FOOTNOTES

FOOTNOTESMany good and fine things have been said of this wonderful 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:—“… Humor, wild wit,Quips, cranks, puns, sneers,—with clear sweet thought profound;—And stinging jests, with honey for the wound,”—The subtlest lines ofALLfine powers, splitTo their last films, then marvellously spunIn magic web, whose million hues areONE!”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 solemnity; I dare say, 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 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 photography), in the corner of which he had written, with a hand trembling with age and fun, “Adam’s-sunfecit”—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 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 preceptor, 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, particularly 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 feeling may be imagined when the doctor finally returned it to his own pocket.ReturnIt is not easy giving this look by one word; it was expressive of her being so much of her life alone.ReturnA Highland game-keeper, when asked why a certain terrier, of singular pluck, was so much more solemn than the other dogs, said, “Oh, Sir, life’s full o’ sairiousness to him—he just never can get enuff o’ fechtin’.”ReturnFuller 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 their exercise. Dr. Charles Stewart, of Dunearn, whose rare gifts and graces as a physician, a divine, a scholar, and a gentleman, 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 abuirdlyman come along the passage, he would instinctively draw himself up, measure his imaginary antagonist, and forecast how he would deal with him, his hands meanwhile condensing into fists, and tending to “square.” He must have been a hard hitter if he boxed as he preached—what “The Fancy” would call “an ugly customer.”ReturnToby 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 remembering—“Ay, aince.” “What on?” “Cauld mutton!”ReturnInThe Dog, by Stonehenge, an excellent book, there is a woodcut 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,from kindness of heart”—a suspicion, my dear “Stonehenge,” which is true, and shows your own “kindness of heart,” as well as sense.ReturnThe 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 discoverer 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.ReturnAs 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’sἀγχίνοιαandεὐστοχία. The latter of these,εὐστοχία, Aristotle mentions incidentally when treating ofεὐβουλία, or good deliberation.Eth. Nic.bk. vi. ch. 9. Good deliberation, he says, is notεὐστοχία, 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 thatἀγχίνοιαis a sort ofεὐστοχία. But he speaks ofἀγχίνοιαmore fully inAna. Post.i. 34:—‘Άγχίνοιαis a sort of 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 conversing 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 observations confused and perplexing by reducing them to his logical formula.“The derivation of the words will confirm this view.Εὐστοχίαis a hitting themarksuccessfully, 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 (ἄνευ τε γὰρ λογου), 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 guessing. 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 ofεὐστοχία.“Άγχίνοια, on the other hand, is anearness 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 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 intellectual it is ready wit. It is a sort of shorter or more limitedεὐστοχία. It is more of a natural gift thanεὐστοχία, 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.Εὐστοχίαis more akin to genius,ἀγχίνοιαto practical common sense.”ReturnA 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 coming 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 way. “Tibbie” is now living at Thankerton.ReturnThis sofa, which was henceforward sacred in 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.ReturnI have been told thatoncein the course of the sermon his voice trembled, and many feared he was about to break down.ReturnThere 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,” “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 noo.”ReturnOn a low chest of drawers in this room there lay for many years my mother’s parasol, by his orders—I daresay, for long, the only one in Biggar.ReturnHis reading aloud of everything from John Gilpin to John Howe was a fine and high art, or rather gift. Henderson could not have given“The dinner waits, and we are tired;”Says Gilpin, “So am I,”better; and to hear him sounding 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 unsearchable 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 of profound religious feeling, of which they were the utterance; and he rejoiced over the warlike airs and choruses of “Judas Maccabæus.” You have recorded his estimate of the religious nature of him of theterribile via; he said it was a relief to his mind to know that such a mighty genius walked humbly with his God.ReturnWith the practices of this last worthy, when carried on moderately, and for the sport’s sake, he had a special sympathy.ReturnI 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.”ReturnHe was curiously destitute of all literary ambition or show; like thecactusin the desert, always plump, always taking in the dew of heaven, and caring little to give it out. He wrote many papers in theRepositoryandMonitor, an acute and clever tract on the Voluntary controversy, entitledCalm 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 Arbuthnot. 