary, kind, especially to children. She and her brother were very young when she went to Wood- house, and her father objected to re-setting the farm from Sir James, on account of the fearful accounts of his horrid temper and barbarous deeds, and Sir James said if he ever troubled them that he would immedi- ately put him away ; but he was very fond of the younger ones, played with them, and amused them, though when roused and provoked by grown-up people, he raged, stormed, swore terrifically, and struck with anything that was near him, in short, he had an irritable but not a sulky, sour, misanthropic temper. The Messrs. Chambers wrote a book about him and his doings at a very early period of their literary history. Did I tell you of a female relative, Niven (whom he would never see), saying that she would come and streek him after he died? He sent word, ' that if she offered to touch his corpse he would rive the thrapple oot o' her — he would raither be streekit by Auld Clootie's ain red-het hands.' — Yours, truly obliged, "R. C." This poor, vindictive, solitary, and powerful crea- ture, was a philocalist : he had a singular love of flowers and of beautiful women. He was a sort of Paris, to whom the blushing Aphrodites of the glen used to come, and his judgment is said to have been as good, as the world generally thinks that of CEnone's handsome and faithless mate. His garden was full of the finest flowers, and it was his pleasure, when the young beauties " Who bore the blue sky intermixed with flame In their fair eyes " came to him for their competitive examination, to scan them well, and then, without one word, present 152 The Black Dwarfs Bones each with a flower, which was of a certain fixed and well-known value in Davie's standard calimeter. I have heard that there was one kind of rose, his KaXAioretov, which he was known to have given only to three, and I remember seeing one of the three, when she was past seventy. Margaret Murray, or Morra, was her maiden name, and this fine old lady, whom an Oxonian would call a Double First, grave and silent, and bent with " the pains," when asked by us children, would, with some reluctance, and a curious grave smile, produce out of her Bible, Bowed Davie's withered and flattened rose ; and from her looks, even then, I was inclined to affirm the decision of the connoisseur of Manor Water. One can fancy the scene in that sweet solitary valley, informed like its sister Yarrow with pastoral melancholy, with a young May, bashful and eager, presenting herself for honours, encountering from under that penthouse of eye-brows the steady gaze of the strange eldritch crea- ture ; and then his making up his mind, and proceed- ing to pluck his award and present it to her, " herself a fairer flower;" and then turning with a scowl, crossed with a look of tenderness, crawl into his den. Poor " gloomy Dis," slinking in alone. They say, that when the candidate came, he sur- veyed her from his window, his eyes gleaming out of the darkness, and if he liked her not, he disappeared ; if he would entertain her, he beckoned her into the garden. I have often thought, that the Brownie, of whom the South country legends are so full, must have been some such misshapen creature, strong, willing, and forlorn, conscious of his hideous forbidding looks, and ready to purchase affection at any cost of labour, with a kindly heart, and a longing for human sym- pathy and intercourse. Such a being looks like the prototype of the Aiken-Drum of our infancy, and of that " drudging goblin," of whom we all know how he " Sweat To earn his cream-bowl daily set, The Black Dwarf's Bones 153 When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail hath thresh 'd the corn, That ten day lab Vers could not end; Then lies him down, the lubber * fiend, And stretch'd out all the chimney's length, Basks at the fire his hairy strength, And cropful out of doors he flings, Ere the first cock his matin rings." My readers will, I am sure, more than pardon me for giving' them the following poem on Aiken-Drum, for the pleasure of first reading which, many years ago, I am indebted to Mr. R. Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland, where its " extraordinary merit " is generously acknowledged. The Brownie of Blednoch. There cam' a strange wicht to our town-en', An' the fient a body did him ken ; He tirl'd na lang, but he glided ben Wi' a dreary, dreary hum. His face did glow like the glow o' the west, When the drumlie cloud has it half o'ercast; Or the struggling moon when she's fair distrest, O, sirs ! 'twas Aiken-drum. I trow the bauldest stood aback, Wi' a gape an' a glow'r till their lugs did crack, As the shapeless phantom mum 'ling spak, Hae ye wark for Aiken-drum? O 1 had ye seen the bairns' fricht, As they stared at this wild and unyirthly wicht, As they skulkit in 'tween the dark an' the licht, An' graned out, Aiken-drum 1 " Sauf us!" quoth Jock, " d'ye see sic een?" Cries Kate, " There's a hole where a nose should ha' been j An' the mouth's like a gash that a horn had ri'en ; Wow ! keep's frae Aiken-drum 1" The black dog growlin' cow 'red his tail, The lassie swarf 'd, loot fa' the pail ; Rob's lingle brack as he mendit the flail, At the sicht o' Aiken-drum. 1 Lob-lye-by-the-fire. 154 The Black Dwarfs Bones His matted head on his breast did rest, A lang blue beard wan'ered down like a vest; But the glare o' his e'e hath nae bard exprest, Nor the skimes o' Aiken-drum. Roun' his hairy form there was naething seen, But a philabeg o' the rashes green, An' his knotted knees play'd ay knoit between ; What a sicht was Aiken-drum ! On his wauehie arms three claws did meet, As they trail'd on the grun' by his taeless feet; E'en the auld gudeman himsel' did sweat, To look at Aiken-drum. But he drew a score, himsel' did fain, The auld wife tried, but her tongue was gane ; While the young ane closer clespit her wean, And turn'd frae Aiken-drum. But the canty auld wife cam till her braith, And she thocht the Bible micht ward aff scaith ; Be it benshee, bogle, ghaist, or wraith — But it fear'd na Aiken-drum. "His presence protect us!" quoth the auld gudeman; " What wad ye, whare won ye, — by sea or by Ian'? I conjure ye — speak — by the Beuk in my han' 1" What a grane gae Aiken-drum 1 " I lived in a Ian' whare we saw nae sky, I dwalt in a spot whare a burn rins na by ; But I'se dwall noo wi' you if ye like to try — Hae ye wark for Aiken-drum? " I'll shiel a' your sheep i' the mornin' sune, 1 I'll berry your crap by the licht o' the moon, An' ba the bairns wi' un unkenn'd tune, If ye'll keep puir Aiken-drum. " I'll loup the linn when ye canna wade, I'll kirn the kirn, an' I'll turn the bread; An' the wildest fillie that e'er ran rede I'se tame't, " quoth Aiken-drum! ' On one occasion, Brownie had undertaken to gather the sheep into the bught by an early hour, and so zealously did he perform his task, that not only was there not one sheep left on the hill, but he had also collected a number of hares, which were found fairly penned along with them. Upon being congratulated on his extraordinary success, Brownie exclaimed, " Confound thae wee gray anes 1 they cost me mair trouble than a' the lave o' them." The Black Dwarfs Bones 155 " To wear the tod frae the flock on the fell — To gather the dew frae the heather-bell — An' to look at my face in your clear crystal well, Micht gie pleasure to Aiken-drum. " I'se seek nae guids, gear, bond, nor mark; I use nae beddin', shoon, nor sark ; But a cogfu' o' brose 'tween the licht an' the dark. Is the wage o' Aiken-drum." Quoth the wylie auld wife, " The thing speaks weel ; Our workers are scant — we hae routh o' meal ; Giff he'll do as he says — be he man, be he de'il, Wow! we'll try this Aiken-drum." But the wenches skirl'd, " He's no' be here ! His eldritch look gars us swarf wi' fear; An' the fient a ane will the house come near, If they think but o' Aiken-drum. For a foul and a stalwart ghaist is he, Despair sits brooding aboon his e'e-bree, And unchancie to light o' a maiden's e'e, Is the glower o' Aiken-drum." " Puir clipmalabors ! ye hae little wit ; Is't na hallowmas noo, an' the crap out yet?" Sae she s.eelenc'd them wi' a stamp o' her fit, " Sit-yer-wa's-down, Aiken-drum." Roun' a' that side what wark was dune, By the streamer's gleam, or the glance o' the moon; A word, or a wish— an' the Brownie cam sune, Sae helpfu' was Aiken-drum. But he slade aye awa or the sun was up, He ne'er could look straught on Macmillan's cup ; s They watch 'd, — but nane saw him his brose ever sup, Nor a spune sought Aiken-drum. On Blednoch banks, an' on crystal Cree, For mony a day a toil'd wicht was he ; And the bairns they play'd harmless roun' his knee, Sae social was Aiken-drum. 1 A communion cup, belonging to M'Millan, the well-known ousted minister of Balmaghie, and founder of the sect of Covenanters of his name. This cup was treasured by a zealous disciple in the parish of Kirkcowan, and long used as a test by which to ascertain the orthodoxy of suspected persons. If, on taking it into his hand, the person trembled, or gave other symptoms of agitation, he was denounced as having bowed the knee to Baal, and sacrificed at the altar of idolatry. 156 The Black Dwarfs Bones But a new-made wife, fu' o' rippish freaks, Fond o' a' things feat for the five first weeks, Laid a mouldy pair o' her ain man's breeks By the brose o' Aiken-drum. Let the learn'd decide when they convene, What spell was him an' the breeks between; For frae that day forth he was nae mair seen, An' sair miss'd was Aiken-drum. He was heard by a herd gaun by the Thrieve, Crying, " Lang, lang now may I greet an' grieve ; For alas ! I hae gotten baith fee an' leave, O luckless Aiken-drum !" Awa ! ye wrangling sceptic tribe, Wi' your pro's an' your con's wad ye decide 'Gainst the 'sponsible voice o' a hale country-side On the facts 'bout Aiken-drum? Tho' the " Brownie o' Blednoch " lang be gane, The mark o' his feet's left on mony a stane ; An' mony a wife an' mony a wean Tell the feats o' Aiken-drum. E'en now, licht loons that jibe an' sneer At spiritual guests an' a' sic gear, At the Glasnock mill hae swat wi' fear, An' look'd roun' for Aiken-drum. An' guidly folks hae gotten a fricht, When the moon was set, an' the stars gaed nae licht. At the roaring linn in the howe o' the nicht, Wi' sughs like Aiken-drum. We would rather have written these lines than any amount of Aurora Leighs, Festuses, or such like, with all their mighty " somethingness," as Mr. Bailey would say. For they, are they not the " native wood-notes wild " of one of nature's darlings? Here is the indescribable, inestimable, unmistakable im- press of genius. Chaucer, had he been a Galloway man, might have written it, only he would have been more garrulous, and less compact and stern. It is like Tarn o' Shanter, in its living union of the comic, the pathetic, and the terrible. Shrewdness, tenderness, imagination, fancy, humour, word music, dramatic power, even wit — all are here. I have often read it The Black Dwarfs Bones 157 aloud to children, and it is worth any one's while to do it. You will find them repeating- all over the house for days such lines as take their heart and tongue. The author of this noble ballad was William Nicholson, the Galloway poet, as he was, and is still called in his own district. He was born at Tanimaus, in the parish of Borgue, in August 1783; he died circa 1848, unseen, like a bird. Being extremely short- sighted, he was unfitted for being a shepherd or ploughman, and began life as a packman, like the hero of " the Excursion;" and is still remembered in that region for his humour, his music, his verse, and his ginghams ; and also, alas ! for his misery and his sin. After travelling the country for thirty years, he became a packless pedlar, and fell into " a way of drinking;" this led from bad to worse, and the grave closed in gloom over the ruins of a man of true genius. Mr. M'Diarmid of Dumfries prefixed a memoir of him to the Second Edition of his Tales in Verse and Mis- cellaneous Poems. These are scarcely known out of Galloway, but they are worth the knowing : none of them have the concentration and nerve of the Brownie, but they are from the same brain and heart. " The Country Lass," a long poem, is excellent; with much of Crabbe's power and compression. This, and the greater part of the volume is in the Scottish dialect, but there is a Fable — the Butterfly and Bee — the English and sense, the fine, delicate humour and turn of which might have been Cowper's; and there is a bit of rugged sarcasm called " Siller," which Burns need not have been ashamed of. Poor Nicholson, besides his turn for verse, was an exquisite musician, and sang with a powerful and sweet voice. One may imagine the delight of a lonely town-end, when Willie the packman and the piper made his appearance, with his stories, and jokes, and ballads, his songs, and reels, and " wanton wiles." There is one story about him which has always appeared to me quite perfect. A farmer, in a remote 158 The Black Dwarfs Bones part of Galloway, one June morning before sunrise, was awakened by music; he had been dreaming of heaven, and when he found himself awake, he still heard the strains. He looked out, and saw no one, but at the corner of a grass-field he saw his cattle, and young colts and fillies, huddled together, and looking intently down into what he knew was an old quarry. He put on his clothes, and walked across the field, everything but that strange wild melody, still and silent in this the " sweet hour of prime." As he got nearer the " beasts," the sound was louder; the colts with their long manes, and the nowt with their wondering stare, took no notice of him, straining their necks forward entranced. There, in the old quarry, the young sun " glintin " on his face, and resting on his pack, which had been his pillow, was our Wander- ing Willie, playing and singing like an angel — " an Orpheus; an Orpheus." What a picture! When reproved for wasting his health and time by the prosaic farmer, the poor fellow said : " Me and this quarry are lang acquant, and I've mair pleesure in pipin to thae daft cowts,, than if the best leddies in the land were figurin away afore me." OUR GIDEON GRAYS Agricolam laudat Sub galli cantum consultor ubi ostia pulsat. " I would rather go back to Africa than practise again at Peebles." — Mungo Park. OUR GIDEON GRAYS It might perhaps have been better, if our hard- headed, hard-hitting, clever, and not over mansuete friend " Fuge Medicos " had never allowed those " wild and stormy writings " of his to come into print, and it might perhaps also have been as well, had we told him so at once ; but as we are inclined to be optimists when a thing is past, we think more good than evil has come out of his assault and its repulse. " F. M. " (we cannot be always giving at full length his uncouth Hoffmannism) has, in fact, in his second letter, which is much the better, answered his first, and turned his back considerably upon himself, by abating some of his most offensive charges ; and our country doctors in their replies have shown that they have sense as well as spirit, and can write like gentlemen, while they of the town have cordially and to good purpose spoken up for their hard-working country brethren. We are not now going to adjudicate upon the strictly professional points raised by " F. M.," whether, for instance, bleeding is ever anything but mischievous ; whether the constitution, or type of disease, changes or not; whether Dr. Samuel Dick- son of " the Fallacies " is an impudent quack or the Newton of medicine ; whether Dr. Wilkinson is an amiable and bewildered Swedenborgian, with much 1 The following short paper from the Scotsman was occa- sioned by a correspondence in that newspaper, in which doctors in general, and country doctors in particular, were attacked and defended. It is reprinted here as a record of the amazing facts brought out by Dr. Alison's Association. In the attack by " Fuge Medicos," consisting of two long letters, there was much ability with not much fairness, and not a little misapplied energy of language, and sharpness of invective. l6l F 1 62 Our Gideon Grays imagination, little logic, and less knowledge, and a wonderful power of beautiful writing, or the herald of a new gospel of health. We may have our own opinions on these subjects, but their discussion lies out of our beat ; they are strictly professional in their essence, and ought to remain so in their treatment. We are by no means inclined to deny that there are ignorant and dangerous practitioners in the country, as well as in the city. What we have to say against " F. M. " and in favour of the class he has attacked is, that no man should bring such charges against any large body of men, without offering such an amount and kind of proof of their truth, as, it is not too much to say, it is impossible for any mere amateur to produce, even though that amateur were as full of will and energy as " F. M. ;" and unless he can do so, he stands convicted of something very like what he himself calls " reckless, maleficent stupidity." It is true, " F. M." speaks of " ignor- ant country doctors;" but his general charges against the profession have little meaning, and his Latin motto still less, if ignorance be not predicated of country doctors in general. One, or even half a dozen worthless, mischievous country doctors, is too small an induction of particulars, to warrant " F. M. " in inferring the same qualities of some 500 or more unknown men. But we are not content with proving the negative : we speak not without long, intimate, and extensive knowledge of the men who have the charge of the lives of our country population, when we assert, that not only are they as a class fully equal to other rural professional men in intelligence, humanity, and skill, and in all that con- stitutes what we call worth, but that, take them all in all, they are the best educated, the most useful, the most enlightened, as they certainly are the worst paid and hardest-worked country doctors in Christen- dom. Gideon Gray, in Scott's story of the Surgeon's Daughter, is a faithful type of this sturdy, warm- hearted, useful class of men, " under whose rough Our Gideon Grays 163 coat and blunt exterior," as he truly says, "you find professional skill and enthusiasm, intelligence, hxiinanity, courage, and science." Moreover, they have many primary mental qualities in which their more favoured brethren of the city are necessarily behind them — self-reliance, presence of mind, simplicity and readiness of resource, and a cer- tain homely sagacity. These virtues of the mind are, from the nature of things, more likely to be fully brought out, where a man must be self-contained and everything to himself ; he cannot be calling in another to consult with him in every anxious case, or indulge himself in the luxury of that safety which has wag- gishly been expounded as attaching more to the mul- titude of counsellors than to the subject of their counsel. Were this a fitting place, we could relate many instances of this sagacity, decision, and tact, as shown by men never known beyond their own country-side, which, if displayed in more public life, would have made their possessors take their place among our public great men. Such men as old Reid of Peebles, Meldrum of Kincardine, Darling of Dunse, Johnston of Stirling, Clarkson (the original of Gideon Gray) and Ander- son of Selkirk, Robert Stevenson of Gilmerton, Kirkwood of Auchterarder, and many as good — these were not likely to be the representatives of a class who are guilty of "assaults upon life," "who are let loose upon some unhappy rural district, to send vigorous men and women to their graves," who " in youth have been reckless and cruel, given to hang- ing sparrows and cats, and fit for no humane pro- fession," &c. &c Now, is there either good sense, good feeling, or good breeding, in using these un- measured terms against an entire class of men? As- suming — as from the subtlety and hairsplitting character of his arguments, and the sharpness and safety of his epithets, we are entitled to do — that " F. M. " belongs to another of the learned profes- sions, we ask, What would he say if a " Fuge Juridi- 164 Our Gideon Grays cos " were to rise up, who considered that the true reading in Scripture should be, " The devil was a lawyer from the beginning," "asserting that all country lawyers in Scotland were curses to the com- munity, that it would be well if the Lord Advocate " would try half a dozen every year," for devouring widows' houses and other local villanies ; and, more- over, what would he think of the brains and the modesty of an M.D. making an assault upon the legal profession on purely professional questions, and set- tling ab extra, and off-hand and for ever, matters which the wisest heads ab intra have left still in doubt ? The cases are strictly parallel ; and it is one of the worst signs of our times, this public intermeddling of everybody, from the Times down to " F. M.," with every science, profession, and trade. Sydney Smith might now say of the public, what he said of the Master of Trinity, " Science is his forte, omni- science is his foible." Every profession, and every man in it, knows something more and better than any non-professional man can, and it is the part of a wise man to stick to his trade. He is more likely to excel in it, and to honour and wonder at the skill of others. For it is a beautiful law of our nature that we must wonder at everything which we see well done, and yet do not know how it is done, or at any rate know we could not do it. Look at any art, at boot-closing, at a saddler at his work, at basket- making, at our women with their nimble and exact fingers — somebody is constantly doing something which everybody cannot do, and therefore everybody admires. We are afraid " F. M. " does not know many things he could not do. We repeat that our Gideon Grays are, as a class, worthy and intelligent, skilful and safe, doing much more good than evil. 1 They deserve well of, and live in the hearts of the people, and work day and night for less than anybody but themselves and their wives are likely ever to know, for they are most of them 1 Note, page 169. Our Gideon Grays 165 unknown to the Income-tax collectors. They are like the rest of us, we hope, soberer, better read, more enlightened, than they were fifty years ago; they study and trust Nature more, and conquer her by submission ; they bleed and blister less, and are more up to the doctrine that prevention is the best of all cures. They have participated in the general ac- knowledgment among the community, thanks to the two Combes and others, and to the spirit of the age, of those divine laws of health which He who made us implanted in us, and the study and obedience of which is a fulfilling of His word. We can only hope that our clever and pancratic friend " F. M.," if on his autumn holidays in Teviotdale or Lochaber, he has his shoulder or his lower jaw dislocated, or has a fit of colic or a hernia, or any of those ills which even his robust self is heir to, may have sense left him to send for Gideon Gray, and to trust him, and, making a slight alteration on his Hoffmannism, may be led to cry lustily out, in worse Latin and with better sense — " Fuge pro Medico" — Run for the Doctor ! As already said, all of us who have been much in the country know the hard life of its doctors — how much they do, and for how little they do it ; but we dare say our readers are not prepared for the follow- ing account of their unremunerated labour among paupers : — In 1846, a voluntary association of medical men was formed in Edinburgh, with the public-hearted Dr. Alison as chairman. Its object was to express their sympathy with their brethren in the remote country dis- tricts of Scotland, in regard to their unremunerated attendance on paupers, and to collect accurate infor- mation on this subject. The results of their benevo- lent exertions may be found in the Appendix to the First Report of the Board of Supervision. It is pro- bably very little known beyond those officially con- cerned ; we therefore give some of its astounding and lamentable revelations. The queries referred to the 1 66 Our Gideon Grays state and claims of the medical practitioners in the rural districts of Scotland, in relation to their attend- ance upon the permanent or occasional parochial poor. Out of 325 returns, 94 had receivedsorae re- muneration for attendance and outlay. In one of these instances, the remuneration consisted of three shillings for twelve years' attendance on seventy con- stant, and thirteen occasional paupers; a fine ques- tion in decimals — what would each visit come to? But worse remains. One man attended 400 paupers for eight years, and never received one farthing for his skill, his time, or his drugs. Another has the same story to tell of 350, some of them thirty miles off ; he moderately calculates his direct loss, from these calls on his time and purse, at £70 a year. Out of 253 who report, 208 state that, besides at- tending for nothing, they had to give on occasions food, wine, and clothes, and had to pay tolls, &c. 136 of the returns contain a more or less definite estimate, in money value, of their unrequited labours ; the sum-total given in by them amounts to thirty-four thousand four hundred and fifty-seven pounds in ten years I being at the rate of ^238 for each ! They seem to have calculated the amount of medical at- tendance, outlay, and drugs, for each pauper an- nually, at the very moderate average of four shillings. Is there any other country on the face of the earth where such a state of matters can be found? Such active charity, such an amount of public good, is not likely to have been achieved by men whose lives were little else than the development of a juvenile mania for hanging sparrows and cats. We believe we are below the mark when we say, that over head, the country doctors of Scotland do one-third of their work for nothing, and this in cases where the re- ceiver of their attendance would scorn to leave his shoes or his church seats unpaid. We are glad to see that " F. M." reads Sir Wil- liam Hamilton. We doubt not he does more than Our Gideon Grays 167 read him, and we trust that he will imitate him in some things besides his energy, his learning, and his hardihood of thought. As to his and other wise men's pleasantries about doctors and their drugs, we all know what they mean, and what they are worth ; they are the bitter-sweet joking human nature must have at those with whom it has close dealings — its priests, its lawyers, its doctors, its wives and husbands ; the very existence of such expressions proves the opposite ; it is one of the luxuries of dis- respect. But in " F. M. 's " hands these ancient and harmless jokes are used as deadly solemnities upon which arguments are founded. To part pleasantly with him, nevertheless, we give him three good old jokes : — The Visigoths abandoned an unsuccessful surgeon to the family of his de- ceased patient, " ut quod de eo facere voluerint, habeant potestatem." Montaigne, who is great upon doctors, used to beseech his friends, that if he felt ill they would let him get a little stronger before sending for the doctor ! Louis the Fourteenth, who, of course, was a slave to his physicians, asked his friend Moliere what he did with his doctor. " Oh, Sire," said he, " when I am ill I send for him. He comes, we have a chat, and enjoy ourselves. He pre- scribes. I don't take it — and I am cured !" We end with four quotations, which our strong- headed friend " F. M.," we are sure, will cordially relish : — " In Juvene Theologo conscientias detrimentum, In Juvene Legista bursas decrementum, In Juvene Medico caemeterii incrementum." 11 To imagine Nature incapable to cure diseases, is blasphemy ; because that would be imputing imper- fection to the Deity, who has made a great provision for the preservation of animal life." — Sydenham. " When I consider the degree of patience and at- tention that is required to follow Nature in her slow manner of proceeding, I am no longer surprised that 1 68 Our Gideon Grays men of lively parts should be always repeating, ' con- traria adhibenda.' But Hippocrates says: — ' Con- traria paulatim adhibere oportet, et interquiescere. Periculosius censeo incidere in medicum, qui nesciat quiescere, quam qui nesciat contraria adhibere, nam qui nescit quiescere, nescit occasiones contraria adhi- bendi; quare nescit contraria adhibere. Qui nescit contraria adhibere, tamen, si prudens est, scit quies- cere, atque si prodesse non potest, tamen non obest. Prcestantissimus vero est medicus eruditus pariter ac prudens, qui novit festinare lente ; pro ipsius morbi urgentia, auxiliis instare, atque in occasione uti maxime opportunis, alioque quiescere.' " — Grant on Fevers, page 311. " Philosophi qui vita? rationem doceant, vitiis eripiant — aerumnus, metus, angustias, anxietates, tristitias, impotentias expugnent tranquillitati, hila- ritati avrapKeia vindicent. " — Stahl. I don't know who " Quis " was, but the Hudi- brastics are vigorous : — The Country Surgeon. Luckless is he, whom hard fates urge on To practise as a country surgeon — To ride regardless of all weather, Through frost, and snow, and hail together — To smile and bow when sick and tired Consider'd as a servant hired. At every quarter of the compass, A surly patient makes a rumpus, Because he is not seen the first, (For each man thinks his case the worst). And oft at two points diametric, Called to a business obstetric. There lies a man with broken limb, A lady here with nervous whim, Who, at the acme of her fever, Calls him a savage if he leave her. For days and nights in some lone cottage Condemn'd to live on crusts and pottage, To kick his heels, and spin his brains, Waiting, forsooth, for labour's pains; And that job over, happy he, If he squeeze out a guinea fee. Our Gideon Grays 169 Now comes the night, with toil opprest, He seeks his bed in hope of rest ; Vain hope, his slumbers are no more, Loud sounds the knocker at the door, A farmer's wife, at ten miles' distance, Shouting, calls out for his assistance : Fretting and fuming in the dark, He in the tinder strikes a spark, And, as he yawning heaves his breeches, Envies his neighbour blest with riches. Quis. Edin. Ann. Register, 1817. NOTE— p. 164 I have to thank his son, Dr. Henry Anderson, who now reigns in his stead, for the following notes of an ordinary day's work of his father, whose sister was Mungo Park's wife. Selkirk is the " Middlemas " of Sir Walter. " Dr. Anderson practised in Selkirk for forty-five years, and never refused to go to any case, however poor, or how- ever deep in his debt, and however far off. One wife in Selkirk said to her neighbours, as he passed up the street, ' There goes my honest doctor, that brought a' my ten bairns into the world, and ne'er got a rap for ane o' them.' " His methodical habits, and perfect arrangement of his time, enabled him to overtake his very wide practice, and to forget no one. He rose generally at six every morning, often sooner, and saw his severe cases in the town early, thus enabling him to start for his long journeys ; and he generally took a stage to breakfast of fifteen or twenty miles. " One morning he left home at six o'clock, and after being three miles up the Yarrow, met a poor barefoot woman, who had walked from St. Mary's loch to have two teeth extracted. Out of his pocket with his ' key ' (she, of course, shouting ' Murder ! murder 1 mercy ! ') ; down sat the good woman ; the teeth were out at once, and the doctor rode on his journey, to breakfast at Eldinhope, fourteen miles up, calling on all his patients in Yarrow as he rode along. After breakfast, by Dryhope, and along St. Mary's Loch, to the famed Tibby's, whose son was badly, up to the head of the Loch of the Lows, and over the high hills into Ettrick, and riding up the Tima to Delgliesh, and back down the Ettrick, landed at ' Gideon's 0' the Singlie ' to dinner ; and just when making a tumbler F 2 170 Our Gideon Grays of toddy, a boy was brought into the kitchen, with a finger torn off in a thrashing-mill. The doctor left after another tumbler, and still making calls about Ettrickbridge, &c, reached home about eight, after riding fifty miles ; not to rest, however, for various messages await his return ; all are visited, get medicines from him, for there were no laboratories in his days, then home to prepare all the various prescriptions for those he had seen during the long day. He had just finished this when off he was called to a midwifery case, far up Ale Water. " To show how pointed to time he was, one day he had to go to Buccleugh, eighteen miles up the Ettrick, and having to ride down the moors by Ashkirk, and then to go on to St. Boswell's to see old Raeburn, he wished a change of horse at Riddell — fixed one o'clock, and one of his sons met him at a point of the road at the very hour, though he had ridden forty miles through hills hardly passable. " I have seen him return from the head of Yarrow half frozen, and not an hour in bed till he had to rise and ride back the same road, and all without a murmur. " It was all on horseback in his day, as there was only one gig in the county ; and his district extended west up the valleys of Ettrick and Yarrow above twenty miles ; south in Ale Water seven to ten miles ; the same distance east ; and north about fourteen miles