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 thisneveris best in a book; he is always greater than his work.ReturnWell 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 spurr’d 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.”ReturnAfter a tight discussion between these two attached friends, Dr. Wardlaw said, “Well, I can’t answer you, but fish I must and shall.”ReturnHe gave us all the education we got at Biggar.ReturnOne day my mother, and her only sister, Agnes—married to James Aitken of Cullands, a man before his class and his time, for long the only Whig and Seceder laird in Peeblesshire, and with whom my father shared theEdinburgh Reviewfrom 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 of a stocking;” and he was right, he had noticed her make over this “kittle” turn to her mother.ReturnIn 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.”ReturnDavid Hume’sTreatise on Human Naturehe 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.”ReturnThis 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 collecting 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 include all his friends, ancient and modern, but they allwerehis friends:—Robert Hall—Dr. Carey—Melancthon—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—Shakspeare (a small oil painting 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.ReturnIn 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^t 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^t she wold embak on Wedensday. 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 remarkable marginal note:—Edinburgh, Douglas’ Hotel,26th December 1856.My Dear Sir,—I owe you my sincerest thanks for your kindness in favoring me with a sight of the volume of Baxter’s Life, which formerly belonged to my ancestrix, Anna, Countess of Argyll. The MS. note inserted by her in it respecting 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 very interesting information.—Believe me, my dear Sir, your much obliged and faithful servant,Lindsay.John Brown,Esq.M.D.ReturnThis 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 to see a man earnest once a week, about anything.” It is related of David Hume, that having heard my great-grandfather preach, he said, “That’s the man for me, he means what he says, he speaks as if Jesus Christ was at his elbow.”ReturnThe 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 associations of thought that were not of a purely logical character was afforded, we used to think, by the decided and almost contemptuous 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 absolutely 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 power 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 happiness is to be found in the life matrimonial, or in any of the approaches towards it. Every intelligent student of Shakspeare’s, however, will at once feel that the poet’s mind speedily passes away from the idea with which he starts, and becomes merged in a far wider theme, viz., in the disenchantment 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 he 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.”ReturnOn one occasion, Mr. Hall of Kelso, an excellent but very odd man, in whom theegowas 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 himself, met Dr. Belfrage in the lobby of the Synod, and drawing himself up as he passed, he muttered, “high and michty!” “There’s a pair of us, Mr. Hall.”ReturnSuch an occasional paroxysm of eloquence is thus described by Dr. Cairns:—“At certain irregular intervals, when the loftier themes of the gospel ministry were to be handled, his manner underwent a transformation which was startling, and even electrical. He became rapt and excited as with new inspiration; his utterance grew thick and rapid; his voice trembled and faltered with emotion; his eye gleamed with a wild unearthly lustre, in which his countenance shared; and his whole frame heaved to and fro, as if each glowing thought and vivid figure that followed in quick succession were only a fragment of some greater revelation which he panted to overtake. The writer of this notice has witnessed nothing similar in any preacher, and numbers the effects of a passage which he once heard upon the scenes and exercises of the heavenly world among his most thrilling recollections of sacred oratory.”—Memoir prefixed to posthumous volume of Discourses.ReturnJames i. 15, 16. It is plain that “do not err” should have been in verse 15th.Return“The youth Story was in all respects healthy, and even robust; he died of overwork, or rather, as I understand, of a two years’ almost total want of exercise, which it was impossible to induce him to take.’