by Tweedside, and banks of the Gala and Caddon. His early rising enabled him also to get through his other work, for he made up all his books at that time, had accounts ready, wrote all his business letters, of which he had not a few. " In coming home late in the night from his long journeys, he often slept on horseback for miles together. In fine, he was the hardest-worked man in the shire ; always cheerful, and always ready to join in any cheerful and harmless amuse- ment, as well as every good work ; but he killed himself by it, bringing on premature decay." He was many years Provost of the Burgh, took his full share of business, was the personal adviser of his patients, and had more curatorships than any one else in the county. What a pattern of active beneficence, bringing up three sons to his profession, giving his family a first-rate education, and never getting anything for the half of his everyday 's work ! We can fancy we see the handsome, swarthy, ruddy old man coming jogging (his normal pace) on his well-known mare down the Yarrow by Black Andro (a wooded hill), and past Foulshiels (Mungo Park's birthplace), after being all night up the glen with some " crying wife," and the cottagers at Glower-ower- 'im, blessing him as he passed sound asleep, or possibly wakening him out of his dreams, to come up and " lance " the bairn's eye-tooth. Our Gideon Grays 171 Think of a man like this — a valuable, an invaluable public servant, the king of health in his own region — having to start in a winter's night " on-ding o' snaw " for the head of Ettrick, to preside over a primiparous herd's wife, at the back of Boodsbeck, who was as normal and independent as her cows, or her husband's two score of cheviots; to have to put his faithful and well-bred mare (for he knew the value of blood) into the byre, the door of which was secured by an old harrow, or possibly in the course of the obstetric transac- tion by a snow-drift ; to have to sit idle amid the discomforts of a shepherd's hut for hours, no books, except perhaps a ten- year-old Belfast Almanac, or the Fourfold State (an admirable book), or a volume of ballads, all of which he knew by heart, — when all that was needed, was " Mrs. Jaup, " or indeed any neighbour wife, or her mother. True, our doctor made the best of it, heard all the clavers of the country, took an interest in all their interests, and was as much at home by the side of the ingle, with its bit of " licht " or cannel coal, as he would be next day at Bowhill with the Duchess. But what a waste of time, of health ! what a waste of an admirable man ! and, then, with impatient young men, what an inlet to mischiev- ous interference, to fatal curtailing of attendance ! "WITH BRAINS, SIR." " Multi multa sciunt, paicci multum." " It is one thing to wish to have Truth on our side, and another thing to wish to be on the side of Truth." — Whately. "kraXalTrccpos tois tto\\o7s r) ^tjjo-ij rrjs a\r]8eias, leal M ra fTotfj-a fxaWov Toeirovrai." — THUCYDIDES. ' The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind, only staves off our ignorance a little longer; as, perhaps, the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind, serves only to discover larger portions of it." — David Hume. "WITH BRAINS, SIR" Pray, Mr. Opie, may I ask what you mix your colours with?" said a brisk dilettante student to the great painter. " With Brains, Sir," was the gruff reply — and the right one. It did not give much of what we call information ; it did not expound the principles and rules of the art; but, if the inquirer had the commodity referred to, it would awaken him ; it would set him a-going, a-thinking, and a-painting to good purpose. If he had not the wherewithal, as was likely enough, the less he had to do with colours and their mixture the better. Many other artists, when asked such a question, would have either set about detailing the mechanical composition of such and such colours, in such and such proportions, rubbed up so and so ; or perhaps they would (and so much the better, but not the best) have shown him how they laid them on ; but even this would leave him at the critical point. Opie preferred going to the quick and the heart of the matter : " With Brains, Sir." Sir Joshua Reynolds was taken by a friend to see a picture. He was anxious to admire it, and he looked it over with a keen and careful but favourable eye. " Capital composition; correct drawing; the colour, tone, chiaroscuro excellent ; but — but — it wants, hang it, it wants — That !" snapping his fingers ; and, want- ing " that," though it had everything else, it was worth nothing. Again, Etty was appointed teacher of the students of the Royal Academy, having been preceded by a clever, talkative, scientific expounder of aesthetics, who delighted to tell the young men how everything was done, how to copy this, and how to express that. A student came up to the new master, " How should I do this, Sir?" " Suppose you try." Another, 175 176 'With Brains, Sir' ' What does this mean, Mr. Etty?" " Suppose you look." " But I have looked." " Suppose you look again." And they did try, and they did look, and looked again ; and they saw and achieved what they never could have done, had the how or the what (sup- posing this possible, which it is not in its full and highest meaning) been told them, or done for them; in the one case, sight and action were immediate, exact, intense, and secure ; in the other mediate, feeble, and lost as soon as gained. But what are " Brains "? what did Opie mean? and what is Sir Joshua's " That " ? What is included in it? and what is the use, or the need of trying and trying, of missing often before you hit, when you can be told at once and be done with it ; or of looking when you may be shown? Everything in medicine and in painting — practical arts — as means to ends, let their scientific enlargement be ever so rapid and immense, depends upon the right answers to these questions. First of all, " brains," in the painter, are not dili- gence, knowledge, skill, sensibility, a strong will, or a high aim, — he may have all these, and never paint anything so truly good or effective as the rugged woodcut we must all remember, of Apollyon bestriding the whole breadth of the way, and Christian girding at him like a man, in the old sixpenny Pilgrim's Progress; and a young medical student may have zeal, knowledge, ingenuity, attention, a good eye and a steady hand — he may be an accomplished anatomist, stethoscopist, histologist, and analyst; and yet, with all this, and all the lectures, and all the books, and all the sayings, and all the preparations, drawings, tables, and other helps of his teachers, crowded into his memory or his notebooks, he may be beaten in treating a whitlow or a colic, by the nurse in the wards where he was clerk, or by the old country doctor who brought him into the world, and who listens with such humble wonder to his young friend's account, on his coming home after each session, of all he had seen and done, — of all the last astonishing discoveries and 'With Brains, Sir ' 177 operations of the day. What the painter wants, in addition to, and as the complement of, the other ele- ments, is genius and sense; what the doctor needs to crown and give worth and safety to his accomplish- ments, is sense and genius : in the first case, more of this, than of that ; in the second, more of that, than of this. These are the " Brains " and the " That." And what is genius? and what is sense? Genius is a peculiar native aptitude, or tendency, to any one calling or pursuit over all others. A man may have a genius for governing, for killing, or for curing the greatest number of men, and in the best possible man- ner : a man may have a genius for the fiddle, or his mission may be for the tight-rope, or the Jew's harp; or it may be a natural turn for seeking, and finding, and teaching truth, and for doing the greatest possible good to mankind ; or it may be a turn equally natural for seeking, and finding, and teaching a lie, and doing the maximum of mischief. It was as natural, as in- evitable, for Wilkie to develop himself into a painter, and such a painter as we know him to have been, as it is for an acorn when planted to grow up into an oak, a specific quercus robur. But genius, and nothing else, is not enough, even for a painter : he must likewise have sense; and what is sense? Sense drives, or ought to drive, the coach ; sense regulates, combines, restrains, commands, all the rest — even the genius; and sense implies exactness and soundness, power and promptitude of mind. Then for the young doctor, he must have as his main, his master faculty, sense — Brains — wovs, just- ness of mind, because his subject-matter is one in which principle works, rather than impulse, as in painting ; the understanding has first to do with it, however much it is worthy of the full exercise of the feelings, and the affections. But all will not do, if genius is not there, — a real turn for the profession. It may not be a liking for it — some of the best of its practitioners never really liked it, at least liked other things better; but there must be a fitness of faculty 178 'With Brains, Sir' of body and mind for its full, constant, exact pursuit. This sense and this genius, such a special therapeutic gift, had Hippocrates, Sydenham, Pott, Pinel, John Hunter, Delpech, Dupuytren, Kellie, Cheyne, Baillie, and Abercrombie. We might, to pursue the subject, pick out painters who had much genius and little or no sense, and vice versa; and physicians and surgeons, who had sense without genius, and genius without sense, and some perhaps who had neither, and yet were noticeable, and, in their own sideways, useful men. But our great object will be gained if we have given our young readers (and these remarks are addressed exclusively to students) any idea of what we mean, if we have made them think, and look in- wards. The noble and sacred science you have entered on is large, difficult, and deep, beyond most others ; it is every day becoming larger, deeper, and in many senses more difficult, more complicated and involved. It requires more than the average intellect, energy, attention, patience, and courage, and that singular but imperial quality, at once a gift and an acquirement, presence of mind — ayxtvoia, or nearness of the vow?, as the subtile Greeks called it — than almost any other department of human thought and action, except perhaps that of ruling men. Therefore it is, that we hold it to be of paramount importance that the parents, teachers, and friends of youths intended for medicine, and above all, that those who examine them on their entering on their studies, should at least (we might safely go much further) satisfy themselves as far as they can, that they are not below par in intelligence; they may be deficient and unapt, qud medici, and yet, if taken in time, may make excellent men in other useful and honourable callings. But suppose we have got the requisite amount and specific kind of capacity, how are we to fill it with its means ; how are we to make it effectual for its end ? On this point we say nothing, except that the fear now-a-days, is rather that the mind gets too much 'With Brains, Sir' 179 of too many things, than too little or too few. But this means of turning knowledge to action, making it what Bacon :neant when he said it was power, in- vigorating the thinking substance — giving tone, and you may call it muscle and nerve, blood and bone, to the mind — a firm gripe, and a keen and sure eye : that , we think, is far too little considered or cared for at present, as if the mere act of filling in everything for ever into a poor lad's brain, would give him the ability to make anything of it, and above all, the power to appropriate the small portions of true nutriment, and reject the dregs. One comfort we have, that in the main, and in the last resort, there is really very little that can be done for any man by another. Begin with the sense and the genius — the keen appetite and the good digestion — and, amid all obstacles and hardships, the work goes on merrily and well ; without these, we all know what a laborious affair, and a dismal, it is to make an incapable youth apply. Did any of you ever set yourselves to keep up artificial respiration, or to trudge about for a whole night with a narcotized victim of opium, or transfuse blood (your own per- haps) into a poor, fainting exanimate wretch? If so, you will have some idea of the heartless attempt, and its generally vain and miserable result, to make a dull student apprehend — a debauched, interested, know- ing, or active in anything beyond the base of his brain — a weak, etiolated intellect hearty, and worth any- thing ; and yet how many such are dragged through their dreary curricula, and by some miraculous pro- cess of cramming, and equally miraculous power of turning their insides out, get through their examina- tions : and then — what then? providentially, in most cases, they find their level ; the broad daylight of the world — its shrewd and keen eye, its strong instinct of what can, and what cannot serve its purpose — puts all, except the poor object himself, to rights ; happy is it for him if he turns to some new and more congenial pursuit in time. 180 'With Brains, Sir' But it may be asked, how are the brains to be strengthened, the sense quickened, the genius awakened, the affections raised — the whole man turned to the best account for the cure of his fellow- men? How are you, when physics and physiology are increasing so marvellously, and when the burden of knowledge, the quantity of transferable informa- tion, of registered facts, of current names — and such names ! — is so infinite : how are you to enable a student to take all in, bear up under all, and use it as not abusing it, or being abused by it? You must invigorate the containing and sustaining mind, you must strengthen him from within, as well as fill him from without ; you must discipline, nourish, edify, re- lieve, and refresh his entire nature; and how? We have no time to go at large into this, but we will indicate what we mean : — encourage languages, espe- cially French and German, at the early part of their studies ; encourage not merely the book knowledge, but the personal pursuit of natural history, of field botany, of geology, of zoology ; give the young, fresh, unforgetting eye, exercise and free scope upon the infinite diversity and combination of natural colours, forms, substances, surfaces, weights, and sizes — everything, in a word, that will educate their eye or ear, their touch, taste, and smell, their sense of muscular resistance ; encourage them by prizes, to make skele- tons, preparations, and collections of any natural objects ; and, above all, try and get hold of their affec- tions, and make them put their hearts into their work. Let them, if possible, have the advantage of a regu- lated tutorial, as well as the ordinary professional system. Let there be no excess in the number of clases and frequency of lectures. Let them be drilled in composition ; by this we mean the writing and spelling of correct, plain English (a matter not of every-day occurrence, and not on the increase), — let them be directed to the best books of the old masters in medicine, and examined in them, — let them be encouraged in the use of a wholesome and manly 'With Brains, Sir' 181 literature. We do not mean popular, or even modern literature — such as Emerson, Bulwer, or Alison, or the trash of inferior periodicals or novels — fashion, vanity, and the spirit of the age, will attract them readily enough to all these; we refer to the treasures of our elder and better authors. If our young medical student would take our advice, and for an hour or two twice a week take up a volume of Shakspere, Cer- vantes, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Montaigne, Addison, Defoe, Goldsmith, Fielding, Scott, Charles Lamb, Macaulay, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Helps, Thackeray, &c, not to mention authors on deeper and more sacred subjects — they would have happier and healthier minds, and make none the worse doctors. If they, by good fortune — for the tide has set in strong against the literce humaniores — have come off with some Greek or Latin, we would supplicate for an ode of Horace, a couple of pages of Cicero or of Pliny once a month, and a page of Xenophon. French and German should be mastered either before or during the first years of study. They will never afterwards be acquired so easily or so thoroughly, and the want of them may be bitterly felt when too late. But one main help, we are persuaded, is to be found in studying, and by this we do not mean the mere reading, but the digging into and through, the ener- gizing upon, and mastering such books as we have mentioned at the close of this paper. These are not, of course, the only works we would recommend to those who wish to understand thoroughly, and to make up their minds, on these great subjects as wholes ; but we all know too well that our Art is long, broad, and deep, — and Time, opportunity, and our little hour, brief and uncertain, therefore, we would recommend those books as a sort of game of the mind, a mental exercise — like cricket, a gymnastic, a clear- ing of the eyes of their mind as with euphrasy, a strengthening their power over particulars, a getting fresh, strong views of worn out, old things, and, above all, a learning the right use of their reason, and 182 'With Brains, Sir' by knowing their own ignorance and weakness, find- ing true knowledge and strength. Taking up a book like Arnauld, and reading a chapter of his lively manly sense, is like throwing your manuals, and scalpels, and microscopes, and natural (most un- natural) orders out of your hand and head, and taking a game with the Grange Club, or a run to the top of Arthur Seat. Exertion quickens your pulse, expands your lungs, makes your blood warmer and redder, fills your mouth with the pure waters of relish, strengthens and supples your legs ; and though on your way to the top you may encounter rocks, and baffling ddbris, and gusts of fierce winds rushing out upon you from behind corners, just as you will find in Arnauld, and all truly serious and honest books of the kind, difficul- ties and puzzles, winds of doctrine, and deceitful mists; still you are rewarded at the top by the wide view. You see, as from a tower, the end of all. You look into the perfections and relations of things. You see the clouds, the bright lights, and the everlasting hills on the far horizon. You come down the hill a happier, a better, and a hungrier man, and of a better mind. But, as we said, you must eat the book, you must crush it, and cut it with your teeth and swallow it ; just as you must walk up, and not be carried up the hill, much less imagine you are there, or look upon a picture of what you would see were you up, however accurately or artistically done ; no — you yourself must do both. Philosophy — the love and the possession of wisdom — is divided into two things, science or knowledge ; and a habit, or power of mind. He who has got the first is not truly wise unless his mind has reduced and assimilated it, as Dr. Prout would have said, unless he appropriates and can use it for his need. The prime qualifications of a physician may be summed up in the words Capax, Perspicax, Sagax, Efficax. Capax — there must be room to receive, and arrange, and keep knowledge ; Perspicax — senses and perceptions, keen, accurate, and immediate, to bring 'With Brains, Sir' 183 in materials from all sensible things ; Sagax — a central power of knowing- what is what, and what it is worth, of choosing- and rejecting, of judging ; and finally, Efficax — the will and the way — the power to turn all the other three — capacity, perspicacity, sagacity, to account, in the performance of the thing in hand, and thus rendering back to the outer world, in a new and useful form, what you have received from it. These are the intellectual qualities which make up the physician, without any one of which he would be mancus, and would not deserve the name of a complete artsman, any more than proteine would be itself if any one of its four elements were amissing. We have left ourselves no room to speak of the books we have named at the end of this paper. We recommend them all to our young readers. Arnauld's excellent and entertaining Art of Thinking — the once famous Port-Royal Logic — is, if only one be taken, probably the best. Thomson's little book is admir- able, and is specially suited for a medical student, as its illustrations are drawn with great intelligence and exactness from chemistry and physiology. We know nothing more perfect than the analysis, at page 348, of Sir H. Davy's beautiful experiments to account for the traces of an alkali, found when decomposing water by galvanism. It is quite exquisite, the hunt after and the unearthing of "the residual cause." This book has the great advantage of a clear, lively, and strong style. We can only give some short extracts. INDUCTION AND DEDUCTION " We may define the inductive method as the pro- cess of discovering laws and rules from facts, and causes from effects ; and the deductive, as the method of deriving facts from laws, and effects from their causes. " There is a valuable paragraph on anticipation and its uses — there is a power and desire of the mind to 1 84 'With Brains, Sir' project itself from the known into the unknown, in the expectation of finding what it is in search of. " This power of divination, this sagacity, which is the mother of all science, we may call anticipation. The intellect, with a dog-like instinct, will not hunt until it has found the scent. It must have some pre- sage of the result before it will turn its energies to its attainment. The system of anatomy which has im- mortalized the name of Oken, is the consequence of a flash of anticipation, which glanced through his mind when he picked up, in a chance walk, the skull of a deer, bleached by the weather, and exclaimed — ' It is a vertebral column!' " " The man of science possesses principles — the man of art, not the less nobly gifted, is possessed and carried away by them. The principles which art involves, science evolves. The truths on which the success of art depends lurk in the artist's mind in an undeveloped state, guiding his hand, stimulating his invention, balancing his judgment, but not appearing in regular propositions." " An art (that of medicine for instance) will of course admit into its limits, every- thing (and nothing else) which can conduce to the performances of its own proper work; it recognizes no other principles of selection. " " He who reads a book on logic, probably thinks no better when he rises up than when he sat down, but if any of the principles there unfolded cleave to his memory, and he afterwards, perhaps uncon- sciously, shapes and corrects his thoughts by them, no doubt the whole powers of his reasoning receive benefit. In a word, every art, from reasoning to riding and rowing, is learned by assiduous practice, and if principles do any good, it is proportioned to the readiness with which they can be converted into rules, and the patient constancy with which they are applied in all our attempts at excellence." " A man can teach names to another man, but he cannot plant in another's mind that far higher gift — the power of naming." 'With Brains, Sir' 185 " Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking." " The whole of every science may be made the sub- ject of teaching. Not so with art; much of it is not teachable." Coleridge's profound and brilliant, but unequal, and often somewhat nebulous Essay on Method, is worth reading over, were it only as an exercitation, and to impress on the mind the meaning and value of method. Method is the road by which you reach, or hope to reach, a certain end ; it is a process. It is the best direction for the search after truth. System, again, which is often confounded with it, is a mapping out, a circumscription of knowledge, either already gained, or theoretically laid down as probable. Aristotle had a system which did much good, but also much mis- chief. Bacon was chiefly occupied in preparing and pointing out the way — the only way — of procuring knowledge. He left to others to systematize the knowledge after it was got ; but the pride and indo- lence of the human spirit led it constantly to build systems on imperfect knowledge. It has the trick of filling up out of its own fancy what it has not the diligence, the humility, and the honesty, to seek in nature ; whose servant, and articulate voice, it ought to be. Descartes' little tract on Method is like everything the lively and deep-souled Breton did, full of original and bright thought. Sir John Herschel's volume needs no praise. We know no work of the sort, fuller of the best moral worth, as well as the highest philosophy. We fear it is more talked of than read. We would recommend the article in the Quarterly Review as first-rate, and written with great eloquence and grace. Sydney Smith's Sketches of Lectures on Moral Philo- sophy. Second Edition. Sedgwick's Discourse on the Studies at Cambridge, with a Preface and Appendix. Sixth Edition. 1 86 'With Brains, Sir' We have put these two worthies here, not because we had forgotten them, — much less because we think less of them than the others, especially Sydney. But because we bring them in at the end of our small entertainment, as we hand round a liqueur — be it Curacoa, Kimmel, or old Glenlivet — after dinner, and end with the heterogeneous plum-pudding— that most English of realized ideas. Sydney Smith's book is one of rare excellence, and well worthy of the study of men and women, though perhaps not transcendental enough for our modern philosophers, male and female. It is really astonishing how much of the best of every- thing, from patriotism to nonsense, is to be found in this volume of sketches. You may read it through, if your sides can bear such an accumulation of laugh- ter, with great benefit ; and if you open it anywhere, you can't read three sentences without coming across some, it may be common thought, and often original enough, better expressed and put than you ever before saw it. The lectures on the Affections, the Passions and Desires, and on Study, we would have everybody to read and enjoy. Sedgwick is a different, and, as a whole, an inferior man ; but a man every inch of him, and an Englishman too, in his thoughts, and in his fine mother wit and tongue. He has, in the midst of all his confusion and passionateness, the true instinct of philosophy — the true venatic sense of objective truth. We know nothing better in the main, than his demolition of what is untrue, and his reduction of what is absurd, and his taking the wind out of what is tympanitic, in the notorious Vestiges; we don't say he always does justice to what is really good in it ; his mission is to execute justice upon it, and that he does. His remarks on Oken and Owen, and his quotations from Dr. Clarke's admirable paper on the Development of the Foetus, in the Cambridge Philosophical Transactions, we would recommend to our medical friends. The very confusion of Sedgwick is the free outcome of a deep and racy nature ; it puts us in mind of what happened, 'With Brains, Sir' 187 when an Englishman was looking with astonishment and disgust at a Scotchman eating a singed sheep's head, and was asked by the eater what he thought of that dish? "Dish, Sir, do you call that a dish?" " Dish or no dish," rejoined the Caledonian, " there's a deal o' fine confused feedin' aboot it, let me tell you." We conclude these rambling remarks with a quota- tion from Arnauld, the friend of Pascal, and the in- trepid antagonist of the Vatican and the Grand Monarque; one of the noblest, freest, most untiring and honest intellects, our world has ever seen. " Why don't you rest sometimes?" said his friend Nicole to him. " Rest ! why should I rest here? haven't I an eternity to rest in?" The following sentence from his Port-Royal Logic, so well introduced and translated by Mr. Baynes, contains the gist of all we have been trying to say. It should be engraven on the tablets of every young student's heart — for the heart has to do with study as well as the head. " There is nothing more desirable than good sense and justness of mind, — all other qualities of mind are of limited use, but exactness of judgment is of general utility in every part and in all employments of life. " We are too apt to employ reason merely as art instrument for acquiring the sciences, whereas we ought to avail ourselves of the sciences, as an instru- ment for perfecting our reason; justness of mind being infinitely more important than all the speculative knowledge which we can obtain by means of sciences the most solid. This ought to lead wise men to make their sciences the exercise and not the occupation of their mental powers. Men are not born to employ all their time in measuring lines, in considering the vari- ous movements of matter : their minds are too great, and their life too short, their time too precious, to be so engrossed ; but they are born to be just, equitable, and prudent, in all their thoughts, their actions, their business ; to these things they ought specially to train and discipline themselves." 1 88 'With Brains, Sir So, young- friends, bring- Brains to your work, and mix everything with them, and them with everything. Arma virumque, tools and a man to use them. Stir up, direct, and give free scope to Sir Joshua's " that," and try again and again; and look, oculo intento, acie acerrimd. Looking is a voluntary act, — it is the man within coming to the window ; seeing is a state, — passive and receptive, and, at the best, little more than registrative. Since writing the above, we have read with great satisfaction Dr. Forbes' Lecture delivered before the Chichester Literary Society and Mechanics' Institute, and published at their request. Its subject is, Happi- ness in its relation to Work and Knowledge. It is worthy of its author, and is, we think, more largely and finely imbued with his personal character, than any one other of his works that we have met with. We could not wish a fitter present for a young man starting on the game of life. It is a wise, cheerful, manly, warm-hearted discourse on the words of Bacon, — " He that is wise, let him pursue some desire or other : for he that doeth not affect some one thing in chief, unto him all things are distasteful and tedious." We will not spoil this little volume by giving any account of it. Let our readers get it, and read it. The extracts from his Thesis, De Mentis Exercitatione et Felicitate exinde derivandA, are very curious — showing the native vigour and bent of his mind, and indicating also, at once the identity and the growth of his thoughts during the lapse of thirty- three years. We give the last paragraph, the sense and the filial affection of which are alike admirable. Having men- tioned to his hearers that they saw in himself a living illustration of the truth of his position, that happiness is a necessary result of knowledge and work, he thus concludes : — 11 If you would further desire to know to what besides I am chiefly indebted for so enviable a lot, I would say: — ist, Because I had the good fortune 'With Brains, Sir' 189 to come into the world with a healthful frame, and with a sanguine temperament. 2nd, Because I had no patrimony, and was therefore obliged to trust to my own exertions for a livelihood. 3rd, Because I was born in a land where instruction is greatly prized and readily accessible. 