—Arnold’s Report to the Committee of Council on Education, 1860.ReturnEdinburgh: printed privately, 1859.ReturnMiss Graham’s genealogy in connection with Claverhouse—the same who was killed at Killiecrankie—is as follows:—John Graham of Claverhouse married the Honorable Jean Cochrane, daughter of William Lord Cochrane, eldest son of the first Earl of Dundonald. Their only son, an infant, died December 1689. David Graham, his brother, fought at Killiecrankie, and was outlawed in 1690—died without issue—when the representation of the family devolved on his cousin, David Graham of Duntrune. Alexander Graham of Duntrune died 1782; and on the demise of his last surviving son, Alexander, in 1804, the property was inherited equally by his four surviving sisters, Anne, Amelia, Clementina, and Alison. Amelia, who married Patrick Stirling, Esq., of Pittendreich, was her mother. Clementina married Captain Gavin Drummond of Keltie; their only child was Clementina Countess of Airlie, and mother of the present Earl.ReturnThey are strange beings, these lexicographers. Richardson, for instance, under the wordSNAIL, gives this quotation from Beaumont and Fletcher’sWit at Several Weapons,—“Oh, Master Pompey! how is ’t, man?Clown—Snails, I’m almost starved with love and cold, and one thing or other.”Any one else knows of course that it is “‘s nails”—the contraction of the old oath or interjection—God’s nails.ReturnCan the gifted author of these lines and of their music not be prevailed on to give them and others to the world, as well as to her friends?ReturnThe passage from Shakspeare prefixed to this paper, contains probably as much as can be said of the mental, not less than the affectionate conditions, under which such a record asIn Memoriamis produced, and may give us more insight into the imaginative faculty’s mode of working, than all our philosophizing and analysis. It seems to let out with the fulness, simplicity, and unconsciousness of a child—“Fancy’s Child”—the secret mechanism or procession of the greatest creative mind our race has produced. In itself, it has no recondite meaning, it answers fully its own sweet purpose. We are not believers, like some folks, in the omniscience of even Shakspeare. But, like many things that he and other wise men and many simple children say, it has a germ of universal meaning, which it is quite lawful to bring out of it, and which may be enjoyed to the full without any wrong to its own original beauty and fitness. A dew-drop is not the less beautiful that it illustrates in its structure the law of gravitation which holds the world together, and by which “the most ancient heavens are fresh and strong.” This is the passage. The Friar speaking of Claudio, hearing that Hero “died upon his word,” says,—“The idea of her life shall sweetly creepInto his study of imagination;And every lovely organ of her lifeShall come apparelled in more precious habit—More moving delicate, and full of life,Into the eye and prospect of his soul,Than when she lived indeed.”We have here expressed in plain language the imaginative memory of the beloved dead, rising upon the past, like moonlight upon midnight,—“The gleam, the shadow, and the peace supreme.”This is its simple meaning—the statement of a truth, the utterance of personal feeling. But observe its hidden abstract significance—it is the revelation of what goes on in the depths of the soul, when the dead elements of what once was, are laid before the imagination, and so breathed upon as to be quickened into a new and higher life. We have first theIdea of her Life—all he remembered and felt of her, gathered into one vague shadowy image, not any one look, or action, or time—then the idea of her lifecreeps—is in before he is aware, andSWEETLYcreeps,—it might have been softly or gently, but it is the addition of affection to all this, and bringing in another sense—and now it is in hisstudy of imagination—what a place! fit for such a visitor. Then out comes theIdea, more particular, more questionable, but still ideal, spiritual—every lovely organ of her life—then the clothing upon, the mortal putting on its immortal, spiritual body—shall come apparelled in more precious habit, more moving delicate—this is the transfiguring, the putting on strength, thepoco più—the little more which makes immortal,—more full of life, and all this submitted to—the eye and prospect of the soul.Return“Dark house, by which once more I standHere in the long unlovely street;Doors, where my heart was wont to beatSo quickly, waiting for a hand.”—In Memoriam.This is a mistake, as his friend Dr. A. P. Stanley thus corrects:—“‘The long unlovely street’ was Wimpole Street, No. 67, where the Hallams lived; and Arthur used to say to his friends, You know you will always find us at sixes and sevens.’”ReturnWe had read these Lives, and had remarked them, before we knew whose they were, as being of rare merit. No one could suppose they were written by one so young. We give his estimate of the character of Burke. “The mind of this great man may perhaps be taken as a representation of the general characteristics of the English intellect. Its groundwork was solid, practical, and conversant with the details of business; but upon this, and secured by this, arose a superstructure of imagination and moral sentiment. He saw little,because it was painful to himto see anything beyond the limits of the national character. In all things, while he deeply reverenced principles, he chose to deal with the concrete rather than with abstractions. He studied men rather than man.” The words in italics imply an insight into the deepest springs of human action, the conjunct causes of what we call character such as few men of large experience can attain.ReturnThis will remind the reader of a fine passage inEdwin the Fair, on the specific differences in the sounds made by the ash, the elm, the fir, &c., when