4th, Because I was brought up to a profession which not only compelled mental exercise, but supplied for its use materials of the most delightful and varied kind. And lastly and principally, because the good man to whom I owe my existence^ had the foresight to know what would be best for his children. He had the wisdom, and the courage, and the exceeding love, to bestow all that could be spared of his worldly means, to purchase for his sons, that which is beyond price, education ; well judging that the means so expended, if hoarded for future use, would be, if not valueless, certainly evanescent, while the precious treasure for which they were exchanged, a cultivated and instructed mind, would not only last through life, but might be the fruitful source of treasures far more precious than itself. So equipped he sent them forth into the world to fight Life's battle, leaving the issue in the hand of God ; confident, how- ever, that though they might fail to achieve renown or to conquer Fortune, they possessed that which, if rightly used, could win for them the yet higher prize- of HAPPINESS." Since this was written, many good books have appeared, but we would select three, which all young men should read and get — Hartley Coleridge's Lives of Northern Worthies, Thackeray's Letters of Brown the Elder, and Tom Brown's School-days, — in spirit and in expression, we don't know any better models for manly courage, good sense, and feeling, and they are as well written as they are thought. There are the works of another man, one of the greatest, not only of our, but of any time, to which we cannot too earnestly draw our young readers. We mean the philosophical writings of Sir William' 190 'With Brains, Sir' Hamilton. We know no more invigorating, quicken- ing, rectifying kind of exercise, than reading with a will, anything he has written upon permanently im- portant subjects. There is a greatness and simplicity, a closeness of thought, a glance keen and wide, a play of the entire nature, and a truthfulness and downright- ness, with an amount, and accuracy, and vivification of learning, such as we know of in no one other writer, ancient or modern — not even Leibnitz ; and we know no writings which so wholesomely at once exalt and humble the reader, make him feel what is in him, and what he can and may, as well as what he cannot, and need never hope to know. In this respect, Hamilton is as grand as Pascal, and more simple ; he exemplifies everywhere his own sublime adaptation of Scripture — unless a man become a little child, he cannot enter into the kingdom ; he enters the temple stooping, but he presses on, intrepid and alone, to the inmost adytum, worshipping the more the nearer he gets to the inaccessible shrine, whose veil no mortal hand has ever rent in twain. And we name after him, the thoughtful, candid, impressive little volume of his pupil, his friend, and his successor, Professor Fraser. The following passage from Sir William Hamilton's Dissertations, besides its wise thought, sounds in the ear like the pathetic and majestic sadness of a sym- phony by Beethoven : — "There are two sorts of ignorance: we philoso- phize to escape ignorance, and the consummation of our philosophy is ignorance ; we start from the one, we repose in the other; they are the goals from which, and to which, we tend ; and the pursuit of knowledge is but a course between two ignorances, as human life is itself only a travelling from grave to grave. Tt'y fiios ; — 'Ek rv/n^oto Qopwv, £ir\ rv/n^of oSevco. The highest reach of human science is the scientific recognition of human ignorance ; ' Qui nescit igno- rare ignorat scire.' This ' learned ignorance ' is the rational conviction by the human mind of its in- 'With Brains, Sir' 191 ability to transcend certain limits ; it is the knowledge of ourselves, — the science of man. This is accom- plished by a demonstration of the disproportion be- tween what is to be known, and our faculties of knowing, — the disproportion, to wit, between the infinite and the finite. In fact, the recognition of human ignorance, is not only the one highest, but the one true, knowledge ; and its first-fruit, as has been said, is humility. Simple nescience is not proud ; con- summated science is positively humble. For this knowledge it is not, which ' puffeth up;' but its opposite, the conceit of false knowledge, — the conceit, in truth, as the apostle notices, of an ignorance of the very nature of knowledge : — " Nam nesciens quid scire sit, Te scire cuncta jactitas." " But as our knowledge stands to Ignorance, so stands it also to Doubt. Doubt is the beginning and the end of our efforts to know ; for as it is true, — ' Alte dubitat qui altius credit,' so it is likewise true, — 4 Quo magis quaerimus magis dubitamus.' " The grand result of human wisdom, is thus only a consciousness that what we know is as nothing to what we know not, (' Quantum est quod nescimus !') — an articulate confession, in fact, by our natural reason, of the truth declared in revelation, that ' now we see through a glass, darkly.' " His pupil writes in the same spirit and to the same end : "A discovery, by means of reflection and mental experiment, of the limits of knowledge, is the highest and most universally applicable discovery of all ; it is the one through which our intellectual life most strikingly blends with the moral and practical part of human nature. Progress in knowledge is often paradoxically indicated by a diminution in the apparent bulk of what we know. Whatever helps to work off the dregs of false opinion, and to purify the intellectual mass — whatever deepens our conviction of our infinite ignorance — really adds to, although it 192 'With Brains, Sir' sometimes seems to diminish, the rational possessions of man. This is the highest kind of merit that is claimed for Philosophy, by its earliest as well as by its latest representatives. It is by this standard that Socrates and Kant measure the chief results of their toil." BOOKS REFERRED TO 1. Arnauld's Port-Royal Logic; translated by T. S. Baynes.. — 2. Thomson's Outlines of the Necessary Laws of Thought. — 3. Descartes on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. — 4. Coleridge's Essay on Method. — 5. Whately's Logic and Rhetoric; new and cheap edition. — 6. Mill's Logic; new and cheap edition. — 7. Dugald Stewart's Outlines. — 8. Sir John Herschel's- Preliminary Dissertation. — 9. Quarterly Review, vol. Ixviii ; Article upon Whewell's Philosophy of Inductive Sciences. — 10. Isaac Taylor's Elements of Thought. — 11. Sir William- Hamilton's edition of Reid ; Dissertations; and Lectures. — 13. Professor Fraser's Rational Philosophy. HER LAST HALF-CROWN Once I had friends — though now by all forsaken; Once I had parents — they are now in heaven. I had a home once Worn out with anguish, sin, and cold, and hunger, Down sunk the outcast, death had seized her senses. There did the stranger find her in the morning — God had released her. Southey. HER LAST HALF-CROWN Hugh Miller, the geologist, journalist, and man of genius, was sitting in his newspaper office late one dreary winter night. The clerks had all left, and he was preparing to go, when a quick rap came to the door. He said " Come in," and, looking towards the entrance, saw a little ragged child all wet with sleet. "Are ye Hugh Miller?" "Yes." "Mary Duff wants ye. " " What does she want?" "She's deein. " Some misty recollection of the name made him at once set out, and with his well-known plaid and stick, he was soon striding after the child, who trotted through the now deserted High Street, into the Canongate. By the time he got to the Old Play- house Close, Hugh had revived his memory of Mary Duff; a lively girl who had been bred up beside him in Cromarty. The last time he had seen her was at a brother mason's marriage, where Mary was " best maid," and he " best man." He seemed still to see her bright young careless face, her tidy shortgown, and her dark eyes, and to hear her bantering, merry tongue. Down the close went the ragged little woman, and up an outside stair, Hugh keeping near her with difficulty ; in the passage she held out her hand and touched him ; taking it in his great palm, he felt that she wanted a thumb. Finding her way like a cat through the darkness, she opened a door, and saying " That's her !" vanished. By the light of a dying fire he saw lying in the corner of the large empty room something like a woman's clothes, and on drawing nearer became aware of a thin pale face and two dark eyes looking keenly but helplessly up at him. The eyes were plainly Mary Duff's, though he could recog- 195 196 Her Last Half-crown nize no other feature. She wept silently, gazing steadily at him. " Are you Mary Duff?" " It's a' that's o' me, Hugh." She then tried to speak to him, something plainly of great urgency, but she couldn't, and seeing that she was very ill, and was making herself worse, he put half-a-crown into her feverish hand, and said he would call again in the morning. He could get no information about her from the neighbours : they were surly or asleep. When he returned next morning, the little girl met him at the stair-head, and said, " She's deid. " He went in, and found that it was true ; there she lay, the fire out, her face placid, and the likeness to her maiden self restored. Hugh thought he would have known her now, even with those bright black eyes closed as they were, in ceternum. Seeking out a neighbour, he said he would like to bury Mary Duff, and arranged for the funeral with an undertaker in the close. Little seemed to be known of the poor outcast, except that she was a " licht," or, as Solomon would have said, a " strange woman." " Did she drink ? " " Whiles. ' ' On the day of the funeral one or two residents in the close accompanied him to the Canongate Church- yard. He observed a decent looking little old woman watching them, and following at a distance, though the day was wet and bitter. After the grave was filled, and he had taken off his hat, as the men finished their business by putting on and slapping the sod, he saw this old woman remaining. She came up and, courte- sying, said, " Ye wad ken that lass, Sir?" " Yes; I knew her when she was young." The woman then burst into tears, and told Hugh that she " keepit a bit shop at the Closemooth, and Mary dealt wi' me, and aye paid reglar, and I was feared she was dead, for she had been a month awin' me half-a-crown :" and then with a look and voice of awe, she told him how on the night he was sent for, and immediately after he had left, she had been awakened by some one in her room ; and by her bright fire — for she was a bein, Her Last Half-crown 197 well-to-do body — she had seen the wasted dying crea- ture, who came forward and said, " Wasn't it half-a- crown?" "Yes." "There it is," and putting it under the bolster, vanished ! Alas for Mary Duff ! her career had been a sad one since the day when she had stood side by side with Hugh at the wedding of their friends. Her father died not long after, and her mother supplanted her in the affections of the man to whom she had given her heart. The shock was overwhelming, and made home intolerable. Mary fled from it blighted and embittered, and after a life of shame and sorrow, crept into the corner of her wretched garret, to die deserted and alone ; giving evidence in her latest act that honesty had survived amid the wreck of nearly every other virtue. " My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." QUEEN MARY'S CHILD- GARDEN If any one wants a pleasure that is sure to please, one over which he needn't growl the sardonic beati- tude of the great Dean, let him, when the Mercury is at " Fair," take the nine a.m. train to the North and a return ticket for Callander, and when he arrives at Stirling, let him ask the most obliging and know- ing of station-masters to telegraph to " the Dread- nought " for a carriage to be in waiting. When passing Dunblane Cathedral, let him resolve to write to the Scotsman, advising the removal of a couple of shabby trees which obstruct the view of that beautiful triple end window which Mr. Ruskin and everybody else admires, and by the time he has written this letter in his mind, and turned the sentences to it, he will find himself at Callander and the carriage all ready. Giving the order for the Port of Monteith, he will rattle through this hard-featured, and to our eye comfortless village, lying ugly amid so much grandeur and beauty, and let him stop on the crown of the bridge, and fill his eyes with the perfection of the view up the Pass of Leny — the Teith lying diffuse and asleep, as if its heart were in the Highlands and it were loath to go, the noble Ben Ledi imaged in its broad stream. Then let him make his way across a bit of pleasant moorland — flushed with maiden-hair and white with cotton grass, and fragrant with the Orchis conopsia, well deserving its epithet odora- tissima. He will see from the turn of the hillside the Blair of Drummond waving with corn and shadowed with rich woods, where eighty years ago there was a black peat-moss ; and far off, on the horizon, Damyat 198 Queen Mary's Child-garden 199 and the Touch Fells ; and at his side the little loch of Ruskie, in which he may see five Highland cattle, three tawny brown and two brindled, standing in the still water — themselves as still, all except their switching tails and winking ears — the perfect images of quiet enjoyment. By this time he will have come in sight of the Lake of Monteith, set in its woods, with its magical shadows and soft gleams. There is a loveliness, a gentleness and peace about it more like "lone St. Mary's Lake," or Derwent Water, than of any of its sister lochs. It is lovely rather than beautiful, and is a sort of gentle prelude, in the minor key, to the coming glories and intenser charms of Loch Ard and the true Highlands beyond. You are now at the Port, and have passed the secluded and cheerful manse, and the parish kirk with its graves, close to the lake, and the proud aisle of the Grahams of Gartmore washed by its waves. Across the road is the modest little inn, a Fisher's Tryst. On the unruffled water lie several islets, plump with rich foliage, brooding like great birds of calm. You somehow think of them as on, not in the lake, or like clouds lying in a nether sky — " like ships waiting for the wind." You get a coble, and a yauld old Celt, its master, and are rowed across to Inchmahome, the Isle of Rest. Here you find on landing huge Spanish chestnuts, one lying dead, others standing stark and peeled, like gigantic antlers, and others flourishing in their viridis senectus, and in a thicket of wood you see the remains of a monas- tery of great beauty, the design and workmanship exquisite. You wander through the ruins, overgrown with ferns and Spanish filberts, and old fruit trees, and at the corner of the old monkish garden you come upon one of the strangest and most touching sights you ever saw — an oval space of about 18 feet by 12, with the remains of a double row of boxwood all round, the plants of box being about fourteen feet high, and eight or nine inches in diameter, healthy, but plainly of great age. What is this? it is called in the guide-books Queen 200 Queen Mary's Child-garden Mary's Bower; but besides its being- plainly not in the least a bower, what could the little Queen, then five years old, and " fancy free," do with a bower? It is plainly, as was, we believe, first suggested by our keen-sighted and diagnostic Professor of Clinical Surgery, 1 the Child-Queen's Garden, with her little walk, and its rows of boxwood, left to themselves for three hundred years. Yes, without doubt, " here is that first garden of her simpleness. " Fancy the little, lovely royal child, with her four Marys, her playfellows, her child maids of honour, with their little hands and feet, and their innocent and happy eyes, pattering about that garden all that time ago, laughing, and running, and gardening as only chil- dren do and can. As is well known, Mary was placed by her mother in this Isle of Rest before sailing from the Clyde for France. There is something " that tirls the heartstrings a' to the life " in stand- ing and looking on this unmistakable living relic of that strange and pathetic old time. Were we Mr. Tennyson, we would write an Idyll of that child Queen, in that garden of hers, eating her bread and honey — getting her teaching from the holy men, the monks of old, and running off in wild mirth to her garden and her flowers, all unconscious of the black, lowering thunder-cloud on Ben Lomond's shoulder. " Oh, blessed vision ! happy child 1 Thou art so exquisitely wild ; I think of thee with many fears Of what may be thy lot in future years. I thought of times when Pain might be thy guest, Lord of thy house and hospitality. And Grief, uneasy lover ! never rest But when she sat within the touch of thee. What hast thou to do with sorrow, Or the injuries of to-morrow?" 1 The same seeing eye and understanding mind, when they were eighteen years of age, discovered and published the Solvent of Caoutchouc, for which a patent was taken out afterwards by the famous Mackintosh. If the young dis- coverer had secured the patent, he might have made a fortune as large as his present reputation — I don't suppose he much regrets that he didn't. Queen Mary's Child-garden 201 You have ample time to linger there amid "The gleams, the shadows, and the peace profound," and get your mind informed with quietness and beauty, and fed with thoughts of other years, and of her whose story, like Helen of Troy's, will continue to move the hearts of men as long as the grey hills stand round about that gentle lake, and are mirrored at evening in its depths. You may do and enjoy all this, and be in Princes Street by nine p.m. ; and we wish we were as sure of many things as of your saying, " Yes, this is a pleasure that has pleased, and will please again ; this was something expected which did not disappoint." There is another garden of Queen Mary's, which may still be seen, and which has been left to itself like that in the Isle of Rest. It is in the grounds at Chatsworth, and is moated, walled round, and raised about fifteen feet above the park. Here the Queen, when a prisoner under the charge of " Old Bess of Hardwake," was allowed to walk without any guard. How different the two ! and how different she who took her pleasure in them ! Lines written on the steps of a small moated garden at Chatsworth, called " Queen Mary's Bower. " The moated bower is wild and drear, And sad the dark yew's shade; The flowers which bloom in silence here, In silence also fade. " The woodbine and the light wild rose Float o'er the broken wall; And here the mournful nightshade blows, To note the garden's fall. " Where once a princess wept her woes, The bird of night complains ; And sighing trees the tale disclose They learnt from Mary's strains. " A. H." G 2 •AFXINOIA— NEARNESS OF THE Nou ? —PRESENCE OF MIND 'EYSTOXIA: HAPPY GUESSING " Depend upon it a lucky guess is never merely luck — there is always some Talent in it." — Miss Austen, in Emma. ArxiNOIA: or, NEARNESS OF THE NoD* Dr. Chalmers used to say that in the dynamics of human affairs, two qualities were essential to greatness — Power and Promptitude. One man mig-ht have both, another power without promptitude, another promptitude without power. We must all feel the common sense of this, and can readily see how it applies to a general in the field, to a pilot in a storm, to a sportsman, to a fencer, to a debater. It is the same with an operating surgeon at all times, and may be at any time with the practitioner of the art of healing. He must be ready for what are called emergencies — cases which rise up at your feet, and must be dealt with on the instant, — he must have power and promptitude. It is a curious condition of mind that this requires : it is like sleeping with your pistol under your pillow, and it on full cock ; a moment lost and all may be lost. There is the very nick of time. This is what we mean by presence of mind ; by a man having such a subject at his finger ends ; that part of the mind lying nearest the outer world, and having to act on it through the bodily organs, through the will — the outposts must be always awake. It is of course, so to speak, only a portion of the mind that is thus needed and thus available; if the whole mind were for ever at the advanced posts, it would soon lose itself in this en- deavour to keep it. Now, though the thing needed to be done may be simple enough, what goes to the doing of it, and to the being at once ready and able to do it, involves much : the wedge would not be a wedge, or do a wedge's work, without the width 205 206 Presence of Mind, and behind as well as the edge in front. Your men of promptitude without genius or power, including knowledge and will, are those who present the wedge the wrong way. Thus your extremely prompt people are often doing the wrong thing, which is almost always worse than nothing. Our vague friend who bit "Yarrow's" tail instead of "the Chicken's," was full of promptitude ; as was also that other man, probably a relative, who barred the door with a boiled carrot : each knew what was needed — the biting the tail, the barring the door; both erred as to the means — the one by want of presence of mind, the other by lack of mind itself. We must have just enough of the right knowledge and no more ; we must have the habit of using this ; we must have self- reliance, and the consentaneousness of the entire mind ; and what our hand finds to do, we must do with our might as well as with it. Therefore it is that this master act of the man, under some sudden and great unexpected crisis, is in a great measure performed unconsciously as to its mental means. The man is so totus in Mo, that there is no bit of the mind left to watch and record the acts of the rest ; there- fore men, when they have done some signal feat of presence of mind, if asked how they did it, generally don't very well know — they just did it : it was, in fact, done and then thought of, not thought of and then done, in which case it would likely never have been done. Not that the act was uncaused by mind ; it is one of the highest powers of mind thus to act; but it is done, if I may use the phrase, by an acquired instinct. You will find all this in that wonderful old Greek who was Alexander the Great's and the old world's school-master, and ours if we were wise, — whose truthfulness and clear insight one wonders at the longer he lives. He seems to have seen the human mind as a bird or an engineer does the earth — he knew the plan of it. We now-a-days see it as one sees a country, athwart and in perspective, and from the side ; he saw it from above and from below. There Happy Guessing 207 are therefore no shadows, no foreshortening^, no clear-obscure, indeed no disturbing medium ; it is as if he examined every thing in vacuo. I refer my readers to what he says on 'Ay^tvoca and Evcn-ox"*. 1 1 As I am now, to my sorrow and shame, too much of a mediate Grecian, I give a Balliol friend's note on these two words : — " What you have called ' presence of mind ' and ' happy guessing ' may, I think, be identified respectively with Aristotle's a.yxi"o(a and evaroxia. The latter of these, fvtrroxla, Aristotle mentions incidentally when treating of tiifiovXla, or good deliberation. Eth. Nic. bk. vi. ch. 9. Good deliberation, he says, is not evcrroxia, for the former is a slow process, whereas the latter is not guided by reason, and is rapid. In the same passage he tells us that ayxtvola is a sort of evffToxla. But he speaks of ayxtvola more fully in Ana. Post. 1, 34 -.— 'Ayx^oia i s a sort °f happy guessing at the intermediate, when there is not time for consideration : as when a man, seeing that the bright side of the moon is always turned towards the sun, comprehends that her light is borrowed from the sun ; or concludes, from seeing one convers- ing with a capitalist that he wants to borrow money ; or infers that people are friends from the fact of their having common enemies.' And then he goes on to make these simple observa- tions confused and perplexing by reducing them to his logical formula. " The derivation of the words will confirm this view. EuffToxfa is a hitting the mark successfully, a reaching to the end, the rapid and, as it were, intuitive perception of the truth. This is what Whewell means by saying, ' all induction is a happy conjecture.' But when Aristotle says that this faculty is not guided by reason {&i'tv re yap \6yov), he does not mean to imply that it grows up altogether independent of reason, any more than Whewell means to say that all the discoveries in the inductive sciences have been made by men taking ' shots ' at them, as boys at school do at hard passages in their Latin lessons. On the contrary, no faculty is so absolutely the child of reason as this faculty of happy guess- ing. It only attains to perfection after the reason has been long and painfully trained in the sphere in which the guesses are to be made. What Aristotle does mean is, that when it has attained perfection, we are not conscious of the share which reason has in its operation — it is so rapid that by no analysis can we detect the presence of reason in its action. Sir Isaac Newton seeing the apple fall, and thence ' guessing ' at the law of gravitation, is a good instance of eixrroxi'a. " 'Ayxwola, on the other hand, is a nearness of mind; not a reaching to the end, but an apprehension of the best means ; not a perception of the truth, but a perception of how the truth 208 Presence of Mind, and My object in what I have now written and am going- to write, is to impress upon medical students the value of power and promptitude in combination, for their professional purposes ; the uses to them of nearness of the Nov? and of happy guessing-; and how you may see the sense, and neatness, and pith of that excellent thinker, as well as best of all story- tellers, Miss Austin, when she says in Emma, " De- pend upon it, a lucky guess is never merely luck, there is always some talent in it." Talent here de- noting intelligence and will in action. In all sciences except those called exact, this happy guessing plays a large part, and in none more than in medicine, which is truly a tentative art, founded upon likeli- hood, and is therefore what we call contingent. In- stead of this view of the healing art discouraging us from making our ultimate principles as precise, as we should make our observations, it should urge us the more to this ; for, depend upon it, that guess as we may often have to do, he will guess best, most happily for himself and his patient, who has the greatest amount of true knowledge, and the most serviceable amount of what we may call mental cash, ready money, and ready weapons. We must not only have wisdom, which is know- ledge assimilated and made our own, but we must, as the Lancashire men say and do, have wit to use it. We may carry a nugget of gold in our pocket, or a p^ioo bank-note, but unless we can get it changed, it is of little use, and we must moreover have the coin of the country we are in. This want of presence of mind, and having your wits about you, is as fatal to a surgeon as to a general. is to be supported. It is sometimes translated 'sagacity,' but readiness or presence of mind is better, as sagacity rather involves the idea of consideration. In matters purely intel- lectual it is ready wit. It is a sort of shorter or more limited evaroxia- It is more of a natural gift than euarox{«> because the latter is a far higher and nobler faculty, and therefore more dependent for its perfection on cultivation, as all our highest faculties are. Evo-roxla is more akin to genius, ayxtvoia to practical common sense." Happy Guessing 209 That wise little man, Dr. Henry Marshall, little in body but not little in mind, in brain, and in worth, used to give an instance of this. A young, well- educated surgeon, attached to a regiment quartered at Musselburgh, went out professionally with two officers who were in search of " satisfaction." One fell shot in the thigh, and in half-an-hour after he was found dead, the surgeon kneeling pale and grim over him, with his two thumbs sunk in his thigh below the wound, the grass steeped in blood. If he had put them two inches higher, or extemporized a tourniquet with his sash and the pistol's ramrod and a stone, he might have saved his friend's life and his own — for he shot himself that night. Here is another. Robbie Watson, whom I now see walking mildly about the streets — having taken to coal — was driver of the Dumfries coach by Biggar. One day he had changed horses, and was starting down a steep hill, with an acute turn at the foot, when he found his wheelers, two new horses, utterly ignorant of backing. They got furious, and we outside got alarmed. Robbie made an attempt to pull up, and then with an odd smile took his whip, gathered up his reins, and lashed the entire four into a gallop. If we had not seen his face we would have thought him a maniac ; he kept them well together, and shot down like an arrow, as far as we could see to certain destruction. Right in front at the turn was a stout gate into a field, shut; he drove them straight at that, and through we went, the gate broken into shivers, and we finding ourselves safe, and the very horses enjoying the joke. I remember we emptied our pockets into Robbie's hat, which he had taken off to wipe his head. Now, in a few seconds all this must have passed through his head — " that horse is not a wheeler, nor that one either; we'll come to mischief; there's the gate; yes, I'll do it. " And he did it ; but then he had to do it with his might ; he had to make it impossible for his four horses to do anything but toss the gate before them. 210 Presence of Mind, and Here is another case. Dr. Reid of Peebles, long famous in the end of last and beginning of this century, as the Doctor of Tweeddale ; a man of great force of character, and a true Philip, a lover of horses, saw one Fair day a black horse, entire, thorough- bred. The groom asked a low price, and would answer no questions. At the close of the fair the doctor bought him, amid the derision of his friends. Next morning he rode him up Tweed, came home after a long round, and had never been better carried. This went on for some weeks ; the fine creature was without a fault. One Sunday morning, he was post- ing up by Neidpath at a great pace, the country people trooping into the town to church. Opposite the fine old castle, the thoroughbred stood stock still, and it needed all the doctor's horsemanship to coun- teract the law of projectiles; he did, and sat still, and not only gave no sign of urging the horse, but rather intimated that it was his particular desire that he should stop. He sat there a full hour, his friends making an excellent joke of it, and he declining, of course, all interference. At the end of the hour, the Black Duke, as he was called, turned one ear for- ward, then another, looked aside, shook himself, and moved on, his master intimating that this was exactly what he wished ; and from that day till his death, some fifteen years after, never did these two friends allude to this little circumstance, and it was never repeated ; though it turned out that he had killed his two men previously. The doctor must have, when he got him, said to himself, " if he is not stolen there is a reason for his paltry price," and he would go over all the possibilities. So that when he stood still, he would say, " Ah, this is it;" but then he saw this at once, and lost no time, and did nothing. Had he given the horse one dig with his spurs, or one cut with his whip, or an impatient jerk with his bit, the case would have failed. When a colt it had been brutally used, and being nervous, it lost its judgment, poor thing, and lost its presence of mind. Happy Guessing 211 One more instance of nearness of the Novs. A lady was in front of her lawn with her children, when a mad dog made his appearance, pursued by the peasants. What did she do? What would you have done? Shut your eyes and think. She went straight to the dog, received its head in her thick stuff gown, between her knees, and muffling it up, held it with all her might till the men came up. No one was hurt. Of course, she fainted after it was all right. We all know (but why should we not know again?) the story of the Grecian mother who saw her child sporting on the edge of the bridge. She knew that a cry would startle it over into the raging stream — she came gently near, and opening her bosom allured the little scapegrace. I once saw a great surgeon, after settling a par- ticular procedure as to a life-and-death operation, as a general settles his order of battle. He began his work, and at the second cut altered the entire conduct of the operation. No one not in the secret could have told this : not a moment's pause, not a quiver of the face, not a look of doubt. This is the same master power in man, which makes the difference between Sir John Moore and Sir John Cope. Mrs. Major Robertson, a woman of slight make, great beauty, and remarkable energy, courage, and sense (she told me the story herself), on going up to her bedroom at night — there being no one in the house but a servant girl, in the ground floor — saw a portion of a man's foot projecting from under the bed. She gave no cry of alarm, but shut the door as usual, set down her candle, and began as if to undress, when she said aloud to herself, with an impatient tone and gesture, " I've forgotten that key again, I declare;" and leaving the candle burning, and the door open, she went down stairs, got the watchman, and secured the proprietor of the foot, which had not moved an inch. How many women or men could have done, or rather been all this ! DR. CHALMERS'S POST- HUMOUS WORKS When, towards the close of some long summer day, we come suddenly, and, as we think, before his time, upon the broad sun, " sinking- down in his tran- quillity " into the unclouded west, we cannot keep our eyes from the great spectacle, — and when he is gone the shadow of him haunts our sight : we see every- where, — upon the spotless heaven, upon the distant mountains, upon the fields, and upon the road at our feet, — that dim, strange changeful image; and if our eyes shut, to recover themselves, we still find in them, like a dying flame, or like a gleam in a dark place, the unmistakable phantom of the mighty orb that has set, — and were we to sit down, as we have often done, and try to record by pencil or by pen, our impression of that supreme hour, still would it be there. We must have patience with our eye, it will not let the impression go, — that spot on which the radiant disc was impressed, is insensible to all other outward things, for a time : its best relief is, to let the eye wander vaguely over earth and sky, and repose itself on the mild shadowy distance. So it is when a great and good and beloved man departs, sets — it may be suddenly — and to us who know not the times and the seasons, too soon. We gaze eagerly at his last hours, and when he is gone, never to rise again on our sight, we see his image wherever we go, and in whatsoever we are engaged, and if we try to record by words our wonder, our sorrow, and our affection, we cannot see to do it, for the " idea of his life " is for ever coming into our " study of imagination " — into all our thoughts, and 212 Chalmers's Posthumous Works 213 we can do little else than let our mind, in a wise passiveness, hush itself to rest. The sun returns — he knows his rising — ' To-morrow he repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky;" but man lieth down, and riseth not again till the heavens are no more. Never again wili he whose ' Meditations " are now before us, lift up the light of his countenance upon us. We need not say we look upon him, as a great man, as a good man, as a beloved man, — quis desi- derio sit pudor tarn cari capitis ? We cannot now go very curiously to work, to scrutinize the composition of his character, — we cannot take that large, free, genial nature to pieces, and weigh this and measure that, and sum up and pronounce ; we are too near as yet to him, and to his loss, he is too dear to us to be so handled. " His death," to use the pathetic words of Hartley Coleridge, " is a recent sorrow; his image still lives in eyes that weep for him." The prevailing feeling is, — He is gone — " abiit ad plures — he has gone over to the majority, he has joined the famous nations of the dead. " It is no small loss to the world, when one of its master spirits — one of its great lights — a king among the nations — leaves it. A sun is extinguished ; a great attractive, regulating power is withdrawn. For though it be a common, it is also a natural thought, to compare a great man to the sun ; it is in many respects significant. Like the sun, he rules his day, and he is " for a sign and for seasons, and for days and for years;" he enlightens, quickens, attracts, and leads after him his host — his generation. To pursue our image. When the sun sets to us, he rises elsewhere — he goes on rejoicing, like a strong man, running his race. So does a great man : when he leaves us and our concerns — he rises elsewhere ; and we may reasonably suppose that one who has in 214 Chalmers's Posthumous Works this world played a great part in its greatest histories — who has through a long life been pre-eminent for promoting the good of men and the glory of God — will be looked upon with keen interest, when he joins the company of the immortals. They must have heard of his fame ; they may in their ways have seen and helped him already. Every one must have trembled when reading that passage in Isaiah, in which Hell is described as moved to meet Lucifer at his coming : there is not in human language anything more sublime in conception, more exquisite in expression ; it has on it the light of the terrible crystal. But may we not reverse the scene? May we not imagine, when a great and good man — a son of the morning — enters on his rest, that Heaven would move itself to meet him at his coming? That it would stir up its dead, even all the chief ones of the earth, and that the kings of the nations would arise each one from his throne to welcome their brother? that those who saw him would " narrowly consider him," and say, " is this he who moved nations, en- lightened and bettered his fellows, and whom the great Taskmaster welcomes with ' Well done !' " We cannot help following him, whose loss we now mourn, into that region, and figuring to ourselves his great, childlike spirit, when that unspeakable scene bursts upon his view, when, as by some inward, instant sense, he is conscious of God — of the immediate presence of the All-seeing Unseen ; when he beholds " His honourable, true, and only Son," face to face, enshrined in " that glorious form, that light unsuffer- able, and that far-beaming blaze of majesty," that brightness of His glory, that express image of His person ; when he is admitted into the goodly fellow- ship of the apostles — the glorious company of the prophets — the noble army of martyrs — the general assembly of just men — and beholds with his loving eyes the myriads of " little ones," outnumbering their elders as the dust of stars with which the galaxy is filled exceeds in multitude the hosts of heaven. Chalmers's Posthumous Works 215 What a change ! death the gate of life — a second birth, in the twinkling- of an eye : this moment, weak, fearful, in the amazement of death; the next, strong, joyful, — at rest, — all things new ! To adopt his own words: all his life, up to the last, " knocking at a door not yet opened, with an earnest indefinite long- ing, — his very soul breaking for the longing, — drink- ing of water, and thirsting again " — and then — sud- denly and at once — a door opened into heaven, and the Master heard saying, ' Come in, and come up hither !" drinking of the river of life, clear as crystal, of which if a man drink he will never thirst, — being filled with all the fulness of God ! Dr. Chalmers was a ruler among men : this we know historically ; this every man who came within his range felt at once. He was like Agamemnon, a native ara£ avSpwv, and with all his homeliness of feature and deportment, and his perfect simplicity of expression, there was about him " that divinity that doth hedge a king." You felt a power, in him, and going from him, drawing you to him in spite of your- self. He was in this respect a solar man, he drew after him his own firmanent of planets. They, like all free agents, had their centrifugal forces acting ever towards an independent, solitary course, but the centripetal also was there, and they moved with and around their imperial sun, — gracefully or not, wil- lingly or not, as the case might be, but there was no breaking loose : they again, in their own spheres of power, might have their attendant moons, but all were bound to the great massive luminary in the midst. There is to us a continual mystery in this power of one man over another. We find it acting every- where, with the simplicity, the ceaselessness, the energy of gravitation ; and we may be permitted to speak of this influence as obeying similar conditions; it is proportioned to bulk — for we hold to the notion of a bigness in souls as well as bodies — one soul differing from another in quantity and momentum as 216 Chalmers's Posthumous Works well as in quality and force, and its intensity increases by nearness. There is much in what Jonathan Edwards says of one spiritual essence having - more being than another, and in Dr. Chalmers's question, "Is he a man of wecht?" But when we meet a solar man, of ample nature — soul, body, and spirit; when we find him from his earliest years moving among his fellows like a king, moving them whether they will or not — this feeling of mystery is deepened ; and though we would not, like some men (who should know better), worship the creature and convert the hero into a god, we do feel more than in other cases the truth, that it is the in- spiration of the Almighty which has given to that man understanding, and that all power, all energy, all light, come to him, from the First and the Last — the Living One. God comes to be regarded by us, in this instance, as He ought always to be, " the final centre of repose " — the source of all being, of all life — the Terminus ad quern and the Terminus a quo. And assuredly, as in the firmament that simple law of gravitation reigns supreme — making it indeed a kosmos — majestic, orderly, comely in its going — ruling, and binding not the less the fiery and nomadic comets, than the gentle, punctual moons — so cer- tainly, and to us moral creatures to a degree transcen- dently more important, does the whole intelligent universe move around and move towards and in the Father of Lights. It would be well if the world would, among the many other uses they make of its great men, make more of this, — that they are manifestors of God — revealers of His will — vessels of His omnipotence — and are among the very chiefest of His ways and works. As we have before said, there is a perpetual wonder in this power of one man over his fellows, especially when we meet with it in a great man. You see its operations constantly in history, and through it the Great Ruler has worked out many of His greatest Chalmers's Posthumous Works 217 and strangest acts. But however we may understand the accessory conditions by which the one man rules the many, and controls, and fashions them to his purposes, and transforms them into his likeness — multiplying as it were himself — there remains at the bottom of it all a mystery — a reaction between body and soul that we cannot explain. Generally, how- ever, we find accompanying its manifestation, a capacious understanding — a strong will — an emo- tional nature quick, powerful, urgent, undeniable, in perpetual communication with the energetic will and the large resolute intellect — and a strong, hearty capable body ; a countenance and person expressive of this combination — the mind finding its way at once and in full force to the face, to the gesture, to every act of the body. He must have what is called a " presence;" not that he must be great in size, beau- tiful, or strong ; but he must be expressive and im- pressive — his outward man must communicate to the beholder at once and without fail, something of in- dwelling power, and he must be and act as one. You may in your mind analyze him into his several parts ; but practically he acts in everything with his whole soul and his whole self ; whatsoever his hand finds to do, he does it with his might. Luther, Moses, David, Mahomet, Cromwell — all verified these con- ditions. And so did Dr. Chalmers. There was something about his whole air and manner, that disposed you at the very first to make way where he went — he held you before you were aware. That this depended fully as much upon the activity and the quantity — if we may so express ourselves — of his affections, upon that combined action of mind and body which we call temperament, and upon a straightforward, urgent will, as upon what is called the pure intellect, will be generally allowed ; but with all this, he could not have been and done, what he was and did, had he not had an understanding, in vigour and in capacity, worthy of its great and ardent companions. It was large, 218 Chalmers's Posthumous Works and free, mobile, and intense, rather than penetrative, judicial, clear, or fine, — so that in one sense he was more a man to make others act than think; but his own actings had always their origin in some fixed, central, inevitable proposition, as he would call it, and he began his onset with stating plainly, and with lucid calmness, what he held to be a great seminal truth ; from this he passed at once, not into exposi- tion, but into illustration and enforcement — into, if we may make a word, overwhelming insistance. Something was to be done, rather than explained. There was no separating his thoughts and expres- sions from his person, and looks, and voice. How perfectly we can at this moment recall him ! Thun- dering, flaming, lightening in the pulpit; teaching, indoctrinating, drawing after him the students in his lecture-room ; sitting among other public men, the most unconscious, the most king-like of them all, with that broad leonine countenance, that beaming, liberal smile ; or on the way out to his home, in his old-fashioned great-coat, with his throat muffled up, his big walking-stick moved outwards in an arc, its point fixed, its head circumferential, a sort of com- panion, and playmate, with which doubtless, he de- molished legions of imaginary foes, errors, and stupidities in men and things, in Church and State. His great look, large chest, large head, his amplitude every way ; his broad, simple, childlike, inturned feet; his short, hurried impatient step; his erect, royal air ; his look of general goodwill ; his kindling up into a warm but vague benignity when one he did not recognize spoke to him ; the addition, for it was not a change, of keen speciality to his hearty recog- nition ; the twinkle of his eyes; the immediately saying something very personal to set all to rights, and then the sending you off with some thought, some feeling, some remembrance, making your heart burn within you; his voice indescribable; his eye — that most peculiar feature — not vacant, but asleep — innocent, mild, and large; and his soul, its great Chalmers's Posthumous Works 219 inhabitant, not always at his window ; but then, when he did awake, how close to you was that burning vehement soul ! how it penetrated and overcame you ! how mild, and affectionate, and genial its expression at his own fireside ! Of his portraits worth mentioning, there are Wat- son Gordon's, Duncan's — the Calotypes of Mr. Hill — Kenneth M'Leay's miniatures — the Daguerreotype, and Steell's bust. These are all good, and all give bits of him, some nearly the whole, but not one of them that ti 6epfj.6v, that fiery particle — that inspired look — that " diviner mind " — the poco piii, or little more. Watson Gordon's is too much of the mere clergyman — is a pleasant likeness, and has the shape of his mouth, and the setting of his feet very good. Duncan's is a work of genius, and is the giant looking up, awakening, but not awakened — it is a very fine picture. Mr. Hill's Calotypes we like better than all the rest ; because what in them is true, is absolutely so, and they have some delicate render- ings which are all but beyond the power of any human artist; for though man's art is mighty, nature's is mightier. The one of the Doctor sitting with his grandson " Tommy,*' is to us the best; we have the true grandeur of his form — his bulk. M'Leay's is admirable — spirited — and has that look of shrewd- ness and vivacity and immediateness which he had when he was observing and speaking keenly ; it is, moreover, a fine, manly bit of art. M'Leay is the Raeburn of miniature painters — he does a great deal with little. The Daguerreotype is, in its own way, excellent ; it gives the externality of the man to per- fection, but it is Dr. Chalmers at a stand-still — his mind and feelings " pulled up " for the second that it was taken. Steell's is a noble bust — has a stern heroic expression and pathetic beauty about it, and from wanting colour and shadow and the eyes, it relies upon a certain simplicity and grandeur; — in this it completely succeeds — the mouth is handled with extraordinary subtlety and sweetness, and the 220 Chalmers's Posthumous Works hair hangs over that huge brow like a glorious cloud. We think this head of Dr. Chalmers the artist's greatest bust. In reference to the assertion we have made as to bulk forming one primary element of a powerful mind, Dr. Chalmers used to say, when a man of activity and public mark was mentioned, " Has he wecht? he has promptitude — has he power? he has power — has he promptitude? and, moreover, has he a discerning spirit?" These are great practical, universal truths. How few even of our greatest men have had all these three faculties large — fine, sound, and in " perfect diapa- son." Your men of promptitude, without power or judgment, are common and are useful. But they are apt to run wild, to get needlessly brisk, unpleasantly incessant. A weasel is good or bad as the case may be, — good against vermin — bad to meddle with ; — but inspired weasels, weasels on a mission, are terrible indeed, mischievous and fell, and swiftness making up for want of momentum by inveteracy; "fierce as wild bulls, untamable as flies." Of such men we have now-a-days too many. Men are too much in the way of supposing that doing is being; that theology and excogitation, and fierce dogmatic assertion of what they consider truth, is godliness; that obedience is merely an occasional great act, and not a series of acts, issuing from a state, like the stream of water from its well. " Action is transitory — a step — a blow, The motion of a muscle — this way or that ; Tis done — and in the after vacancy, We wonder al ourselves like men betrayed. Suffering " (obedience, or being as opposed to doing) — " Suffering is permanent, And has the nature of infinity." Dr. Chalmers was a man of genius — he had his own way of thinking, and saying, and doing, and looking everything. Men have vexed themselves in vain to define what genius is; like every ultimate Chalmers's Posthumous Works 221 term we may describe it by giving its effects, we can hardly succeed in reaching its essence. Fortunately, though we know not what are its elements, we know it when we meet it ; and in him, in every movement of his mind, in every gesture, we had its unmistakable tokens. Two of the ordinary accompaniments of genius — Enthusiasm and Simplicity — he had in rare measure. He was an enthusiast in its true and good sense ; he was " entheat," as if full of God, as the old poets called it. It was this ardour, this superabounding life, this immediateness of thought and action, idea and emotion, setting the whole man agoing at once — that gave a power and a charm to everything he did. To adopt the old division of the Hebrew Doctors, as given by Nathaniel Culverwel, in his Light of Nature : In man we have — ist, -nreufxa Quottoiovv, the sensitive soul, that which lies nearest the body — the very blossom and flower of life; 2nd, tov vovv, animam rationis, sparkling and glittering with intellectuals, crowned with light; and 3rd, tov 6vfx6v, impetum animi, motum mentis, the vigour and energy of the soul — its temper — the mover of the other two — the first being, as they said, resident in hepate — the second in cerebro — the third in corde, where it pre- sides over the issues of life, commands the circula- tion, and animates and sets the blood a-moving. The first and second are informative, explicative, they " take in and do " — the other " gives out." Now in Dr. Chalmers the great ingredient was the 6 0v/xo's as indicating vis animce et vitce, — and in close fellowship with it, and ready for its service, was a large, capa- cious 6 V0C5, and an energetic, sensuous, rapid to irvivfia. Hence his energy, his contagious enthu- siasm — this it was which gave the peculiar character to his religion, to his politics, to his personnel ; every- thing he did was done heartily — if he desired heavenly blessings he " panted " for them — " his soul broke for the longing." To give again the words of the spiritual and subtle Culverwel, " Religion (and 222 Chalmers's Posthumous Works indeed everything- else) was no matter of indifferency to him. It was Oep/xov ti irpayfxa, a certain fiery thing - , as Aristotle calls love; it required and it got, the very flower and vigour of the spirit — the strength and sinews of the soul — the prime and top of the affections — this is that grace, that panting grace — we know the name of it and that's all — 'tis called zeal — a flaming edge of the affection — the ruddy complexion of the soul." Closely connected with this tempera- ment, and with a certain keen sensation of truth, rather than a perception of it, if we may so express ourselves, an intense consciousness of objective reality, — was his simple animating faith. He had faith in God — faith in human nature — faith, if we may say so, in his own instincts — in his ideas of men and things — in himself ; and the result was, that un- hesitating bearing up and steering right onward — " never bating one jot of heart or hope " so charac- teristic of him. He had " the substance of things hoped for." He had "the evidence of things not seen." By his simplicity we do not mean the simplicity of the head — of that he had none ; he was eminently shrewd and knowing — more so than many thought ; but we refer to that quality of the heart and of the life, expressed by the words, " in simplicity a child." In his own words, from his Daily Readings, — " When a child is filled with any strong emotion by a surprising event or intelligence, it runs to discharge it on others, impatient of their sympathy ; and it marks, I fancy, the simplicity and greater naturalness of this period (Jacob's), that the grown-up men and women ran to meet each other, giving way to their first impulses — even as children do." His emotions were as lively as a child's, and he ran to discharge them. There was in all his ways a certain beautiful unconsciousness of self — an out- going of the whole nature that we see in children, who are by learned men said to be long ignorant of the Ego — blessed in many respects in their ignor- ance ! This same Ego, as it now exists, being per- Chalmers's Posthumous Works 223 haps part of " the fruit of that forbidden tree;" that mere knowledge of good as well as of evil, which our great mother bought for us at such a price. In this meaning of the word, Dr. Chalmers, considering the size of his understanding — his personal eminence — his dealings with the world — his large sympathies — his scientific knowledge of mind and matter — his relish for the practical details, and for the spirit of public business — was quite singular for his simplicity ; and taking this view of it, there was much that was plain and natural in his manner of thinking and acting, which otherwise was obscure, and liable to be misunderstood. We cannot better explain what we mean than by giving a passage from F^nelon, which D'Alembert, in his Eloge, quotes as character- istic of that " sweet-souled " prelate. We give the passage entire, as it seems to us to contain a very beautiful, and by no means commonplace truth : — " Fenelon," says D'Alembert, " a caracterise" lui-meme en peu de mots cette simplicity qui se rendoit si cher a tous les cceurs, ' La simplicity est la droiture d'une ame qui s'interdit tout retour sur elle et sur ses actions — cette vertu est diffeVente de la since-rite, et la surpasse. On voit beaucoup de gens qui sont sinceres sans etre simples — lis ne veulent passer que pour ce qu'ils sont, mais ils craignent sans cesse de passer pour ce qu'ils ne sont pas. L'homme simple n'affecte ni la vertu, ni la ve>it6 m&me ; il n'est jamais occupe" de lui, il semble d'avoir perdu ce moi dont on est si jaloux.' " What delicacy and justness of expression ! how true and clear ! how little we see now-a-days, among grown-up men, of this straightness of the soul — of this losing or never finding " ce moi .'" There is more than is perhaps generally thought in this. Man in a state of perfection, would no sooner think of asking himself — am I right? am I appearing to be what in- wardly I am? than the eye asks itself — do I see? or a child says to itself — do I love my mother? We have lost this instinctive sense ; we have set one portion of ourselves aside to watch the rest ; we must keep up appearances and our consistency ; we must respect — that is, look back upon — ourselves, and be re- 224 Chalmers's Posthumous Works spected, if possible; we must, by hook or by crook, be respectable. Dr. Chalmers would have made a sorry Balaam ; he was made of different stuff, and for other purposes. Your " respectable " men are ever doing their best to keep their status, to maintain their position. He never troubled himself about his status ; indeed, we would say status was not the word for him. He had a sedes on which he sat, and from which he spoke ; he had an imperium, to and fro which he roamed as he listed : but a status was as little in his way as in that of a Mauritanian lion. Your merely " sincere " men are always thinking of what they said yesterday, and what they may say to-morrow, at the very mo- ment when they should be putting their whole self into to-day. Full of his idea, possessed by it, moved alto- gether by its power, — believing, he spoke, and with- out stint or fear, often apparently contradicting his former self — careless about everything, but speaking fully his mind. One other reason for his apparent inconsistencies was, if one may so express it, the spaciousness of his nature. He had room in that capacious head, and affection in that great, hospitable heart, for relishing and taking in the whole range of human thought and feeling. He was several men in one. Multitudinous but not multiplex, in him odd and apparently incongruous notions dwelt peaceably together. The lion lay down with the lamb. Volun- taryism and an endowment — both were best. He was childlike in his simplicity : though in un- derstanding a man, he was himself in many things a child. Coleridge says, every man should include all his former selves in his present, as a tree has its former years' growths inside its last; so Dr. Chalmers bore along with him his childhood, his youth, his early and full manhood into his mature old age. This gave himself, we doubt not, infinite delight — multi- plied his joys, strengthened and sweetened his whole nature, and kept his heart young and tender, it en- abled him to sympathize, to have a fellow-feeling Chalmers's Posthumous Works 225 with all, of whatever age. Those who best knew him, who were most habitually with him, know how beautifully this point of his character shone out in daily hourly life. We well remember long- ago loving him before we had seen him — from our having been told, that being out one Saturday at a friend's house near the Pentlands, he collected all the children and small people — the other bairns, as he called them — and with no one else of his own growth, took the lead to the nearest hill-top, — how he made each take the biggest and roundest stone he could find, and carry, — how he panted up the hill himself with one of enormous size, — how he kept up their hearts, and made them shout with glee, with the light of his countenance, and with all his pleasant and strange ways and words, — how having got the breathless little men and women to the top of the hill, he, hot and scant of breath — looked round on the world and upon them with his broad benignant smile like the av-qpiOfiov KV/J.O.TWV yeAacr/xa — the unnumbered laughter of the sea, — how he set off his own huge " fellow/* — how he watched him setting out on his race, slowly, stupidly, vaguely at first, almost as if he might die before he began to live, then suddenly giving a spring and off like a shot — bounding, tearing, avns cireira TrtSov&e Kv\Cv8ero Xaas avails, vires acquirens eundo; how the great and good man was totus in Mo ; how he spoke to, upbraided him, cheered him, gloried in him, all but prayed for him, — how he joked philo- sophy to his wondering and ecstatic crew, when he (the stone) disappeared among some brackens — telling them they had the evidence of their senses that he was in, they might even know he was there by his effects, by the moving brackens, himself unseen; how plain it became that he had gone in, when he actually came out ! — how he ran up the opposite side a bit, and then fell back, and lazily expired at the bottom, — how to their astonishment, but not dis- pleasure — for he " set them off so well," and " was so funny " — he took from each his cherished stone, H 226 Chalmers's Posthumous Works and set it off himself ! showing them how they all ran alike, yet differently; how he went on, " making," as he said, " an induction of particulars," till he came to the Benjamin of the flock, a wee wee man, who had brought up a stone bigger than his own big head ; then how he let him, unicus omnium, set off his own, and how wonderfully it ran ! what miraculous leaps ! what escapes from impossible places ! and how it ran up the other side farther than any, and by some felicity remained there. He was an orator in its specific and highest sense. We need not prove this to those who have heard him ; we cannot to those who have not. It was a living man sending living, burning words into the minds and hearts of men before him, radiating his intense fervour upon them all ; but there was no reproducing the entire effect when alone and cool ; some one of the elements was gone. We say nothing of this part of his character, because upon this all are agreed. His eloquence rose like a tide, a sea, setting in, bearing down upon you, lifting up all its waves — " deep call- ing unto deep;" there was no doing anything but giving yourself up for the time to its will. Do our readers remember Horace's description of Pindar 3 " Monte decurrens velut amnis, imbres Quem super notas aluere ripas, Fervet, immensusque ruit profundo Pindarus ore : -' per audaces nova dithyrambos Verba devolvit, numerisque fertur Lege solutis.' " This is to our mind singularly characteristic of our perfervid Scotsman. If we may indulge our conceit, we would paraphrase it thus. His eloquence was like a flooded Scottish river, — it had its origin in some exalted region — in some mountain-truth — some high, immutable reality; it did not rise in a plain, and quietly drain its waters to the sea, — it came sheer Chalmers's Posthumous Works 227 down from above. He laid hold of some simple truth — the love of God, the Divine method of justification, the unchangeableness of human nature, the supremacy of conscience, the honourableness of all men ; and having got this vividly before his mind, on he moved — the river rose at once, drawing everything into its course — " AH thoughts, all passions, all desires, — Whatever stirs this mortal frame," things outward and things inward, interests imme- diate and remote — God and eternity — men, miserable and immortal — this world and the next — clear light and unsearchable mystery — the word and the works of God — everything contributed to swell the volume and add to the onward and widening flood. His river did not flow like Denham's Thames, — " Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull ; Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." There was strength, but there was likewise rage; a fine frenzy — not unoften due mainly to its rapidity and to its being raised suddenly by his affections; there was some confusion in the stream of his thoughts, some overflowing of the banks, some tur- bulence, and a certain noble immensity ; but its origin was clear and calm, above the region of clouds and storms. If you saw it; if you took up and admitted his proposition, his starting idea, then all else moved on ; but once set agoing, once on his way, there was no pausing to inquire, why or how — fervet — ruit — fertur, he boils — he rushes — he is borne along; and so are all who hear him. To go on with our figure — There was no possibility of sailing up his stream. You must go with him, or you must go ashore. This was a great peculiarity with him, and puzzled many people. You could argue with him, and get him to entertain your ideas on any purely abstract or simple proposition, — at least for a 228 Chalmers's Posthumous Works time; but once let him get down among practicals, among applications of principles, into the regions of the affections and active powers, and such was the fervour and impetuosity of his nature, that he could not stay leisurely to discuss, he could not then enter- tain the opposite; it was hurried off, and made light of, and disregarded, like a floating thing before a cataract. To play a little more with our conceit — The greatest man is he who is both born and made — who is at once poetical and scientific — who has genius and talent — each supporting the other. So with rivers. Your mighty world's river rises in high and lonely places, among the everlasting hills ; amidst clouds, or inac- cessible clearness. On he moves, gathering to him- self all waters ; refreshing, cheering all lands. Here a cataract, there a rapid ; now lingering in some corner of beauty, as if loath to go. Now shallow and wide, rippling and laughing in his glee ; now deep, silent, and slow ; now narrow and rapid and deep, and not to be meddled with. Now in the open country ; not so clear, for other waters have come in upon him, and he is becoming useful, no longer turbulent, — travelling more contentedly; now he is navigable, craft of all kinds coming and going upon his surface for ever; and then, as if by some gentle and great necessity, " deep and smooth, passing with a still foot and a sober face," he pays his last tribute to " the Fiscus, the great Exchequer, the sea " — running out fresh, by reason of his power and volume, into the main for many a league. Your mere genius, who has instincts, and is poetical and not scientific, who grows from within — he is like our mountain river, clear, wilful, odd ; running round corners ; disappearing it may be under ground, coming up again quite unexpectedly and strong, as if fed from some unseen spring, deep down in darkness; rising in flood without warning, and coming down like a lion ; often all but dry ; never to be trusted to for driving mills ; must at least be Chalmers's Posthumous Works 229 tamed and led off to the mill ; and going down at full pace, and without stop or stay, into the sea. Your man of talent, of acquirements, of science — who is made, — who is not so much educed as edified ; who, instead of acquiring his vires, eundo gets his vires eundi, from acquirement, and grows from with- out ; who serves his brethren and is useful ; he rises often no one knows where or cares ; has perhaps no proper fountain at all, but is the result of the gathered rain water in the higher flats ; he is never quite clear, never brisk, never dangerous; always from the first useful, and goes pleasantly in harness ; turns mills ; washes rags — makes them into paper ; carries down all manner of dye-stuffs and feculence; and turns a bread-mill to as good purpose as any clearer stream ; is docile, and has, as he reaches the sea, in his deal- ings with the world, a river trust, who look after his and their own interests, and dredge him, and deepen him, and manage him, and turn him off into docks, and he is in the sea before he or you know it. Though we do not reckon the imagination of Dr. Chalmers among his master faculties, it was power- ful, effective, magnificent. It did not move him, he took it up as he went along ; its was not that imperial, penetrating, transmuting function that we find it in Dante, in Jeremy Taylor, in Milton, or in Burke; he used it to emblazon his great central truths, to hang clouds of glory on the skirts of his illustration ; but it was too passionate, too material, too encumbered with images, too involved in the general meUe of the soul, to do its work as a master. It was not in him, as Thomas Fuller calls it, " that inward sense of the soul, its most boundless and restless faculty ; for while the understanding and the will are kept as it were in liberd, custodiA to their objects of verum et bonum, it is free from all engagements — digs without spade, flies without wings, builds without charges, in a mo- ment striding from the centre to the circumference of the world by a kind of omnipotency, creating and 230 Chalmers's Posthumous Works annihilating- things in an instant — restless, ever work- ing, never wearied." We may say, indeed, that men of his temperament are not generally endowed with this power in largest measure ; in one sense they can do without it, in another they want the conditions on which its highest exercise depends. Plato and Milton, Shakspere and Dante, and Wordsworth, had imaginations tranquil, sedate, cool, originative, pene- trative, intense, which dwelt in the " highest heaven of invention." Hence it was that Chalmers could personify or paint a passion ; he could give it in one of its actions ; he could not, or rather he never did impassionate, create, and vivify a person — a very different thing from personifying a passion — all the difference, as Henry Taylor says, between Byron and Shakspere. In his impetuosity, we find the rationale of much that is peculiar in the style of Dr. Chalmers. As a spoken style it was thoroughly effective. 1 He seized 1 We have not noticed his iterativeness, his reiterativeness, because it flowed naturally from his primary qualities. In speaking it was effective, and to us pleasing, because there was some new modulation, some addition in the manner, just as the sea never sets up one wave exactly like the last or the next. But in his books it did somewhere encumber his thoughts, and the reader's progress and profit. It did not arise, as in many lesser men, from his having said his say — from his having no more in him ; much less did it arise from conceit, either of his idea or of his way of stating it ; but from the intensity with which the sensation of the idea — if we may use the expression — made its first mark on his mind. Truth to him never seemed to lose its first freshness, its edge, its flavour ; and Divine truth, we know, had come to him so suddenly, so fully, at mid-day, when he was in the very prime of his knowledge and his power and quickness — had so possessed his entire nature, as if, like him who was journeying to Damascus, a Great Light had shone round about him — that whenever he reproduced that condition, he began afresh, and with his whole utterance, to proclaim it. He could not but speak the things he had seen and felt, and heard and believed ; and he did it much in the same way, and in the same words, for the thoughts and affections and posture of his soul were the same. Like all men of vivid perceptions and keen sensibility, his mind and his body con- Chalmers's Posthumous Works 231 the nearest weapons, and smote down whatever he hit. But from this very vehemence, this haste, there was in his general style a want of correctness, of selectness, of nicety, of that curious felicity which makes thought immortal, and enshrines it in imperish- able crystal. In the language of the affections he was singularly happy; but, in a formal statement, rapid argumentation and analysis, he was often as we might think, uncouth, and imperfect, and incorrect : chiefly owing to his temperament, to his fiery, im- patient, swelling spirit, this gave his orations their fine audacity — this brought out hot from the furnace, his new words — this made his numbers run wild — lege solutis. We are sure this view will be found confirmed by these Daily Readings, when he wrote little, and had not time to get heated, and when the nature of the work, the hour at which it was done, and his solitariness, made his thoughts flow at their " own sweet will;" they are often quite as classical in expression, as they are deep and lucid in thought — reflecting heaven with its clouds and stars, and letting us see deep down into its own secret depths : this is to us one great charm of these volumes. Here he is broad and calm ; in his great public performances by mouth and pen, he soon passed from the lucid into the luminous. What, for instance, can be finer in expression than tinued under impressions, both material and spiritual, after the objects were gone. A curious instance of this occurs to us. Some years ago, he roamed up and down through the woods near Auchindinny, with two boys as companions. It was the first burst of summer, and the trees were more than usually enriched with leaves. He wandered about delighted, silent, looking at the leaves, " thick and numberless." As the three went on, they came suddenly upon a high brick wall, newly built, for peach trees, not yet planted. Dr. Chalmers halted, and looking steadfastly at the wall, ex- claimed most earnestly, "What foliage! what foliage!" The boys looked at one another, and said nothing ; but on getting home, expressed their astonishment at this very puzzling phenomenon. What a difference! leaves and parallelograms; a forest and a brick wall ! 232 Chalmers's Posthumous Works this? "It is well to be conversant with great ele- ments — life and death, reason and madness." " God forgets not His own purposes, though He executes them in His own way, and maintains His own pace, which he hastens not and shortens not to meet our impatience. " "I find it easier to apprehend the great- ness of the Deity than any of his moral perfections, or his sacredness;" and this — " One cannot but feel an interest in Ishmael, figuring him to be a noble of nature — one of those heroes of the wilder- ness who lived on the produce of his bow, and whose spirit was nursed and exercised among the wild adventures of the life he led. And it does soften our conception of him whose hand was against every man, and every man's hand against him, when we read of his mother's influence over him, in the deference of Ishmael to whom we read another example of the respect yielded to females even in that so-called bar- barous period of the world. There was a civilization, the immediate effect of religion, in these days, from which men fell away as the world grew older." That he had a keen relish for material and moral beauty and grandeur we all know ; what follows shows that he had also the true ear for beautiful words, as at once pleasant to the ear and suggestive of some higher feelings : — " I have often felt, in reading Milton and Thomson, a strong poetical effect in the bare enumeration of different countries, and this strongly enhanced by the statement of some common and prevailing emotion, which passed from one to another." This is set forth with great beauty and power in verses 14th and 15th of Exodus xv. , — " The people shall hear and be afraid — sorrow shall take hold of the inhabitants of Palestina. Then the dukes of Edom shall be amazed — the mighty men of Moab, trembling shall take hold of them — the in- habitants of Canaan shall melt away." Any one who has a tolerable ear and any sensibility, must remem- ber the sensation of delight in the mere sound — like the colours of a butterfly's wing, or the shapeless glories of evening clouds, to the eye — in reading aloud such passages as these: " Heshbon shall cry and Chalmers's Posthumous Works 233 Elealeh — their voice shall be heard to Jabez — for by the way of Luhith with weeping shall they go it up — for in the way of Horonaim they shall raise a cry. God came from Teman, the Holy One from Mount Paran. Is not Calno as Carchemish? is not Hamath as Arpad? is not Samaria as Damascus? He is gone to Aiath, he is passed to Migron ; at Michmash he hath laid up his carriages : Ramath is afraid ; Gibeah of Saul is fled — Lift up thy voice, O daughter of Gallim : cause it to be heard unto Laish, O poor Anathoth. Madmenah is removed ; the inhabitants of Gebim gather themselves to flee. The fields of Heshbon languish — the vine of Sibmah — I will water thee with my tears, O Heshbon and Elealeh." Any one may prove to himself that much of the effect and beauty of these passages depends on these names ; put others in their room, and try them. We remember well our first hearing Dr. Chalmers. We were in a moorland district in Tweeddale, re- joicing in the country, after nine months of the High School. We heard that the famous preacher was to be at a neighbouring parish church, and off we set, a cartful of irrepressible youngsters. " Calm was all nature as a resting wheel." The crows, instead of making wing, were impudent and sat still ; the cart- horses were standing, knowing the day, at the field- gates, gossiping and gazing, idle and happy; the moor was stretching away in the pale sun-light — vast, dim, melancholy, like a sea; everywhere were to be seen the gathering people, 4< sprinklings of blithe company;" the country-side seemed moving to one centre. As we entered the kirk we saw a notorious character, a drover, who had much of the brutal look of what he worked in, with the knowing eye of a man of the city, a sort of big Peter Bell — " He had a hardness in his eye, He had a hardness in his cheek." He was our terror, and we not only wondered, but were afraid when we saw him going in. The kirk H 2 234 Chalmers's Posthumous Works was as full as it could hold. How different in looks to a brisk town congregation ! There was a fine leisureliness and vague stare ; all the dignity and vacancy of animals ; eyebrows raised and mouths open, as is the habit with those who speak little and look much, and at far-off objects. The minister comes in, homely in his dress and gait, but having a great look about him, like a mountain among hills. The High School boys thought him like a " big one of our- selves," he looks vaguely round upon his audience, as if he saw in it one great object, not many. We shall never forget his smile ! its general benignity ; — how he let the light of his countenance fall on us ! He read a few verses quietly ; then prayed briefly, solemnly, with his eyes wide open all the time, but not seeing. Then he gave out his text ; we forget it, but its subject was "Death reigns." He stated slowly, calmly, the simple meaning of the words ; what death was, and how and why it reigned; then suddenly he started, and looked like a man who had seen some great sight, and was breathless to declare it; he told us how death reigned — everywhere, at all times, in all places ; how we all knew it, how we would yet know more of it. The drover, who had sat down in the table-seat opposite, was gazing up in a state of stupid excitement ; he seemed restless, but never kept his eye from the speaker. The tide set in — everything added to its power, deep called to deep, imagery and illustration poured in ; and every now and then the theme, — the simple, terrible statement, was repeated in some lucid interval. After over- whelming us with proofs of the reign of Death, and transferring to us his intense urgency and emotion ; and after shrieking, as if in despair, these words, " Death is a tremendous necessity," — he suddenly looked beyond us as if into some distant region, and cried out, " Behold a mightier! — who is this? He cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah, glorious in his apparel, speaking in righteousness, travelling in the greatness of his strength, mighty to Chalmers's Posthumous Works 235 save." Then, in a few plain sentences, he stated the truth as to sin entering, and death by sin, and death passing upon all. Then he took fire once more, and enforced, with redoubled energy and richness, the freeness, the simplicity, the security, the sufficiency of the great method of justification. How astonished and impressed we all were ! He was at the full thunder of his power; the whole man was in an agony of earnestness. The drover was weeping like a child, the tears running down his ruddy, coarse cheeks — his face opened out and smoothed like an infant's; his whole body stirred with emotion. We all had in- sensibly been drawn out of our seats, and were con- verging towards the wonderful speaker. And when he sat down, after warning each one of us to remem- ber who it was, and what it was, that followed death on his pale horse, 1 and how alone we could escape — we all sunk back into our seats. How beautiful to our eyes did the thunderer look — exhausted — but sweet and pure ! How he poured out his soul before his God in giving thanks for sending the Abolisher of Death ! Then, a short psalm, and all was ended. We went home quieter than we came ; we did not recount the foals with their long legs, and roguish eyes, and their sedate mothers ; we did not speculate upon whose dog that was, and whether that was a crow or a man in the dim moor, — we thought of other things. That voice, that face; those great, simple, living thoughts ; those floods of resistless eloquence ; that piercing, shattering voice, — " that tremendous necessity." Were we desirous of giving to one who had never seen or heard Dr. Chalmers an idea of what manner of man he was — what he was as a whole, in the full round of his notions, tastes, affections, and powers — we would put this book into their hands, and ask 1 " And I looked, and behold a pale horse ; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him." — Rev. vi. 8. 236 Chalmers's Posthumous Works them to read it slowly, bit by bit, as he wrote it. In it he puts down simply, and at once, what passes through his mind as he reads ; there is no making of himself feel and think — no getting into a frame of mind ; he was not given to frames of mind ; he pre- ferred states to forms — substances to circumstances. There is something of everything in it — his relish for abstract thought — his love of taking soundings in deep places and finding no bottom — his knack of starting subtle questions, which he did not care to run to earth — his penetrating, regulating godliness — his delight in nature — his turn for politics, general economical, and ecclesiastical — his picturesque eye — his humanity — his courtesy — his warm-heartedness — his impetuosity — his sympathy with all the wants, pleasures, and sorrows of his kind — his delight in the law of God, and his simple, devout, manly treatment of it — his acknowledgment of difficulties — his turn for the sciences of quantity and number, and indeed for natural science and art generally — his shrewdness — his worldly wisdom — his genius ; all these come out — you gather them like fruit, here a little, and there a little. He goes over the Bible, not as a philosopher, or a theologian, or a historian, or a geologist, or a jurist, or a naturalist, or a statist, or a politician — picking out all that he wants, and a great deal more than he has any business with, and leaving everything else as barren to his reader as it has been to himself ; but he looks abroad upon his Father's word — as he used so pleasantly to do on his world — as a man, and as a Christian ; he submits himself to its influences, and lets his mind go out fully and naturally in its utterances. It is this which gives to this work all the charm of multitude in unity, of variety in harmony; and that sort of unexpectedness and ease of movement which we see everywhere in nature and in natural men. Our readers will find in these delightful Bible Read- ings not a museum of antiquities, and curiosities, and laborious trifles; nor of scientific specimens, analysed Chalmers's Posthumous Works 237 to the last degree, all standing in order, labelled and useless. They will not find in it an armoury of weapons for fighting with and destroying their neigh- bours. They will get less of the physic of controversy than of the diet of holy living. They will find much of what Lord Bacon desired, when he said, " We want short, sound, and judicious notes upon Scrip- ture, without running into commonplaces, pursuing controversies, or reducing those notes to artificial method, but leaving them quite loose and native. For certainly, as those wines which flow from the first treading of the grape are sweeter and better than those forced out by the press, which gives them the roughness of the husk and the stone, so are those doctrines best and sweetest which flow from a gentle crush of the Scriptures, and are not wrung into con- troversies and commonplaces." They will find it as a large pleasant garden ; no great system ; not trim, but beautiful, and in which there are things pleasant to the eye as well as good for food — flowers and fruits, and a few good esculent, wholesome roots. There are Honesty, Thrift, Eye-bright (Euphrasy that cleanses the sight), Heart 's-ease. The good seed in abundance, and the strange mystical Passion-flower; and in the midst, and seen everywhere, if we but look for it, the Tree of Life, with its twelve manner of fruits — the very leaves of which are for the healing of the nations. And, perchance, when they take their walk through it at evening time, or at " the sweet hour of prime," they may see a happy, wise, beaming old man at his work there — they may hear his well- known voice ; and if they have their spiritual senses exercised as they ought, they will not fail to see by his side, " one like unto the Son of Man." LETTER TO JOHN CAIRNS, D.D. » I praised the dead which are already dead, more than the living which are yet alive." LETTER TO JOHN CAIRNS, D.D. 23, Rutland Street, i$th August, 1860. My dear Friend, — When, at the urgent request of his trustees and family, and in accordance with what I believe was his own wish, you undertook my father's Memoir, it was in a measure on the understanding that I would furnish you with some domestic and per- sonal details. This I hoped to have done, but was unable. Though convinced more than ever how little my hand is needed, I will now endeavour to fulfil my promise. Before doing so, however, you must permit me to express our deep gratitude to you for this crowning proof of your regard for him "Without whose life we had not been;" to whom for many years you habitually wrote as " My father," and one of whose best blessings, when he was " such an one as Paul the aged," was to know that you were to him " mine own son in the gospel." With regard to the manner in which you have done this last kindness to the dead, I can say nothing more expressive of our feelings, and, I am sure, nothing more gratifying to you, than that the record you have given of my father's life, and of the series of great public questions in which he took part, is done in the way which would have been most pleasing to himself — that which, with his passionate love of truth and liberty, his relish for concentrated, just thought and expression, and his love of being loved, he would have most desired, in any one speaking of him after he was gone. He would, I doubt not, say, as one said to a great painter, on looking at his portrait, " It is 241 242 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. certainly like, but it is much better-looking;" and you might well reply as did the painter, " It is the truth, told lovingly " — and all the more true that it is so told. You have, indeed, been enabled to speak the truth, Or as the Greek has it, dXyjOeveiv iv dyajr-q — to truth it in love. I have over and over again sat down to try and do what I promised and wished — to give some faint ex- pression of my father's life; not of what he did or said or wrote — not even of what he was as a man of God and a public teacher; but what he was in his essential nature — what he would have been had he been anything else than what he was, or had lived a thousand years ago. Sometimes I have this so vividly in my mind that I think I have only to sit down and write it off, and do it to the quick. " The idea of his life," what he was as a whole, what was his self, all his days, would, — to go on with words which not time or custom can ever wither or make stale, — " Sweetly creep Into my study of imagination ; And every lovely organ of his life Would come apparelled in more precious habit — More moving delicate, and full of life, Into the eye and prospect of my soul, Than when he lived indeed," as if the sacredness of death and the bloom of eternity were on it ; or as you may have seen in an untroubled lake, the heaven reflected with its clouds, brighter, purer, more exquisite than itself ; but when you try to put this into words, to detain yourself over it, it is by this very act disturbed, broken and bedimmed, and soon vanishes away, as would the imaged heavens in the lake, if a pebble were cast into it, or a breath of wind stirred its face. The very anxiety to transfer it, as it looked out of the clear darkness of the past, makes the image grow dim and disappear. Every one whose thoughts are not seldom with the dead, must have felt both these conditions; how, in Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 243 certain passive, tranquil states, there comes up into the darkened chamber of the mind, its " chamber of imagery " — uncalled, as if it blossomed out of space, exact, absolute, consummate, vivid, speaking, not darkly as in a glass, but face to face, and " moving delicate " — this " idea of his life;" and then how an effort to prolong and perpetuate and record all this, troubles the vision and kills it ! It is as if one should try to paint in a mirror the reflection of a dear and unseen face ; the coarse, uncertain passionate hand- ling and colour, ineffectual and hopeless, shut out the very thing itself. I will therefore give this up as in vain, and try by some fragmentary sketches, scenes, and anecdotes, to let you know in some measure what manner of man my father was. Anecdotes, if true and alive, are always valuable; the man in the concrete, the totus quis comes out in them ; and I know you too well to think that you will consider as trivial or out of place anything in which his real nature displayed itself, and your own sense of humour as a master and central power of the human soul, playing about the very essence of the man, will do more than forgive anything of this kind which may crop out here and there, like the smile of wild-flowers in grass, or by the wayside. My first recollection of my father, my first impres- sion, not only of his character, but of his eyes and face and presence, strange as it may seem, dates from my fifth year. Doubtless I had looked at him often enough before that, and had my own childish thoughts about him ; but this was the time when I got my fixed, compact idea of him, and the first look of him which I felt could never be forgotten. I saw him, as it were, by a flash of lightning, sudden and complete. A child begins by seeing bits of every- thing; it knows in part — here a little, there a little; it makes up its wholes out of its own littles, and is long of reaching the fulness of a whole ; and in this we are children all our lives in much. Children are 244 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. long of seeing, or at least of looking at what is above them; they like the ground, and its flowers and stones, its " red sodgers " and lady-birds, and all its queer things ; their world is about three feet high, and they are more often stooping than gazing up. I know I was past ten before I saw, or cared to see, the ceilings of the rooms in the manse at Biggar. On the morning of the 28th May, 1816, my eldest sister Janet and I were sleeping in the kitchen-bed with Tibbie Meek, 1 our only servant. We were all three awakened by a cry of pain — sharp, insufferable, as if one were stung. Years after we two confided to each other, sitting by the burnside, that we thought that " great cry " which arose at midnight in Egypt must have been like it. We all knew whose voice it was, and, in our night-clothes, we ran into the pas- sage, and into the little parlour to the left hand, in which was a closet-bed. We found my father stand- ing before us, erect, his hands clenched in his black hair, his eyes full of misery and amazement, his face white as that of the dead. He frightened us. He saw this, or else his intense will had mastered his agony, for, taking his hands from his head, he said, slowly and gently, " Let us give thanks," and turned to a little sofa in the room ; there lay our mother, dead. 2 She had long been ailing. I remember her sitting in a shawl, — an Indian one with little dark green spots on a light ground, — and watching her growing pale with what I afterwards knew must 1 A year ago, I found an elderly countrywoman, a widow, waiting for me. Rising up, she said, " D'ye mind me?" I looked at her, but could get nothing from her face ; but the voice remained in my ear, as if coining from " the fields of sleep," and I said by a sort of instinct, "Tibbie Meek!" I had not seen her or heard her voice for more than forty years. She had come to get some medical advice. Voices are often like the smells of flowers and leaves, the tastes of wild fruits — they touch and awaken memory in a strange wa\ . " Tibbie " is now living at Thankerton. 1 This sofa, which was henceforward sacred to the house, he had always beside him. He used to tell us he set her down upon it when he brought her home to the manse. Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 245 have been strong- pain. She had, being feverish, slipped out of bed, and " grandmother," her mother, seeing her " change come," had called my father, and they two saw her open her blue, kind, and true eyes, " comfortable " to us all " as the day " — I remember them better than those of any one I saw yesterday — and, with one faint look of recognition to him, close them till the time of the restitution of all things. " She had another morn than ours." Then were seen in full action his keen, passionate nature, his sense of mental pain, and his supreme will, instant and unsparing, making himself and his terrified household give thanks in the midst of such a desolation, — and for it. Her warfare was accom- plished, her iniquities were pardoned ; she had already received from her Lord's hand double for all her sins : this was his supreme and over-mastering thought, and he gave it utterance. No man was happier in his wives. My mother was modest, calm, thrifty, reasonable, tender, happy- hearted. She was his student-love, and is even now remembered in that pastoral region, for " her sweet gentleness and wifelike government. " Her death and his sorrow and loss, settled down deep into the heart of the countryside. He was so young and bright, so full of fire, so unlike any one else, so devoted to his work, so chivalrous in his look and manner, so fear- less, and yet so sensitive and self-contained. She was so wise, good and gentle, gracious and frank. His subtlety of affection, and his almost cruel self- command, were shown on the day of the funeral. It was to Symington, four miles off, — a quiet little churchyard, lying in the shadow of Tinto; a place where she herself had wished to be laid. The funeral was chiefly on horseback. We, the family, were in coaches. I had been since the death in a sort of stupid musing and wonder, not making out what it all meant. I knew my mother was said to be dead. I saw she was still, and laid out, and then shut up, 246 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. and didn't move; but I did not know that when she was carried out in that long- black box, and we all went with her, she alone was never to return. When we got to the village all the people were at their doors. One woman, the blacksmith Thomas Spence's wife, had a nursing baby in her arms, and he leapt up and crowed with joy at the strange sight, the crowding horsemen, the coaches, and the nodding plumes of the hearse. This was my brother William, then nine months old, and Margaret Spence was his foster-mother. Those with me were overcome at this sight ; he of all the world whose, in some ways, was the greatest loss, the least conscious, turning it to his own childish glee. We got to the churchyard and stood round the open grave. My dear old grandfather was asked by my father to pray; he did. I don't remember his words; I believe he, through his tears and sobs, repeated the Divine words, " All flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of the grass ; the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away, but the word of the Lord endureth for ever;" adding, in his homely and pathetic way, that the flower would again bloom, never again to fade ; that what was now sown in dis- honour and weakness, would be raised in glory and power, like unto His own glorious body. Then to my surprise and alarm, the coffin, resting on its bearers, was placed over that dark hole, and I watched with curious eye the unrolling of those neat black bunches of cords, which I have often enough seen since. My father took the one at the head, and also another much smaller springing from the same point as his, which he had caused to be put there, and unrolling it, put it into my hand. I twisted it firmly round my fingers, and awaited the result ; the burial men with their real ropes lowered the coffin, and when it rested at the bottom, it was too far down for me to see it — the grave was made very deep, as he used afterwards to tell us, that it might hold us all — my father first and abruptly let his cord drop, followed by the rest. This Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 247 was too much. I now saw what was meant, and held on and fixed my fist and feet, and I believe my father had some difficulty in forcing open my small fingers; he let the little black cord drop, and I remember, in my misery and anger, seeing its open end disappear- ing in the gloom. My mother's death was the second epoch in my father's life ; it marked a change at once and for life ; and for a man so self-reliant, so poised upon a centre of his own, it is wonderful the extent of change it made. He went home, preached her funeral sermon, every one in the church in tears, himself outwardly unmoved. 1 But from that time dates an entire, though always deepening, alteration in his manner of preaching, because an entire change in his way of dealing with God's Word. Not that his abiding religious views and convictions were then originated or even altered — I doubt not that from a child he not only knew the Holy Scriptures, but was " wise unto salvation " — but it strengthened and clarified, quickened and gave permanent direction to, his sense of God as revealed in His Word. He took as it were to subsoil ploughing ; he got a new and adamantine point to the instrument with which he bored, and with a fresh power — with his whole might, he sunk it right down into the living rock, to the virgin gold. His entire nature had got a shock, and his blood was drawn inwards, his surface was chilled ; but fuel was heaped all the more on the inner fires, and his zeal, that ti depfibv TrpayfjLa, burned with a new ardour; indeed had he not found an outlet for his pent-up energy, his brain must have given way, and his faculties have either consumed themselves in wild, wasteful splendour and combustion, or dwindled into lethargy. 2 The manse became silent; we lived and slept and 1 I have been told that once in the course of the sermon his voice trembled, and many feared he was about to break down. * There is a story illustrative of this altered manner and matter of preaching. He had been preaching when very young, at Galashiels, and one wife said to her " neebor, " 248 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. played under the shadow of that death, and we saw, or rather felt, that he was another father than before. No more happy laughter from the two in the parlour, as he was reading Larry, the Irish postboy's letter in Miss EdgewoVth's tale, or the last Waverley novel ; no more visitings in a cart with her, he riding beside us on his white thorough-bred pony, to Kil- bucho, or Radian Mill, or Kirklawhill. He went among his people as usual when they were ill ; he preached better than ever — they were sometimes frightened to think how wonderfully he preached ; but the sunshine was over — the glad and careless look, the joy of young life and mutual love. He was little with us, and, as I said, the house was still, except when he was mandating his sermons for Sab- bath. This he always did, not only viva voce, but with as much energy and loudness as in the pulpit ; we felt his voice was sharper, and rang keen through the house. What we lost, the congregation and the world gained. He gave himself wholly to his work. As you have yourself said, he changed his entire system and fashion of preaching ; from being elegant, rhetor- ical, and ambitious, he became concentrated, urgent, moving (being himself moved), keen, searching, un- swerving, authoritative to fierceness, full of the terrors of the Lord, if he could but persuade men. The truth of the words of God had shone out upon him with an immediateness and infinity of meaning and power, which made them, though the same words he had looked on from childhood, other and greater and deeper words. He then left the ordinary com- mentators, and men who write about meanings and flutter around the circumference and corners ; he was bent on the centre, on touching with his own fingers, on seeing with his own eyes, the pearl of great price. 1 f "Jean, what think ye o' the lad?" " It's maist o't tinsel wark," said Jean, neither relishing nor appreciating his fine sentiments and figures. After my mother's death, he preached in the same place, and Jean, running to her friend, took the first word, " It's a' gowd two." Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 249 Then it was that he began to dig into the depths, into the primary and auriferous rock of Scripture, and take nothing at another's hand : then he took up with the word " apprehend ;" he had laid hold of the truth, — there it was, with its evidence, in his hand ; and every one who knew him must remember well how, in speaking with earnestness of the meaning of a passage, he, in his ardent, hesitating way, looked into the palm of his hand as if he actually saw there the truth he was going to utter. This word appre- hend played a large part in his lectures, as the thing itself did in his processes of investigation, or, if I might make a word, indigation. Comprehension, he said, was for few ; apprehension was for every man who had hands and a head to rule them, and an eye to direct them. Out of this arose one of his deficien- cies. He could go largely into the generalities of a subject, and relished greatly others doing it, so that they did do it really and well; but he was averse to abstract and wide reasonings. Principles he rejoiced in : he worked with them as with his choicest weapons ; they were the polished stones for his sling, against the Goliaths of presumption, error, and tyranny in thought or in polity, civil or ecclesiastical ; but he somehow divined a principle, or got at it naked and alone, rather than deduced it and brought it to a point from an immensity of particulars, and then rendered it back so as to bind them into one cosmos. One of my young friends now dead, who afterwards went to India, used to come and hear him in Brough- ton Place with me, and this word apprehend caught him, and as he had a great love for my father, in writing home to me, he never forgot to ask how " grand old Apprehend " was. From this time dates my father's possession and use of the German Exegetics. After my mother's death I slept with him ; his bed was in his study, a small room, 1 with a very small grate ; and I remember 1 On a low chest of drawers in this room there lay for many years my mother's parasol, by his orders — I dare say, for long, the only one in Biggar. 250 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. well his getting- those fat, shapeless, spongy German books, as if one would sink in them, and be bogged in their bibulous, unsized paper; and watching him as he impatiently cut them up, and dived into them in his rapid, eclectic way, tasting them, and dropping for my play such a lot of soft, large, curled bits from the paper-cutter, leaving the edges all shaggy. He never came to bed when I was awake, which was not to be wondered at ; but I can remember often awaking far on in the night or morning, and seeing that keen, beautiful, intense face bending over these Rosen- mullers,and Ernestis, and Storrs, and Kuinoels — the fire out, and the grey dawn peering through the win- dow ; and when he heard me move, he would speak to me in the foolish words of endearment my mother was wont to use, and come to bed, and take me, warm as I was, into his cold bosom. Vitringa in Jesaiam I especially remember, a noble folio. Even then, with that eagerness to communicate what he had himself found, of which you must often have been made the subject, he went and told it. He would try to make me, small man as I was, " appre- hend " what he and Vitringa between them had made out of the fifty-third chapter of his favourite prophet, the princely Isaiah. 1 Even then, so far as I can recall, 1 His reading aloud of everything from John Gilpin to John Howe was a fine and high art, or rather gift. Hen- derson could not have given " The dinner waits, and we are tired ;" Says Gilpin, "So am I," better ; and to hear him sounding to the depths and cadences of the Living Temple, " bearing on its front this doleful inscription, 'Here God once dwelt,'" was like listening to the recitative of Handel. But Isaiah was his masterpiece ; and I remember quite well his startling us all when reading at family worship, " His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God," by a peremptory, explosive sharpness, as of thunder overhead, at the words " the mighty God," similar to the rendering now given to Handel's music, and doubtless so meant by him ; and then closing with " the Prince of Peace," soft and low. No man who wishes to feel Isaiah, as well as understand him, should be ignorant of Handel's "Messiah." His prelude to "Comfort ye" — its simple theme, cheerful and infinite as the ripple of the un- Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 251 he never took notes of what he read. He did not need this, his intellectual force and clearness were so great; he was so totus in Mo, whatever it was, that he recorded~"by a secret of its own, his mind's results and victories and memoranda, as he went on; he did not even mark his books, at least very seldom; he 1 11* * 1 marked his mind. He was thus every year preaching with more and more power, because with more and more knowledge and " pureness;" and, as you say, there were prob- ably nowhere in Britain such lectures delivered at that time to such an audience, consisting of country people, sound, devout, well-read in their Bibles and in the native divinity, but quite unused to persistent, deep, critical thought. Much of this — most of it — was entirely his own, self-originated and self-sustained, and done for its own sake, " All too happy in the pleasure Of his own exceeding treasure." But he often said, with deep feeling, that one thing put him always on his mettle, the knowledge that " yonder in that corner, under the gallery, sat, Sab- bath after Sabbath, a man who knew his Greek Testa- ment better than I did." This was his brother-in-law, and one of his elders, Mr. Robert Johnston, married to his sister Violet, a merchant and portioner in Biggar, a remarkable man, of whom it is difficult to say to strangers what is true, without being accused of exaggeration. A shop- searchable sea — gives a deeper meaning to the words. One of my father's great delights in his dying months was reading the lives of Handel and of Michael Angelo, then newly out. He felt that the author of " He was despised," and " He shall feed his flock," and those other wonderful airs, was a man c" profound religious feeling, of which they were the utterance and he rejoiced over the warlike airs and choruses of " Juda MaccabEeus." You have recorded his estimate of the religious nature of him of the terribile via; he said it was a relief to his mind to know that such a mighty genius walked humbly with his God. viy uui. le shall man of :erance ; " Judas MiVrfh.tc 252 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. keeper in that remote little town, he not only inter- meddled fearlessly with all knowledge, but mastered more than many practised and University men do in their own lines. Mathematics, astronomy, and espe- cially what may be called selenology, or the doctrine of the moon, and the higher geometry and physics; Hebrew, Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin, to the veriest rigours of prosody and metre; Spanish and Italian, German, French, and any odd language that came in his way; all these he knew more or less thoroughly, and acquired them in the most leisurely, easy, cool sort of way, as if he grazed and browsed perpetually in the field of letters, rather than made formal meals, or gathered for any ulterior purpose, his fruits, his roots, and his nuts — he especially liked mental nuts — much less bought them from any one. With all this, his knowledge of human, and espe- cially of Biggar human nature, the ins and outs of its little secret ongoings, the entire gossip of the place, was like a woman's ; moreover, every personage great or small, heroic or comic, in Homer — whose poems he made it a matter of conscience to read once every four years — Plautus, Suetonius, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Lucian, down through Boccaccio and Don Quixote, which he knew by heart and from the living Spanish, to Joseph Andrews, the Spectator, Goldsmith and Swift, Miss Austen, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Ferrier, Gait and Sir Walter, — he was as familiar with, as with David Crockat the nailer, or the parish minister, the town-drummer, the mole-catcher, or the poaching weaver, who had the night before leistered a prime kipper at Rachan Mill, by the flare of a tarry wisp, or brought home his surreptitious grey hen or maukin from the wilds of Dunsyre or the dreary Lang Whang. 1 This singular man came to the manse every Friday evening for many years, and he and my father dis- cussed everything and everybody; — beginning with 1 With the practices of this last worthy, when carried on moderately, and for the sport's sake, he had a special sympathy. Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 253 tough, strong head work — a bout at wrestling, be it Caesar's Bridge, the Epistles of Phalaris, the import of fiev and 8e, the Catholic question, or the great roots of Christian faith ; ending with the latest joke in the town or the West Raw, the last effusion by Affleck, tailor and poet, the last blunder of ^isop the apothecary, and the last repartee of the village fool, with the week's Edinburgh and Glasgow news by their respective carriers ; the whole little life, sad and humorous — who had been born, and who was dying or dead, married or about to be, for the past eight days. 1 This amused, and, in the true sense, diverted my father, and gratified his curiosity, which was great, and his love of men, as well as for man. He was shy, and unwilling to ask what he longed to know, liking better to have it given him without the asking ; and no one could do this better than " Uncle Johnston. " You may readily understand what a thorough exer- cise and diversion of an intellectual and social kind this was, for they were neither of them men to shirk from close gripes, or trifle and flourish with their weapons ; they laid on and spared not. And then my uncle had generally some special nut of his own to crack, some thesis to fling down and offer battle on, some " particle " to energize upon; for though quiet and calm, he was thoroughly combative, and enjoyed seeing his friend's blood up, and hearing his emphatic and bright speech, and watching his flashing eye. Then he never spared him ; criticised and sometimes quizzed — for he had great humour — his style, as well as debated and weighed his apprehendings and 1 1 believe this was the true though secret source of much of my father's knowledge of the minute personal history of every one in his region, which, — to his people, knowing his reserved manner and his devotion to his studies, and his so rarely meeting them or speaking to them except from the pulpit, or at a diet of visitation, was a perpetual wonder, and of which he made great use in his dealings with his afflicted or erring " members." 254 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. exegeses, shaking- them heartily to test their strength. He was so thoroughly independent of all authority, except that of reason and truth, and his own humour ; so ready to detect what was weak, extravagant, or unfair; so full of relish for intellectual power and accuracy, and so attached to and proud of my father, and bent on his making the best of himself, that this trial was never relaxed. His firm and close-grained mind was a sort of whetstone on which my father sharpened his wits at this weekly " setting." The very difference of their mental tempers and complexions drew them together — the one impatient, nervous, earnest, instant, swift, vehement, regardless of exertion, bent on his goal, like a thorough-bred racer, pressing to the mark ; the other leisurely to slowness and provokingness, with a constitution which could stand a great deal of ease, unimpassioned, still, clear, untroubled by likings or dislikings, dwelling and working in thought and speculation and observa- tion as ends in themselves, and as their own re- wards i 1 the one hunting for a principle ora" divine method;" the other sapping or shelling from a dis- tance, and for his pleasure, a position, or gaining a point, or setting a rule, or verifying a problem, or getting axiomatic and proverbial. In appearance they were as curiously unlike ; my uncle short and round to rotundity, homely and florid 1 He was curiously destitute of all literary ambition or show ; like the cactus in the desert, always plump, always taking in the dew of heaven, and caring little to give it out. He wrote many papers in the Repository and Monitor, an acute and clever tract on the Voluntary controversy, entitled Calm Answers to Angry Questions, and was the author of a capital bit of literary banter — a Congratulatory Letter to the Minister of Liberton, who had come down upon my father in a pamphlet, for his sermon on " There remaineth much land to be possessed." It is a mixture of Swift and Arbuth- not. I remember one of the flowers he culls from him he is congratulating, in which my father is characterized as one of those " shallow, sallow souls that would swallow the bait, without perceiving the cloven foot!" But a man like this never is best in a book ; he is always greater than his work. Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 255 in feature. I used to think Socrates must have been like him in visage as well as in much of his mind. He was careless in his dress, his hands in his pockets as a rule, and strenuous only in smoking or in sleep ; with a large, full skull, a humorous twinkle in his cold, blue eye, a soft, low voice, expressing every kind of thought in the same, sometimes plaguily douce tone ; a great power of quiet and telling sar- casm, large capacity of listening to and of enjoying other men's talk, however small. My father — tall, slim, agile, quick in his move- ments, graceful, neat to nicety in his dress, with much in his air of what is called style, with a face almost too beautiful for a man's, had not his eyes commanded it and all who looked at it, and his close, firm mouth been ready to say what the fiery spirit might bid ; his eyes, when at rest, expressing — more than almost any other's I ever saw — sorrow and ten- der love, a desire to give and to get sympathy, and a sort of gentle, deep sadness, as if that was their per- manent state, and gladness their momentary act ; but when awakened, full of fire, peremptory, and not to be trifled with; and his smile, and flash of gaiety and fun, something no one could forget; his hair in early life a dead black; his eyebrows of exquisite curve, narrow and intense ; his voice deep when un- moved and calm ; keen and sharp to piercing fierce- ness when vehement and roused — in the pulpit, at times a shout, at times a pathetic wail ; his utterance hesitating, emphatic, explosive, powerful,— each sen- tence shot straight and home; his hesitation arising from his crowd of impatient ideas, and his resolute will that they should come in their order, and some of them not come at all, only the best, and his settled determination that each thought should be dressed in the very and only word which he stammered on till it came, — it was generally worth his pains and ours. Uncle Johnston, again, flowed on like Caesar's Arar, incredibili lenitate, or like linseed out of a poke. You can easily fancy the spiritual and bodily contrast of 256 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. these men, and can fancy too, the kind of engage- ments they would have with their own proper weapons on these Friday evenings, in the old manse dining- room, my father showing uncle out into the darkness of the back-road, and uncle, doubtless, lighting his black and ruminative pipe. If my uncle brought up nuts to crack, my father was sure to have some difficulties to consult about, or some passages to read, something that made him put his whole energy forth ; and when he did so, I never heard such reading. To hear him read the story of Joseph, or passages in David's history, and Psalms 6th, nth, and 15th, or the 52nd, 53rd, 54th, 55th, 63rd, 64th, and 40th chapters of Isaiah, or the Sermon on the Mount, or the Journey to Emmaus, or our Saviour's prayer in John, or Paul's speech on Mars' Hill, or the first three chapters of Hebrews and the latter part of the nth, or Job, or the Apocalypse; or, to pass from those divine themes — Jeremy Taylor, or George Herbert, Sir Walter Raleigh, or Milton's prose, such as the passage beginning " Come forth out of thy royal chambers, O thou Prince of all the kings of the earth !" and " Truth, indeed, came once into the world with her divine Master," or Charles Wesley's Hymns, or, most loved of all, Cowper, from the rapt " Come thou, and, added to thy many crowns," or " O that those lips had language!" to the Jackdaw, and his incomparable Letters ; or Gray's Poems, Burns's " Tarn O'Shanter," or Sir Walter's " Eve of St. John," 1 and "The Grey Brother." 1 Well do I remember when driving him from Melrose to Kelso, long ago, we came near Sandyknowe, that grim tower of Smailholm, standing erect like a warder turned to stone, defying time and change, his bursting into that noble ballad— " The Baron of Smaylho'me rose with day, He spurred his courser on, Without stop or stay, down the rocky way, That leads to Brotherstone ; " and pointing out the " Watchfold height," "the eiry Beacon Hill," and " Brotherstone." Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 257 But I beg your pardon : Time has run back with me, and fetched that blessed past, and awakened its echoes. I hear his voice; I feel his eye; I see his whole nature given up to what he is reading, and making its very soul speak. Such a man then as I have sketched, or washed faintly in, as the painters say, was that person who sat in the corner under the gallery every Sabbath- day, and who knew his Greek Testament better than his minister. He is dead too, a few months ago, dying surrounded with his cherished hoard of books of all sizes, times, and tongues — tatterdemalion many ; all however drawn up in an order of his own ; all thoroughly mastered and* known; among them David Hume's copy of Shaftesbury's Characteristics, with his autograph, which he had picked up at some stall. I have said that my mother's death was the second epoch in my father's life. I should perhaps have said the third ; the first being his mother's long illness and death, and the second his going to Elie, and beginning the battle of life at fifteen. There must have been something very delicate and close and exquisite in the relation between the ailing, silent, beautiful and pen- sive mother, and that dark-eyed, dark-haired, bright and silent son ; a sort of communion it is not easy to express. You can think of him at eleven slowly writing out that small book of promises in a distinct and minute hand, quite as like his mature hand, as the shy, lustrous-eyed boy was to his after self in his manly years, and sitting by the bedside while the rest were out and shouting, playing at hide-and-seek round the little church, with the winds from Ben- lomond or the wild uplands of Ayrshire blowing through their hair. He played seldom, but when he did run out, he jumped higher and farther, and ran faster than any of them. His peculiar beauty must have come from his mother. He used at rare times, and with a sort of shudder, to tell of her when a lovely girl of fifteen, having been seen by a gentleman of rank, in Cheapside, hand in hand with an eviJ 1 258 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. woman, who was decoying- her to ruin, on pretence of showing her the way home ; and how he stopped his carriage, and taking in the unconscious girl, drove her to her uncle's door. But you have said all this better than I can. His time with his mother, and the necessary confine- ment and bodily depression caused by it, I doubt not deepened his native thoughtful turn, and his tendency to meditative melancholy, as a condition under which he viewed all things, and quickened and intensified his sense of the suffering of this world, and of the profound seriousness and mystery in the midst of which we live and die. The second epoch was that of his leaving home with his guinea, the last he ever got from any one but himself and his going among utter strangers to be master of a school one half of the scholars of which were bigger and older than himself, and all rough colts — wilful and unbroken. This was his first front- ing of the world. Besides supporting himself, this knit the sinews of his mind, and made him rely on himself in action as well as in thought. He some- times, but not often, spoke of this, never lightly, though he laughed at some of his predicaments. He could not forget the rude shock. Generally those familiar revelations were at supper, on the Sabbath evening, when, his work over, he enjoyed and lingered over his meal. From his young and slight, almost girlish look, and his refined, quiet manners, the boys of the school were inclined to annoy and bully him. He saw this, and felt it was now or never, — nothing between. So he took his line. The biggest boy, much older and stronger, was the rudest, and infected the rest. The " wee maister " ordered him, in that peremptory voice we all remember, to stand up and hold out his hand, being not at all sure but the big fellow might knock him down on the word. To the astonishment of the school, and to the big rebel's too, he obeyed and was punished on the instant, and to the full ; out went the Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 259 hand, down came the " taws," and bit like fire. From that moment he ruled them by his eye, the taws vanished. There was an incident at this time of his life which I should perhaps not tell, and yet I don't know why I shouldn't, it so perfectly illustrates his character in many ways. He had come home during the vaca- tion of his school to Langrig, and was about to go back ; he had been renewing his intercourse with his old teacher and friend whom you mention, from whom he used to say he learned to like Shakspere, and who seems to have been a man of genuine literary tastes. He went down to bid him good-bye, and doubtless they got on their old book loves, and would be spouting their pet pieces. The old dominie said, " John, my man, if you are walking into Edinburgh, I'll convoy you a bit." " John " was too happy, so next morning they set off, keeping up a constant fire of quotation and eager talk. They got past Mid- Calder to near East, when my father insisted on his friend returning, and also on going back a bit with him; on looking at the old man, he thought he was tired, so on reaching the well-known Kippen's Inn, he stopped and insisted on giving him some refresh- ment. Instead of ordering bread and cheese and a bottle of ale, he, doubtless full of Shakspere, and great upon sack and canary, ordered a bottle of wine ! Of this, you may be sure, the dominie, as he most needed it, had the greater share, and doubtless it warmed the cockles of his old heart. " John " making him finish the bottle, and drink the health of " Gentle Will," saw him off, and went in to pay the reckoning. What did he know of the price of wine ! It took exactly every penny he had ; I doubt not, most boys, knowing that the landlord knew them, would have cither paid a part, or asked him to score it up. This was not his way ; he was too proud and shy and honest for such an expedient. By this time, what with dis- cussing Shakspere, and witnessing his master's leisurely emptying of that bottle, and releasing the " Dear prisoned spirits of the impassioned grape," 260 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. he found he must run for it to Edinburgh, or rather Leith, fourteen miles; this he did, and was at the pier just in time to jump into the Elie pinnace, which was already off. He often wondered what he would have done if he had been that one moment late. You can easily pick out the qualities this story unfolds. His nature, capable as it was of great, persistent, and indeed dogged labour, was, from the predomi- nance of the nervous system in his organization, ex- citable, and therefore needed and relished excitement — the more intense the better. He found this in his keen political tastes, in imaginative literature, and in fiction. In the highest kinds of poetry he enjoyed the sweet pain of tears ; and he all his life had a steady liking, even a hunger, for a good novel. This re- freshed, lightened, and diverted his mind from the strain of his incessant exegesis. He used always to say that Sir Walter and Goldsmith, and even Fielding, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Miss Ferrier, were true benefactors to the race, by giving such genuine, such secure and innocent pleasure ; and he often re- peated with admiration Lord Jeffrey's words on Scott, inscribed on his monument. He had no turn for gardening or for fishing or any field sports or games ; his sensitive nature recoiled from the idea of pain, and above all, needless pain. He used to say the lower creation had groans enough, and needed no more burdens; indeed, he was fierce to some measure of unfairness against such of his brethren — Dr. Ward- law, for instance 1 — as resembled the apostles in fishing for other things besides men. But the exercise and the excitement he most of all others delighted in, was riding ; and had he been a country gentleman and not a clergyman, I don't think he could have resisted fox-hunting. With the excep- tion of that great genius in more than horsemanship, Andrew Ducrow, I never saw a man sit a horse as he did. He seemed inspired, gay, erect, full of the joy 1 After a tight discussion between these two attached friends, Dr. Wardlaw said, " Well, I can't answer you, but fish I must and shall." Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 261 of life, fearless and secure. I have heard a farmer friend say if he had not been a preacher of the gospel he would have been a cavalry officer, and would have fought as he preached. He was known all over the Upper Ward and down Tweeddale for his riding-. " There goes the minis- ter," as he rode past at a swift canter. He had generally well-bred horses, or as I would now call them, ponies ; if he had not, his sufferings from a dull, hardmouthed, heavy-hearted and footed, plebeian horse were almost comic. On his grey mare, or his little blood bay horse, to see him setting off and in- dulging it and himself in some alarming gambols, and in the midst of his difficulties, partly of his own making, taking off his hat or kissing his hand to a lady, made one think of "young Harry with his beaver up." He used to tell with much relish, how, one fine summer Sabbath evening, after preaching in the open air for a collection, in some village near, and having put the money, chiefly halfpence, into his handkerchief, and that into his hat, he was taking a smart gallop home across the moor, happy and re- lieved, when three ladies — I think, the Miss Bertrams of Kersewell— came suddenly upon him ; off went the hat, down bent the head, and over him streamed the cherished collection, the ladies busy among the wild grass and heather picking it up, and he full of droll confusion and laughter. The grey mare he had for many years. I can re- member her small head and large eyes ; her neat, com- pact body, round as a barrel ; her finely flea-bitten skin, and her thorough-bred legs. I have no doubt she had Arabian blood. My father's pride in her was quite curious. Many a wild ride to and from the Presbytery at Lanark, and across flooded and shifting fords, he had on her. She was as sweet-tempered and enduring, as she was swift and sure ; and her powers of running were appreciated and applied in a way which he was both angry and amused to discover. You know what riding the bruse means. At a country 262 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. wedding the young- men have a race to the bride- groom's home, and he who wins brings out a bottle and glass and drinks the young wife's health. I wish Burns had described a brase ; all sorts of steeds, wild, unkempt lads as well as colts, old broken-down thoroughbreds that did wonders when soopled, huge, grave cart horses devouring the road with their shaggy hoofs, wilful ponies, &c. You can imagine the wild hurry-skurry and fun, the comic situations and upsets over a rough road, up and down places one would be giddy to look at. Well, the young farmers were in the habit of coming to my father, and asking the loan of the mare to go and see a friend, &c, &c, praising knowingly the fine points and virtues of his darling. Having through life, with all his firmness of nature, an ab- horrence of saying " No " to any one, the interview generally ended with, " Well, Robert, you may have her, but take care of her, and don't ride her fast." In an hour or two Robert was riding the bruse, and flying away from the crowd, Grey first, and the rest nowhere, and might be seen turning the corner of the farm-house with the victorious bottle in his uplifted hand, the motley pack panting vainly up the hill. This went on for long, and the grey was famous, almost notorious, all over the Upper Ward ; some- times if she appeared, no one would start, and she trotted the course. Partly from his own personal abstraction from outward country life, and partly from Uncle Johnston's sense of waggery keeping him from telling his friend of the grey's last exploit at Hartree Mill, or her leaping over the " best man " at Thriepland, my father was the last to hear of this equivocal glory of "the minister's meet." Indeed, it was whispered she had once won a whip at Lanark races. They still tell of his feats on this fine creature, one of which he himself never alluded to without a feeling of shame. He had an engagement to preach somewhere beyond the Clyde on a Sabbath evening, and his excellent and attached friend and elder, Mr. Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 263 Kello of Lindsay-lands, accompanied him on his big plough horse. It was to be in the open air, on the river side. When they got to the Clyde they found it in full flood, heavy and sudden rains at the head of the water having brought it down in a wild spate. On the opposite side were the gathered people and the tent. Before Mr. Kello knew where he was, there was his minister on the mare swimming across, and carried down in a long diagonal, the people looking on in terror. He landed, shook himself, and preached with his usual fervour. As I have said, he never liked to speak of this bit of hardihood, and he never repeated it; but it was like the man — there were the people, that was what he would be at, and though timid for anticipated danger as any woman, in it he was without fear. One more illustration of his character in connection with his riding. On coming to Edinburgh he gave up this kind of exercise ; he had no occasion for it, and he had enough, and more than enough of excite- ment in the public questions in which he found himself involved, and in the miscellaneous activities of a popular town minister. I was then a young doctor — it must have been about 1840 — and had a patient, Mrs. James Robertson, eldest daughter of Mr. Pirie, the predecessor of Dr. Dick in what was then Shuttle Street congregation, Glasgow. She was one of my father's earliest and dearest friends, — a mother in the Burgher Israel, she and her cordial husband " given to hospitality," especially to "the Prophets." She was hopelessly ill at Juniper Green, near Edinburgh. Mr. George Stone, then living at Muirhouse, one of my father's congregation in Broughton Place, a man of equal originality and worth, and devoted to his minister, knowing my love of riding, offered me his blood-chestnut to ride out and make my visit. My father said, " John, if you are going, I would like to ride out with you ;" he wished to see his dying friend. " You ride !" said Mr. Stone, who was a very York- shireman in the matter of horses. " Let him try," 264 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. said I. The upshot was, that Mr. Stone sent the chestnut for me, and a sedate pony — called, if Horget not, Goliath — for his minister, with all sorts of injunc- tions to me to keep him off the thoroughbred, and on Goliath. My father had not been on a horse for nearly twenty years. He mounted and rode off. He soon got teased with the short, pattering steps of Goliath, and looked wistfully up at me, and longingly to the tall chestnut, stepping once for Goliath's twice, like the Don striding beside Sancho. I saw what he was after, and when past the toll he said in a mild sort of way, " John, did you promise absolutely I was not to ride your horse?" " No, father, certainly not. Mr. Stone, I dare say, wished me to do so, but I didn't." "Well then, I think we'll change; this beast shakes me." So we changed. I remember how noble he looked ; how at home : his white hair and his dark eyes, his erect, easy, accustomed seat. He soon let his eager horse slip gently away. It was first evasit, he was off, Goliath and I jogging on behind ; then erupit, and in a twinkling — evanuit. I saw them last flashing through the arch under the Canal, his white hair flying. I was uneasy, though from his riding I knew he was as yet in command, so I put Goliath to his best, and having passed through Slateford, I asked a stonebreaker if he saw a gentle- man on a chestnut horse. " Has he white hair?" "Yes." "And een like a gled's?" "Yes." " Weel then, he's fleein' up the road like the wund ; he'll be at Little Vantage " (about nine miles off) " in nae time if he haud on." I never once sighted him, but on coming into Juniper Green there was his steaming chestnut at the gate, neighing cheerily to Goliath. I went in, he was at the bedside of his friend, and in the midst of prayer; his words as I entered were, " When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee;" and he was not the least instant in prayer that his blood was up with Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 265 his ride. He never again saw Mrs. Robertson, or as she was called when they were young-, Sibbie (Sibella) Pirie. On coming out he said nothing, but took the chestnut, mounted her, and we came home quietly. His heart was opened; he spoke of old times and old friends ; he stopped at the exquisite view at Hailes into the valley, and up the Pentlands beyond, the smoke of Kate's Mill rising in the still and shadowy air, and broke out into Cowper's words : Yes, ( " HE sets the bright procession on its way, And marshals all the order of the year ; And ere one flowery season fades and dies, Designs the blooming wonders of the next." Then as we came slowly in, the moon shone behind Craiglockhart hill among the old Scotch firs ; he pulled up again, and gave me Collins' Ode to Even- ing, beginning — " If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song, May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear, Thy springs, and dying gales;" repeating over and over some of the lines, as " Thy modest ear, Thy springs, and dying gales." " — And marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil." And when she looked out on us clear and full, " Yes — " The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth." As we passed through Slateford, he spoke of Dr. Belfrage, his great-hearted friend, of his obligations to him, and of his son, my friend, both lying together in Colinton churchyard ; and of Dr. Dick, who was minister before him, of the Coventrys, and of Stitchel and Sprouston, of his mother, and of himself, — his doubts of his own sincerity in religion, his sense of sin, of God — reverting often to his dying friend. Such 1 2 266 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. a thing- only occurred to me with him once or twice all my life ; and then when we were home, he was silent, shut up, self-contained as before. He was himself conscious of this habit of reticence, and what may be called selfism to us, his children, and lamented it. I remember his saying in a sort of mournful joke, " I have a well of love ; I know it ; but it is a well, and I a draw-well, to your sorrow and mine, and it seldom overflows, but," looking with that strange power of tenderness as if he put his voice and his heart into his eyes, "you may always come hither to draw;" he used to say he might take to himself Wordsworth's jS lines, — " I am not one who much or oft delights To season my fireside with personal talk." And changing " though " into "if:" " A well of love it may be deep, I trust it is, and never dry ; What matter, though its waters sleep In silence and obscurity?" The expression of his affection was more like the shock of a Leyden jar, than the continuous current of a galvanic circle. There was, as I have said, a permanent chill given by my mother's death, to what may be called the outer surface of his nature, and we at home felt it much. The blood was thrown in upon the centre, and went forth in energetic and victorious work, in searching the Scriptures and saving souls ; but his social faculty never recovered that shock ! it was blighted ; he was always desiring to be alone and at his work. A stranger who saw him for a short time, bright, animated, full of earnest and cordial talk, pleasing and being pleased, the life of the company, was apt to think how delightful he must always be, — and so he was ; but these times of bright talk were like angels' visits; and he smiled with peculiar be- nignity on his retiring guest, as if blessing him not the less for leaving him to himself. I question if there Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 267 ever lived a man so much in the midst of men, and in the midst of his own children, 1 in whom the silences, as Mr. Carlyle would say, were so predominant. Every Sabbath he spoke out of the abundance of his heart, his whole mind ; he was then communicative and frank enough : all the week, before and after, he would not unwillingly have never opened his mouth. Of many people we may say that their mouth is always open except when it is shut ; of him that his mouth was always shut except when it was opened. Every one must have been struck with the seeming inconsistency of his occasional brilliant, happy, ener- getic talk, and his habitual silentness — his difficulty in getting anything to say. But, as I have already said, what we lost, the world and the church gained. When travelling he was always in high spirits and full of anecdote and fun. Indeed I knew more of his inner history in this one way, than during years of living with him. I recollect his taking me with him to Glasgow when I must have been about fourteen; we breakfasted in The Ram's Horn Tavern, and I felt a new respect for him at his commanding the waiters. He talked a great deal during our short tour, and often have I desired to recall the many things he told me of his early life, and of his own religious crises, my mother's death, his fear of his own death, and all this intermingled with the drollest stories of his boy and student life. We went to Paisley and dined, I well remember, we two alone, and, as I thought, magnificently, in a great apartment in The Saracen's Head, at the end of which was the county ball-room. We had come across from Dunoon and landed in a small boat at the Water Neb along with Mrs. Dr. Hall, a character Sir Walter or Gait would have made im- mortal. My father with characteristic ardour took an oar, for the first time in his life, and I believe for the last, to help the old boatman on the Cart, and wishing to do something decided, missed the water, 1 He gave us all the education we got at Biggar. 268 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. and went back head over heels to the immense enjoy- ment of Mrs. Hall, who said, " Less pith, and mair to the purpose, my man." She didn't let the joke die out. Another time — it was when his second marriage was fixed on, to our great happiness and his — I had just taken my degree of M.D., and he took Isabella, William, and myself to Moffat. By a curious felicity we got into Miss Geddes' lodgings, where the village circulating library was kept, the whole of which we aver he read in ten days. I never saw him so happy, so open and full of mirth, reading to us, and reciting the poetry of his youth. On these rare but delightful occasions he was fond of exhibiting, when asked, his powers of rapid speaking, in which he might have rivalled old Matthews or his son. His favourite feat was repeating " Says I to my Lord, quo' I — what for will ye no grund ma barleymeal mouter-free, says I to my Lord, quo' I, says I, I says. " He was brilliant upon the final, " I says. " Another chef-d'oeuvre was, " On Tintock tap there is a mist, and in the mist there is a kist (a chest), and in the kist there is a cap (a wooden bowl), and in the cap there is a drap, tak' up the cap, and sup the drap, and set the cap on Tintock tap." This he could say, if I mistake not, five times without drawing breath. It was a favourite passage this, and he often threatened to treat it exegetically ; laughing heartily when I said, in that case, he would not have great trouble with the context, which in others cost him a good deal. His manners to ladies, and indeed to all women, was that of a courtly gentleman ; they could be roman- tic in their empressement and devotion, and I used to think Sir Philip Sydney, or Ariosto's knights and the Paladins of old, must have looked and moved as he did. He had great pleasure in the company of high- bred, refined, thoughtful women ; and he had a pecu- liar sympathy with the sufferings, the necessary mournfulness of women, and with all in their lot con- nected with the fruit of that forbidden tree — their Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 269 loneliness, the sorrows of their time, and their pangs in travail, their peculiar relation to their children. I think I hear him reading the words, " Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea " (as if it was the next thing to impossible), " she may forget, yet will not I forget thee." Indeed, to a man who saw so little of, and said so little to his own children, perhaps it may be because of all this, his sympathy for mothers under loss of children, his real suffering for their suffering, not only endeared him to them as their minister, their consoler, and gave him oppor- tunities of dropping in divine and saving truth and comfort, when the heart was full and soft, tender, and at his mercy, but it brought out in his only loss of this kind, the mingled depth, tenderness, and also the peremptoriness of his nature. In the case of the death of little Maggie — a child the very image of himself in face, lovely and pensive, and yet ready for any fun, with a keenness of affection that perilled everything on being loved, who must cling to some one and be clasped, made for a garden, for the first garden, not for the rough world, the child of his old age — this peculiar meeting of opposites was very marked. She was stricken with sudden ill- ness, malignant sore-throat; her mother was gone, and so she was to my father as a flower he had the sole keeping of ; and his joy in her wild mirth, his watching her childish moods of sadness, as if a shadow came over her young heaven, were themselves something to watch. Her delicate life made no struggle with disease ; it as it were declined to stay on such conditions. She therefore sunk at once and without much pain, her soul quick and unclouded, and her little forefinger playing to the last with my father's silvery curls, her eyes trying in vain to brighten his : — *b J Thou wert a dew-drop which the morn brings forth, Not fitted to be trailed along the soiling earth ; But at the touch of wrong, without a strife, Slips in a moment out of life." 270 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. His distress, his anguish at this stroke, was not only intense, it was in its essence permanent; he went mourning and looking for her all his days ; but after she was dead, that resolved will compacted him in an instant. It was on a Sabbath morning she died, and he was all day at church, not many yards from where lay her little corpse alone in the house. His colleague preached in the forenoon, and in the afternoon he took his turn, saying before beginning his discourse : — " It has pleased the Father of Lights to darken one of the lights of my dwelling — had the child lived I would have remained with her, but now I have thought it right to arise and come into the house of the Lord and worship." Such violence to one part of his nature by that in it which was supreme, injured him : it was like pulling up on the instant an express train ; the whole inner organization is minutely, though it may be invisibly hurt ; its molecular consti- tution damaged by the cruel stress and strain. Such things are not right ; they are a cruelty and injustice and injury from the soul to the body, its faithful slave, and they bring down, as in his case they too truly did, their own certain and specific retribution. A man who did not feel keenly might have preached ; a man whose whole nature was torn, shattered, and astonished as his was, had in a high sense no right so to use himself ; and when too late he opened his eyes to this. It was part of our old Scottish severe unsparing character — calm to coldness outside, burn- ing to fierceness, tender to agony within. I was saying how much my father enjoyed women's company. He liked to look on them, and watch them, listening * to their keen, unconnected, and unreason- 1 One day my mother, and her only sister, Agnes — mar- ried to James Aitken of Cullands, a man before his class and his time, for long the only Whig and Seceder laird in Peebles- shire, and with whom my father shared the Edinburgh Review from its beginning — the two sisters who were, the one to the other, as Martha was to Mary, sat talking of their household doings ; my aunt was great upon some things she could do ; my father looked up from his book, and said, " There is one thing, Mrs. Aitken, you cannot do — you cannot turn the heel Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 271 ing, but not unreasonable talk. Men's argument, or rather arguing, and above all debating, he disliked. He had no turn for it. He was not combative, much less contentious. He was, however, warlike. Any- thing that he could destroy, any falsehood or in- justice, he made for, not to discuss, but to expose and kill. He could not fence with his mind much less with his tongue, and had no love for the exploits of a nimble dialectic. He had no readiness either in thought or word for this ; his way was slowly to think out a subject, to get it well " bottomed," as Locke would say ; he was not careful as to recording the steps he took in their order, but the spirit of his mind was logical, as must be that of all minds who seek and find truth, for logic is nothing else than the arithmetic of thought ; having therefore thought it out, he proceeded to put it into formal expression. This he did so as never again to undo it. His mind seemed to want the wheels by which this is done, vestigia nulla retrorsum, and having stereotyped it, he was never weary of it ; it never lost its life and fresh- ness to him, and he delivered it as emphatically thirty years after it had been cast, as the first hour of its existence. I have said he was no swordsman, but he was a heavy shot ; he fired off his ball, compact, weighty, the maximum of substance in the minimum of bulk ; he put in double charge, pointed the muzzle, and fired, with what force and sharpness we all remember. If it hit, good; if not, all he could do was to load again, with the same ball, and in the same direction. You must come to him to be shot, at least you must stand still, for he had a want of mobility of mind in great questions. He could not stalk about the field like a sharp-shooter; his was a great sixty-eight pounder, and it was not much of a swivel. Thus it was that he rather dropped into the minds of others his authoritative assertions, and left them to breed of a stocking;" and he was right, he had noticed her make over this " kittle " turn to her mother. 272 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. conviction. If they gave them entrance and cherished them, they would soon find how full of primary truth they were, and how well they would serve them, as they had served him. With all this heavy artillery, somewhat slow and cumbrous, on great questions, he had no want, when he was speaking off-hand, of quick, snell remark, often witty and full of spirit, and often too unexpected, like lightning- — flashing, smiting and gone. In Church Courts this was very marked. On small ordinary matters, a word from him would settle a long discussion. He would, after lively, easy talk with his next neighbour, set him up to make a speech, which was conclusive. But on great ques- ti6ns he must move forward his great gun with much solemnity and effort, partly from his desire to say as much of the truth at once as he could, partly from the natural concentration and rapidity of his mind in action, as distinguished from his slowness when incu- bating, or in the process of thought, — and partly from a sort of self-consciousness — I might almost call it a compound of pride and nervous diffidence — which seldom left him. He desired to say it so that it might never need to be said again or otherwise by himself, or any one else. This strong personality, along with a prevailing love to be alone, and dwell with thoughts rather than with thinkers, pervaded his entire character. His religion was deeply personal, 1 not only as affecting himself, but as due to a personal God, and presented through the sacrifice and intercession of the God- man; and it was perhaps owing to his "conversa- tion " being so habitually in heaven — his social and affectionate desires filling themselves continually from "all the fulness of God," through living faith and l OV e — that he the less felt the need of giving and receiving human affection. I never knew any man who lived more truly under the power, and sometimes 1 In his own words, " A personal Deity is the soul of Natural Religion ; a personal Saviour — the real living Christ — is the soul of Revealed Religion." Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 273 under the shadow of the world to come. This world had to him little reality except as leading - to the next ; little interest, except as a time of probation and sen- tence. A child brought to him to be baptized was in his mind, and in his words, " a young immortal to be educated for eternity;" a birth was the beginning of what was never to end ; sin — his own and that of the race — was to him, as it must be to all men who can think, the great mystery, as it is the main curse of time. The idea of it — of its exceeding sinfulness — haunted and oppressed him. He used to say of John Foster, that this deep and intense, but sometimes narrow and grim thinker, had, in his study of the disease of the race, been, as it were, fascinated by its awful spell, so as almost to forget the remedy. This was not the case with himself. As you know, no man held more firmly to the objective reality of his religion — that it was founded upon fact. It was not the pole- star he lost sight of, or the compass he mistrusted ; it was the sea-worthiness of the vessel. His constitu- tional deficiency of hope, his sensibility to sin, made him not unfrequently stand in doubt of himself, of his sincerity and safety before God, and sometimes made existence — the being obliged to continue to be — a doubtful privilege. When oppressed with this feeling, — " the burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible world," the hurry of mankind out of this brief world into the un- changeable and endless next, — I have heard him, with deep feeling, repeat Andrew Marvell's strong lines : — " But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariots hurrying near; And yonder all before me lie Deserts of vast eternity." His living so much on books, and his strong personal attachment to men, as distinct from his adhesion to their principles and views, made him, as it were, live and commune with the dead — made him intimate, not merely with their thoughts, and the public events of 274 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. their lives, but with themselves — Augustine, Milton, Luther, Melanchthon, George Herbert, Baxter, Howe, Owen, Leighton, Barrow, Bunyan, Philip and Matthew Henry, Doddridge, Defoe, Marvel, Locke, Berkeley, Halliburton, Cowper, Gray, Johnson, Gib- bon, and David Hume, 1 Jortin, Boston, Bengel, Neander, &c, not to speak of the apostles, and above all, his chief friend the author of the Epistle to the Romans, whom he looked on as the greatest of men, — with all these he had personal relations as men, he cordialized with them. He had thought much more about them — would have had more to say to them had they met, than about or to any but a very few living men. 2 He delighted to possess books which 1 David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature he knew thoroughly, and read it carefully during his last illness. He used to say it not only was a miracle of intellectual and literary power for a man of twenty-eight, but contained the essence of all that was best on the philosophy of mind; "It's all there, if you will think it out." * This tendency was curiously seen in his love of portraits, especially of men whose works he had and liked. He often put portraits into his books, and he seemed to enjoy this way of realizing their authors ; and in exhibitions of pictures he was more taken up with what is usually and justly the most tiresome departments, the portraits, than with all else. He was not learned in engravings, and made no attempt at col- lecting them, so that the following list of portraits in his rooms shows his liking for the men much more than for the art which delineated them. Of course they by no means in- clude all his friends, ancient and modern, but they all were his friends : — Robert Hall — Dr. Carey — Melanchthon — Calvin — Pollok — Erasmus (very like "Uncle Ebenezer ") — John Knox — Dr. Waugh — John Milton (three all framed) — Dr. Dick — Dr. Hall — Luther (two) — Dr. Heugh — Dr. Mitchell — Dr. Balmer — Dr. Henderson — Dr. Wardlaw — Shakspere (a small oil paint- ing which he had since ever I remember) — Dugald Stewart — Dr. Innes — Dr. Smith, Biggar — the two Erskines and Mr. Fisher — Dr. John Taylor of Toronto — Dr. Chalmers — Mr. William Ellis — Rev. James Elles — J. B. Patterson — Vinet — Archibald M'Lean — Dr. John Erskine — Tholuck — John Pym — Gesenius — Professor Finlayson — Richard Baxter — Dr. Lawson — Dr. Peddie (two, and a copy of Joseph's noble bust); and they were thus all about him for no other reason than that he liked to look at and think of them through their countenances. Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 275 any of them might have held in their hands, on which they had written their names. He had a number of these, some very curious ; among- others, that wild soldier, man of fashion and wit among - the reformers, Ulric von Hiitten's autograph on Erasmus' beautiful folio Greek Testament, and John Howe's (spelt How) on the first edition of Milton's Speech on Unlicensed Printing. 1 He began collecting books when he was twelve, and he was collecting up to his last hours. 1 In a copy of Baxter's Life and Times, which he picked up at Maurice Ogle's shop in Glasgow, which had belonged to Anna, Countess of Argyll, besides her autograph, there is a most affecting and interesting note in that venerable lady's handwriting. It occurs on the page where Baxter brings a charge of want of veracity against her eldest and name- daughter, who was perverted to Popery. They are in a hand tremulous with age and feeling : — " I can say w' truth I neuer in all my lyff did hear hir ly, and what she said, if it was not trew, it was by others sugested to hir, as y* she wold embak on Wednesday. She belived she wold, bot thy took hir, alles ! from me who never did sie her mor. The minester of Cuper, Mr. John Magill, did sie hir at Paris in the convent. Said she was a knowing and vertuous person, and hed retined the living principels of our relidgon, which made him say it was good to grund young persons weel in ther relidgion, as she was one it appired weel grunded." The following is Lord Lindsay's letter, on seeing this re- markable marginal note : — Edinburgh, Douglas' Hotel, itth December, 1856. My dear Sir, — I owe you my sincerest thanks for your kindness in favouring me with a sight of the volume of Bax- ter's Life, which formerly belonged to my ancestrix, Anna, Countess of Argyll. The MS. note inserted by her in it re- specting her daughter is extremely interesting. I had always been under the impression that the daughter had died very shortly after her removal to France, but the contrary appears from Lady Argyll's memorandum. That memorandum throws also a pleasing light on the later life of Lady Anna, and forcibly illustrates the undying love and tenderness of the aged mother, who must have been very old when she penned it, the book having been printed as late as 1696. I am extremely obliged to you for communicating to me this new and interesting information. — Believe me, my dear Sir, your much obliged and faithful servant, Lindsay. John Brown, Esq., M.D. 276 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. He cared least for merely fine books, though he en- joyed, no one more so, fine type, good binding, and all the niceties of the book-fancier. What he liked were such books as were directly useful in his work, and such as he liked to live in the midst of; such, also, as illustrated any great philosophical, historical, or ecclesiastical epoch. His collection of Greek Testa- ments was, considering his means, of great extent and value, and he had a quite singular series of books, pamphlets, and documents, referring not merely to his own body — the Secession, with all its subdivisions and reunions — but to Nonconformity and Dissent everywhere, and, indeed, to human liberty, civil and religious, in every form, — for this, after the great truths, duties, and expectations of his faith, was the one master passion of his life — liberty in its greatest sense, the largest extent of individual and public spontaneity consistent with virtue and safety. He was in this as intense, persistent in his devotion, as Sydney, Locke, or old Hollis. For instance, his ad- miration of Lord Macaulay as a writer and a man of letters, an orator and a statesman, great as it was, was as nothing to his gratitude to him for having placed permanently on record, beyond all risk of ob- scuration or doubt, the doctrine of 1688 — the right and power of the English people to be their own law- givers, and to appoint their own magistrates, of whom the sovereign is the chief. His conviction of the sole right of God to be Lord of the conscience, and his sense of his own absolute religious independence of every one but his Maker, were the two elements in building up his beliefs on all church matters ; they were twin beliefs. Hence the simplicity and thoroughness of his principles. Sitting in the centre, he commanded the circumference. But I am straying out of my parish into yours. I only add to what you have said, that the longer he lived, the more did he insist upon it being not less true and not less important, that the Church must not inter- meddle with the State, than that the State must not Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 277 intermeddle with the Church. He used to say, " Go down into the world, with all its complications and confusions, with this double-edged weapon, and you can cut all the composite knots of Church and State." The element of God and of eternity predominates in the religious more than in the civil affairs of men, and thus far transcends them ; but the principle of mutual independence is equally applicable to each. All that statesmen, as such, have to do with religion, is to be themselves under its power; all that Christians, as such, have to do with the State, is to be good citizens. The fourth epoch of his personal life I would date from his second marriage. As I said before, no man was ever happier in his wives. They had much alike in nature, — only one could see the Divine wisdom of his first wife being his first, and his second his second ; each did best in her own place and time. His mar- riage with Miss Crum was a source of great happiness and good not only to himself, but to us his first children. She had been intimately known to us for many years, and was endeared to us long before we saw her, by her having been, as a child and girl, a great favourite of our own mother. The families of my grandfather Nimmo, and of the Crums, Ewings, and Maclaes, were very intimate. I have heard my father tell, that being out at Thornliebank with my mother, he asked her to take a walk with him to the Rouken, a romantic waterfall and glen up the burn. My mother thought they might take " Miss Mar- garet " with them, and so save appearances, and with Miss Crum, then a child of ten, holding my father's hand, away the three went ! So you may see that no one could be nearer to being our mother ; and she was curiously ingenious, and completely successful in gaining our affection and regard. I have, as a boy, a peculiarly pleasant re- membrance of her, having been at Thornliebank when about fourteen, and getting that impression of her gentle, kind, wise, calm, and happy nature — her 278 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. entire lovableness — which it was our privilege to see ministering so much to my father's comfort. That fortnight in 1824 or 1825 is still to me like the memory of some happy dream ; the old library, the big chair in which I huddled myself up for hours with the New Arabian Nights, and all the old-fashioned and unfor- gotten books I found there, the ample old garden, the wonders of machinery and skill going on in " the works," the large water-wheel going its stately rounds in the midst of its own darkness, the petrifac- tions I excavated in the bed of the burn, ammonites, &c. , and brought home to my museum ( !) the hos- pitable lady of the house, my hereditary friend, digni- fied, anxious and kind ; and above all, her only daughter who made me a sort of pet, and was always contriving some unexpected pleasure, — all this feels to me even now like something out of a book. My father's union with Miss Crum was not only one of the best blessings of his life, — it made him more of a blessing to others, than it is likely he would otherwise have been. By her cheerful, gracious ways, her love for society as distinguished from company, her gift of making every one happy and at ease when with her, and her tender compassion for all suffering, she in a measure won my father from himself and his books, to his own great good, and to the delight and benefit of us all. It was like sunshine and a glad sound in the house. She succeeded in what is called " drawing out " the inveterate solitary. Moreover, she encouraged and enabled him to give up a moiety of his ministerial labours, and thus to devote himself to the great work of his later years, the preparing for and giving to the press the results of his life's study of God's Word. We owe entirely to her that immense armamentarium libertatis, the third edition of his treatise on Civil Obedience. One other source of great happiness to my father by this marriage was the intercourse he had with the family at Thornliebank, deepened and endeared as this was by her unexpected and irreparable loss. But Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 279 on this I must not enlarge, nor on that death itself, the last thing in the world he ever feared — leaving him once more, after a brief happiness, and when he had still more reason to hope that he would have " grown old with her, leaning on her faithful bosom. " The urn was again empty — and the only word was vale! he was once more viduus, bereft. " God gives us love ; something to love He lends us ; but, when love is grown To ripeness, that on which it throve Falls off, and love is left alone. This is the curse of time " — But Still " 'Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all." It was no easy matter to get him from home and away from his books. But once off, he always en- joyed himself, — especially in his visits to Thornlie- bank, Busby, Crofthead, Biggar, and Melrose. He was very fond of preaching on these occasions, and his services were always peculiarly impressive. He spoke more slowly and with less vehemence than in his own pulpit, and, as I often told him, with all the more effect. When driving about Biggar, or in the neighbourhood of Langrig, he was full of the past, showing how keenly, with all his outward reserve, he had observed and felt. He had a quite peculiar inter- est in his three flocks, keeping his eye on all their members, through long years of absence. His love for his people and for his " body " was a special love ; and his knowledge of the Secession, through all its many divisions and unions, — his know- ledge, not only of its public history, with its immense controversial and occasional literature, but of the lives and peculiarities of its ministers, — was of the most minute and curious kind. He loved all mankind, and specially such as were of " the household of faith;" and he longed for the time when, as there was one Shepherd, there would be but one sheepfold ; but he 280 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. gloried in being- not only a Seceder, but a Burgher ; and he often said, that take them all in all, he knew no body of professing Christians in any country or in any time, worthier of all honour than that which was founded by the Four Brethren, not only as God-fearing, God-serving men, but as members of civil society ; men who on every occasion were found on the side of liberty and order, truth and justice. He used to say he believed there was hardly a Tory in the Synod, and that no one but He whose service is perfect freedom, knew the public good done, and the public evil averted, by the lives and the principles, and when need was, by the votes of such men, all of whom were in the working classes, or in the lower half of the middle. The great Whig leaders knew this, and could always depend on the Seceders. There is no worthy portrait of my father in his prime. I believe no man was ever more victimized in the way of being asked to " sit;" indeed, it was probably from so many of them being of this kind, that the opportunity of securing a really good one was lost. The best — the one portrait of his habitual expression — is Mr. Harvey's, done for Mr. Crum of Busby : it was taken when he was failing, but it is an excellent likeness as well as a noble picture; such a picture as one would buy without knowing anything of the subject. So true it is, that imaginative painters, men gifted and accustomed to render their own ideal conceptions in form and colour, grasp and impress on their canvas the features of real men more to the quick, more faithfully as to the central qualities of the man, than professed portrait painters. Steell's bust is beautiful, but it is wanting in ex- pression. Slater's, though rude, is better. Angus Fletcher's has much of his air, but is too much like a Grecian God. There is a miniature by Mrs. Robert- son of London, belonging to my sister, Mrs. Young, which I always liked, though more like a gay, brilliant French Abb6, than the Seceder minister of Rose Street, as he then was. It gives, however, more of Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 281 his exquisite brightness and spirit, the dancing light in his dark eyes, and his smile, when pleased and desiring to please, than any other. I have a drawing by Mr. Harvey, done from my father for his picture of the Minister's Visit, which I value very much, as giving the force and depth, the momentum, so to speak, of his serious look. He is sitting in a cottar's house, reading the Bible to an old bed-ridden woman, the farm servants gathered round to get his word. Mungo Burton painted a good portrait which my brother William has ; from his being drawn in a black neckcloth, and standing, he looks as he some- times did, more like a member of Parliament than a clergyman. The print from this is good and very scarce. Of Photographs, I like D. O. Hill's best, in which he is represented as shaking hands with the (invisible) Free Church — it is full of his earnest, cordial power; that by Tunny, from which the beau- tiful engraving by Lumb Stocks in this Memoir was taken, is very like what he was about a year and a half before his death. All the other portraits, as far as I can remember, are worthless and worse, missing entirely the true expression. He was very difficult to take, partly because he was so full of what may be called spiritual beauty, evanescent, ever changing, and requiring the highest kind of genius to fix it; and partly from his own fault, for he thought it was necessary to be lively, or rather to try to be so to his volunteering artist, and the consequence was, his giving them, as his habitual expression, one which was rare, and in this particular case more made than born. The time when I would have liked his look to have been perpetuated, was that of all others the least likely, or indeed possible ; — it was, when after ad- ministering the Sacrament to his people, and having solemnized every one, and been himself profoundly moved by that Divine, everlasting memorial, he left the elders' seat and returned to the pulpit, and after giving out the psalm, sat down wearied and satisfied. 282 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. filled with devout gratitude to his Master — his face pale, and his dark eyes looking- out upon us all, his whole countenance radiant and subdued. Any like- ness of him in this state, more like that of the proto- martyr, when his face was as that of an angel, than anything I ever beheld, would have made one feel what it is so impossible otherwise to convey, — the mingled sweetness, dignity, and beauty of his face. When it was winter, and the church darkening, and the lights at the pulpit were lighted so as to fall upon his face and throw the rest of the vast assemblage into deeper shadow, the effect of his countenance was something never to forget. He was more a man of power than of genius in the ordinary sense. His imagination was not a primary power ; it was not originative, though in a quite un- common degree receptive, having the capacity of real- izing the imaginations of others, and through them bodying forth the unseen. When exalted and urged by the understanding, and heated by the affections, it burst out with great force, but always as servant, not master. But if he had no one faculty that might be, to use the loose words of common speech, original, he was so as a whole, — such a man as stood alone. No one ever mistook his look, or would, had they been blind, have mistaken his voice or words, for those of any one else, or any one else's for his. His mental characteristics, if I may venture on such ground, were clearness and vigour, intensity, fervour, 1 concentration, penetration, and persever- 1 This earnestness of nature pervaded all his exercises. A man of great capacity and culture, with a head like Benjamin Franklin's, an avowed unbeliever in Christianity, came every Sunday afternoon, for many years, to hear him. I remember his look well, as if interested, but not impressed. He was often asked by his friends why he went when he didn't believe one word of what he heard. " Neither I do, but I like to hear and see a man earnest once a week, about anything." It is related of David Hume, that having heard my grand- father preach, he said, " That's the man for me, he means what he says, he speaks as if Jesus Christ was at his elbow." Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 283 ance, — more of depth than width. 1 The moral con- ditions under which he lived were the love, the pur- 1 The following note from the pen to which we owe " St. Paul's Thorn in the Flesh " is admirable, both for its reference to my father, and its own beauty and truth. " One instance of his imperfect discernment of associa- tions of thought that were not of a purely logical character was afforded, we used to think, by the decided and almost con- temptuous manner in which he always rejected the theory of what is called the double interpretation of prophecy. This, of course, is not the place to discuss whether he was abso- lutely right or wrong in his opinion. The subject, however, is one of somewhat curious interest, and it has also a strictly literary as well as a theological aspect, and what we have to say about it shall relate exclusively to the former. When Dr. Brown then said, as he was accustomed in his strong way to do, that ' if prophecy was capable of two senses, it was impossible it could have any sense at all,' it is plain, we think, that he forgot the specific character of prophetic literature, viz., its being in the highest degree poetic. Now every one knows that poetry of a very elevated cast almost invariably possesses great breadth, variety, we may say multiplicity of meaning. Its very excellence consists in its being capable of two, three, or many meanings and applications. Take, for example, these familiar lines in the ' Midsummer Night's Dream : ' — ' Ah me ! for aught that ever I could read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth But either it was different in blood, Or else misgraffed in respect of years, Or else it stood upon the choice of friends ; Or if there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, Making it momentary as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath time to say " Behold ! " The jaws of darkness do devour it up ; So quick bright things come to confusion.' We remember once quoting these lines to a lady, and being rather taken aback by her remark, ' They are very beautiful, but I don't think they are true.' We really had forgot for the moment the straightforward, matter-of-fact sense of which they are capable, and were not adverting to the possibility of their being understood to mean that — nothing but love-crosses are going, and that no tolerable amount of comfort or happi- ness is to be found in the life matrimonial, or in any of the approaches towards it. Every intelligent student of Shak- spere's, however, will at once feel that the poet's mind 284 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. suit, and the practice of truth in everything; strength and depth, rather than external warmth of affection ; fidelity to principles and to friends. He used often to speak of the moral obligations laid upon every man to think truly, as well as to speak and act truly, and said that much intellectual demoralization and ruin resulted from neglecting this. He was absolutely tolerant of all difference of opinion, so that it was sincere ; and this was all the more remarkable from his being the opposite of an indifferentist, being very strong in his own convictions, holding them keenly, even passionately, while, from the structure of his mind, he was somehow deficient in comprehending, much less of sympathizing with the opinions of men who greatly differed from him. This made his hom- age to entire freedom of thought all the more genuine and rare. In the region of theological thought he was scientific, systematic, and authoritative, rather than philosophical and speculative. He held so strongly that the Christian religion was mainly a religion of facts, that he perhaps allowed too little to its also being a philosophy that was ready to meet, out of its own essence and its ever unfolding powers, any new form of unbelief, disbelief, or misbelief, and must front itself to them as they moved up. With devotional feeling — with everything that speedily passes away from the idea with which he starts, and becomes merged into a far wider theme, viz., in the dis- enchantment to which all lofty imaginations are liable, the disappointment to which all extravagant earthly hopes and wishes are doomed. This, in fact, is distinctly expressed in the last line, and in this sense alone can the words be regarded as at all touching or impressive. Sudden expansions and transitions of thought, then, are nothing more than what is common to all poetry ; and when we find the Hebrew bards, in their prophetic songs, mingling in the closest conjunction the anticipations of the glories of Solomon's reign, or the happy prospects of a return from Babylon, with the higher glory and happiness of Messiah's advent, such transitions of thought are in perfect accordance with the ordinary laws of poetry, and ought not to perplex even the most unimaginative student of the Bible." Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 285 showed reverence and godly fear — he cordialized wherever and in whomsoever it was found, — Pagan, or Christian, Romanist or Protestant, bond or free; and while he disliked, and had indeed a positive anti- pathy to intellectual mysticism, he had a great know- ledge of and relish for such writers as Dr. Henry More, Culverwel, Scougall, Madame Guyon, whom (besides their other qualities) I may perhaps be allowed to call affectionate mystics, and for such poets as Herbert and Vaughan, whose poetry was pious, and their piety poetic. As I have said, he was perhaps too impatient of all obscure thinking, from not considering that on certain subjects, necessarily in their substance, and on the skirts of all subjects, obscurity and vagueness, difficulty and uncertainty, are inherent, and must therefore appear in their treatment. Men who rejoiced in making clear things obscure, and plain things the reverse, he could not abide, and spoke with some contempt of those who were original merely from their standing on their heads, and tall from walking upon stilts. As you have truly said, his character mellowed and toned down in his later years, without in any way losing its own individuality, and its clear, vigorous, un- flinching perception of and addiction to principles. His affectionate ways with his students were often very curious : he contrived to get at their hearts, and find out all their family and local specialities, in a sort of short-hand way, and he never forgot them in after life; and watching him with them at tea, speaking his mind freely and often jocularly upon all sorts of sub- jects, one got a glimpse of that union of opposites which made him so much what he was — he gave out far more liberally to them the riches of his learning and the deep thoughts of his heart, than he ever did among his full-grown brethren. It was like the flush of an Arctic summer, blossoming all over, out of and into the stillness, the loneliness, and the chill rigour of winter. Though authoritative in his class without any effort, he was indulgent to everything 286 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. but conceit, slovenliness of mind and body, irrever- ence, and above all handling the Word of God deceit- fully. On one occasion a student having delivered in the Hall a discourse tinged with Arminianism, he said, " That may be the gospel according to Dr. Macknight, or the gospel according to Dr. Taylor of Norwich, but it is not the gospel according to the Apostle Paul ; and if I thought the sentiments ex- pressed were his own, if I had not thought he has taken his thoughts from commentators without care- fully considering them, I would think it my duty to him and to the church to make him no longer a student of divinity here. " He was often unconsciously severe, from his saying exactly what he felt. On a student's ending his discourse, his only criticism was, " the strongest characteristic of this discourse is weakness," and feeling that this was really all he had to say, he ended. A young gentleman on very good terms with himself, stood up to pray with his hands in his pockets, and among other things he put up a petition he might " be delivered from the fear of man, which bringeth a snare;" my father's only remark was that there was part of his prayer which seemed to be granted before it was asked. But he was always unwilling to criticise prayer, feeling it to be too sacred, and as it were beyond his province, except to deliver the true principles of all prayer, which he used to say were admirably given in the Shorter Catechism — " Prayer is an offering up of the desires of the heart to God, for things agreeable to His will, in the name of Christ ; with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of His mercies. " For the " heroic " old man of Haddington my father had a peculiar reverence, as indeed we all have ■ — as well we may. He was our king, the founder of our dynasty; we dated from him, and he was " hedged " accordingly by a certain sacredness or "divinity." I well remember with what surprise and pride I found myself asked by a blacksmith's Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 287 wife in a remote hamlet among the hop gardens of Kent, if I was " the son of the Self-interpreting Bible." I possess, as an heirloom, the New Testa- ment which my father fondly regarded as the one his grandfather, when a herd laddie, got from the Pro- fessor who heard him ask for it, and promised him it if he could read a verse ; and he has in his beautiful small hand written in it what follows : — " He (John Brown of Haddington) had now acquired so much of Greek as encouraged him to hope that he might at length be prepared to reap the richest of all rewards which classical learning could confer on him, the capacity of reading in the original tongue the blessed New Testament of our Lord and Saviour. Full of this hope, he became anxious to possess a copy of the invaluable volume. One night, having committed the charge of his sheep to a companion, he set out on a midnight journey to St. Andrews, a distance of twenty-four miles. He reached his destination in the morning, and went to the bookseller's shop asking for a copy of the Greek New Testament. The master of the shop, surprised at such a request from a shepherd boy, was disposed to make game of him. Some of the professors coming into the shop ques- tioned the lad about his employment and studies. After hearing his tale, one of them desired the book- seller to bring the volume. He did so, and drawing it down, said, ' Boy, read this, and you shall have it for nothing.' The boy did so, acquitted himself to the admiration of his judges, and carried off his Testament, and when the evening arrived, was study- ing it in the midst of his flock on the braes of Abernethy. " — Memoir of Rev. John Brown of Had- dington, by Rev. J. B. Patterson. " There is reason to believe this is the New Testa- ment referred to. The name on the opposite page was written on the fly-leaf. It is obviously the writing of a boy, and bears a resemblance to Mr. Brown's handwriting in mature life. It is imperfect, wanting a great part of the Gospel of Matthew. The auto- I / 288 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. graph at the end is that of his son, Thomas, when a youth at college, afterwards Rev. Dr. Thomas Brown of Dalkeith.— J. B." I doubt not my father regarded this little worn old book, the sword of the Spirit which his ancestor so nobly won, and wore, and warred with, with not less honest veneration and pride than does his dear friend James Douglas of Cavers the Percy pennon borne away at Otterbourne. When I read, in Uncle William's admirable Life of his father, his own simple story of his early life — his loss of father and mother before he was eleven, his discovering (as true a dis- covery as Dr. Young's of the characters of the Rosetta stone, or Rawlinson's of the cuneiform letters) the Greek characters, his defence of himself against the astonishing and base charge of getting his learning from the devil (that shrewd personage would not have employed him on the Greek Testament), his eager, indomitable study, his running miles to and back again to hear a sermon after folding his sheep at noon, his keeping his family creditably on never more than 50Z. , and for long on 40L a year, giving largely in charity, and never wanting, as he said, " lying money " — when I think of all this, I feel what a strong, independent, manly nature he must have had. We all know his saintly character, his devotion to learning, and to the work of preaching and teaching ; but he seems to have been, like most complete men, full of humour and keen wit. Some of his snell say- ings are still remembered. A lad of an excitable temperament waited on him, and informed him he wished to be a preacher of the gospel. My great- grandfather, finding him as weak in intellect as he was strong in conceit, advised him to continue in his present vocation. The young man said, " But I wish to preach and glorify God." " My young friend, a man may glorify God making broom besoms ; stick to' your trade, and glorify God by your walk and conversation." The late Dr. Husband of Dunfermline called on Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 289 him when he was preparing to set out for Gifford, and was beginning to ask him some questions as to the place grace held in the Divine economy. " Come away wi' me, and I'll expound that; but when I'm speaking, look you after my feet." They got upon a rough bit of common, and the eager and full- minded old man was in the midst of his unfolding the Divine scheme, and his student was drinking in his words, and forgetting his part of the bargain. His master stumbled and fell, and getting up, somewhat sharply said, " James, the grace o' God can do much, but it canna gi'e a man common sense;" which is as good theology as sense. A scoffing blacksmith seeing him jogging up to a house near the smithy on his pony, which was halting, said to him, " Mr. Brown, ye're in the Scripture line the day — 'the legs o' the lame are not equal.'" " So is a parable in the mouth of a fool." On his coming to Haddington, there was one man who held out against his " call." Mr. Brown meet- ing him when they could not avoid each other, the non-content said, " Ye see, sir, I canna say what I * dinna think, and I think ye're ower young and inex- perienced for this charge." " So I think too, David, but it would never do for you and me to gang in the face o' the hale congregation!" The following is a singular illustration of the pre- vailing dark and severe tone of the religious teaching of that time, and also of its strength : — A poor old woman, of great worth and excellent understanding, in whose conversation Mr. Brown took much pleasure, was on her death-bed. Wishing to try her faith, he said to her, " Janet, what would you say if, after all He has done for you, God should let you drop into hell?" " E'en's (even as) He likes; if He does, He'll lose mair than I'll do." There is something not less than sublime in this reply. Than my grandfather and " Uncle Ebenezer," no two brothers could be more different in nature or more united in affection. My grandfather was a man K 290 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. of great natural good sense, well read and well know- ledged, easy but not indolent, never overflowing but never empty, homely but dignified, and fuller of love to all sentient creatures than any other human being I ever knew. I had, when a boy of ten, two rabbits, Oscar and Livia : why so named is a secret I have lost ; perhaps it was an Ossianic union of the Roman with the Gael. Oscar was a broad-nosed, manly, rather brusque husband, who used to snort when angry, and bite too; Livia was a thin-faced, meek, and I fear, deceitfullish wife, who could smile, and then bite. One evening I had lifted both these worthies, by the ears of course, and was taking them from their clover to their beds, when my grandfather, who had been walking out in the cool of the evening, met me. I had just kissed the two creatures, out of mingled love to them, and pleasure at having caught them without much trouble. He took me by the chin, and kissed me, and then Oscar and Livia ! Wonder- ful man, I thought, and still think ! doubtless he had seen me in my private fondness, and wished to please me. He was for ever doing good in his quiet yet earnest way. Not only on Sunday when he preached solid gospel sermons, full of quaint familiar expressions, such as I fear few of my readers could take up, full of solemn, affectionate appeals, full of his own sim- plicity and love, the Monday also found him ready with his everyday gospel. If he met a drover from Lochaber who had crossed the Campsie Hills, and was making across Carnwath Moor to the Calstane Slap, and thence into England by the drove-road, he accosted him with a friendly smile, — gave him a reasonable tract, and dropped into him some words of Divine truth. He was thus continually doing good. Go where he might, he had his message to every one ; to a servant lass, to a poor wanderer on the bleak streets, to gentle and simple — he flowed for ever pleno rivo. Uncle Ebenezer, on the other hand, flowed per Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 291 saltum; he was always good and saintly, but he was great once a week ; six days he brooded over his mes- sage, was silent, withdrawn, self-involved ; on the Sabbath, that downcast, almost timid man, who shunned men, the instant he was in the pulpit, stood up a son of thunder. Such a voice ! such a piercing eye ! such an inevitable forefinger, held out trembling with the terrors of the Lord ; such a power of asking questions and letting them fall deep into the hearts of his hearers, and then answering them himself, with an " ah, sirs !" that thrilled and quivered from him to them. I remember him astonishing us all with a sudden burst. It was a sermon upon the apparent plus of evil in this world, and he had driven himself and us all to despair — so much sin, so much misery — when, taking advantage of the chapter he had read, the account of the uproar at Ephesus in the Theatre, he said, " Ah, sirs ! what if some of the men who, for ' about the space of two hours,' cried out, ' Great is Diana of the Ephesians,' have for the space of eighteen hundred years and more been crying day and night, ' Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are all thy ways, thou King of saints ; who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou only art holy.' " You have doubtless heard of the story of Lord Brougham going to hear him. It is very character- istic, and as I had it from Mrs. Cuninghame, who was present, I may be allowed to tell it. Brougham and Denman were on a visit to James Stuart of Dun- earn, about the time of the Queen's trial. They had asked Stuart where they should go to church ; he said he would take them to a Seceder minister at Inver- keithing. They went, and as Mr. Stuart had de- scribed the saintly old man, Brougham said he would like to be introduced to him, and arriving before service time, Mr. Stuart called, and left a message that some gentlemen wished to see him. The answer was that " Maister " Brown saw nobody before divine 292 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. worship. He then sent in Brougham and Denman's names. " Mr. Brown's compliments to Mr. Stuart, and he sees nobody before sermon," and in a few minutes out came the stooping shy old man, and passed them, unconscious of their presence. They sat in the front gallery, and he preached a faithful sermon, full of fire and of native force. They came away greatly moved, and each wrote to Lord Jeffrey to lose not a week in coming to hear the greatest natural orator they had ever heard. Jeffrey came next Sunday, and often after declared he never heard such words, such a sacred, untaught gift of speech. Nothing was more beautiful than my father's admira- tion and emotion when listening to his uncle's rapt passages, or than his childlike faith in my father's exegetical prowess. He used to have a list of difficult passages ready for " my nephew," and the moment the oracle gave a decision, the old man asked him to repeat it, and then took a permanent note of it, and would assuredly preach it some day with his own proper unction and power. One story of him I must give ; my father, who heard it not long before his own death, was delighted with it, and for some days repeated it to every one. Uncle Ebenezer, with all his mildness and general complaisance, was, like most of the Browns, tenax propositi, firm to obstinacy. He had established a week-day sermon at the North Ferry, about two miles from his own town, Inver- keithing. It was, I think, on the Tuesdays. It was winter, and a wild, drifting, and dangerous day; his daughters — his wife was dead — besought him not to go; he smiled vaguely, but continued getting into his big-coat. Nothing would stay him, and away he and the pony stumbled through the dumb and blinding snow. He was half-way on his journey, and had got into the sermon he was going to preach, and was utterly insensible to the outward storm : his pony getting his feet balled, staggered about, and at last upset his master and himself into the ditch at the roadside. The feeble, heedless, rapt old man might Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 293 have perished there, had not some carters, bringing up whisky casks from the Ferry, seen the catastrophe, and rushed up, raising him, and dichtin' him, with much commiseration and blunt speech — " Puir auld man, what brocht ye here in sic a day?" There they were, a rough crew, surrounding the saintly man, some putting on his hat, sorting and cheering him, and others knocking the balls off the pony's feet, and stuffing them with grease. He was most polite and grateful, and one of these cordial ruffians having pierced a cask, brought him a horn of whisky, and said, " Tak that, it'll hearten ye." He took the horn, and bowing to them, said," Sirs, let us give thanks !" and there, by the road-side, in the drift and storm, with these wild fellows, he asked a blessing on it, and for his kind deliverers, and took a tasting of the horn. The men cried like children. They lifted him on his pony, one going with him, and when the rest arrived in Inverkeithing, they repeated the story to everybody, and broke down in tears whenever they came to the blessing. " And to think o' askin' a blessin' on a tass o' whisky!" Next Presbytery day, after the ordinary business was over, he rose up — he seldom spoke — and said, " Moderator, I have something personal to myself to say. I have often said, that real kindness belongs only to true Christians, but " — and then he told the story of these men ; " but more true kindness I never experienced than from these lads. They may have had the grace of God, I don't know; but I never mean again to be so positive in speaking of this matter." When he was on a missionary tour in the north, he one morning met a band of Highland shearers on their way to the harvest ; he asked them to stop and hear the word of God. They said they could not, as they had their wages to work for. He offered them what they said they would lose ; to this they agreed, and he paid them, and closing his eyes engaged in prayer; when he had ended, he looked up, and his congregation had vanished ! His shrewd brother 294 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. Thomas, to whom he complained of this faithlessness, said, " Eben, the next time ye pay folk to hear you preach, keep your eyes open, and pay them when you are done." I remember, on another occasion, in Bristo Church, with an immense audience, he had been going- over the Scripture accounts of great sinners repenting and turning to God, repeating their names, from Manasseh onwards. He seemed to have closed the record, when, fixing his eyes on the end of the central passage, he called out abruptly, " I see a man !" Every one looked to that point — " I see a man of Tarsus; and he says, Make mention of me !" It must not be supposed that the discourses of " Uncle Ebenezer," with these abrupt appeals and sudden starts, were unwritten or extempore ; they were carefully composed and written out, — only these flashes of thought and passion came on him suddenly when writing, and were therefore quite natural when delivered — they came on him again. The Rev. John Belfrage, M.D., had more power over my father's actions and his relations to the world, than any other of his friends : over his thoughts and convictions proper, not much, — few living men had, and even among the mighty dead, he called no man master. He used to say that the three master intellects devoted to the study of divine truth since the apostles, were Augustine, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards ; but that even they were only pritni inter pares, — this by the bye. On all that concerned his outward life as a public teacher, as a father, and as a member of society, he consulted Dr. Belfrage, and was swayed greatly by his judgment, as, for instance, the choice of a pro- fession for myself, his second marriage, &c. He knew him to be his true friend, and not only wise and honest, but pre-eminently a man of affairs, capax rerum. Dr. Belfrage was a great man in posse, if ever I saw one, — " a village Hampden." Greatness was of his essence ; nothing paltry, nothing second- ary, nothing untrue. Large in body, large and Letter to John Cairns, D.D. 295 handsome in face, lofty in manner to his equals or superiors; 1 homely, familiar, cordial with the young' and the poor, — I never met with a more truly roya3 nature — more native and endued to rule, guide, and benefit mankind. He was for ever scheming for the good of others, and chiefly in the way of helping them to help themselves. From a curious want of ambition — his desire for advancement was for that of his friends, not for his own, and here he was ambitious and zealous enough, — from non-concentra- tion of his faculties in early life, and from an affection of the heart which ultimately killed him — it was too big for his body, and, under the relentless hydrostatic law, at last shattered the tabernacle it moved, like a steam-engine too powerful for the vessel it finds itself in, — his mental heart also was too big for his happi- ness, — from these causes, along with a love for gar- dening, which was a passion, and an inherited com- petency, which took away what John Hunter calls "the stimulus of necessity," you may understand how this remarkable man — instead of being a Prime Minister, a Lord Chancellor, or a Dr. Gregory, a George Stephenson, or likeliest of all, a John Howard, without some of his weaknesses, lived and died minis- ter of the small congregation of Slateford, near Edin- burgh. It is also true that he was a physician, and an energetic and successful one, and got rid of some of his love of doing good to and managing human beings in this way ; he was also an oracle in his dis- trict, to whom many had the wisdom to go to take as well as ask advice, and who was never weary of entering into the most minute details, and taking endless pains, being like Dr. Chalmers a strong be- liever in " the power of littles." It would be out of 1 On one occasion, Mr. Hall of Kelso, an excellent but very odd man, in whom the ego was very strong, and who, if he had been a Spaniard, would, to adopt Coleridge's story, have taken off or touched his hat whenever he spoke of him- self, met Dr. Belfrage in the lobby of the Synod, and drawing himself up as he passed, he muttered, "high and michty 1" " There's a pair of us, Mr. Hall." 296 Letter to John Cairns, D.D. place, thoug-h it would be not uninteresting, to tell how this great resident power — this strong will and authority, this capacious, clear, and beneficent in- tellect —