moved by the wind; and of some lines by Landor on flowers speaking to each other; and of something more exquisite than either, inConsuelo—the description of the flowers in the old monastic garden, at “the sweet hour of prime.”ReturnRemains, vol. iii. p. 105.Return“An unfortunate reference (Acts xiv. 15), for the apostle’s declaration is, that he and his brethren were of ‘like passions” (James v. 17);—liable to the same imperfections and mutations of thought and feeling as other men, and as the Lystrans supposed their gods to be; while the God proclaimed by him to them is not so. AndthatGod is the God of the Jews as well as of the Christians; for there is butoneGod. Hallam’s thought is an important and just one, but not developed with his usual nice accuracy.”For this note, as for much else, I am indebted to my father, whose powers of compressed thought I wish I had inherited.ReturnAbraham “was called the friend of God;” “with him (Moses) will I (Jehovah) speak mouth to mouth, even apparently,”—“as a man to his friend;” David was “a man after mine own heart.”ReturnThis is the passage referred to in Henry Taylor’s delightfulNotes from Life(“Essay on Wisdom”):—“Fear, indeed, is the mother of foresight: spiritual fear, of a foresight that reaches beyond the grave; temporal fear, of a foresight that falls short; but without fear there is neither the one foresight nor the other; and as pain has been truly said to be ‘the deepest thing in our nature,’ so is it fear that will bring the depths of our nature within our knowledge. A great capacity ofsufferingbelongs to genius; and it has been observed that an alternation of joyfulness and dejection is quite as characteristic of the man of genius as intensity in either kind.” In hisNotes from Books, p. 216, he recurs to it:—“‘Pain,’ says a writer whose early death will not prevent his being long remembered, ‘pain is the deepest thing that we have in our nature, and union through pain has always seemed more real and more holy than any other.’”ReturnWe are given to understand that peach-fed pork is a poor pork after all, and goes soon into decomposition. We are not sorry to know this.ReturnWe confess to being considerably affected when we look at this odd little fellow, as he sits there with his innocent upturned toes, and a certain forlorn dignity and meek sadness, as of “one who once had wings.” What is he? and whence? Is he a surface or a substance? is he smooth and warm? is he glossy, like a blackberry? or has he on him “the raven down of darkness,” like an unfledged chick of night? and if we smoothed him, would he smile? Does that large eye wink? and is it a hole through to the other side? (whatever that may be;) and is that a small crescent moon of darkness swimming in its disc? or does the eye disclose a bright light from within, where his soul sits and enjoys bright day? Is he a point of admiration whose head is too heavy, or a quaver or crotchet that has lost his neighbors, and fallen out of the scale? Is he an aspiring Tadpole in search of an idea? What have been and what will be the fortunes of this our small Nigel (Nigellus)? Think of “Elia” having him sent up from the Goblin Valley, packed in wool, and finding him lively! how he and “Mary” would doat upon him, feeding him upon some celestial, unspeakablepap, “sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes, or Cytherea’s breath.” How the brother and sister would croon over him “with murmurs made to bless,” calling him their “tender novice” “in the first bloom of his nigritude,” their belated straggler from the “rear of darkness thin,” their little night-shade, not deadly, their infantile Will-o’-the-wisp caught before his sins, their “poor Blot,” “their innocent Blackness,” their “dim Speck.”ReturnMark i. 35; Luke xxi. 37.ReturnGen. ix. 16.ReturnIn his Preface he explains the title Bornnatural, as meaning “one who inherits the natural sentiments and tastes to which he was born, still artunsullied and customfree.”Returnex. gr.—Konstantinopolitanischerdudelsackspfeifergeselle. Here is a word as long as the sea-serpent—but, like it, having a head and tail, being what lawyers callunum quid—not an up and down series of infatuatedphocæ, as Professor Owen somewhat insolently asserts. Here is what the Bornnatural would have made of it—A Constantinopolitanbagpiperoutofhisapprenticeship.ReturnWe 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 flavor; 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 perception and keen sensibility, his mind and his body continued 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, exclaimed 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!Return“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.ReturnThis seems to have been the view taken by Calvin, but with that logical acuteness which was characteristic of him, he at the same time perceived that it was inaccordant with the expression, “if it had been possible.” In his commentary upon the passage, therefore, he substitutes “si opus sit” for the apostle’s words; thus, of course, assuming that St. Paul had adopted an inapt phrase to express his meaning. But I need scarcely say that such a mode of interpretation is altogether inadmissible, the only legitimate rule being to take the words of the text as they stand, and thence to infer the circumstances or conditions under which they were used.ReturnSee Robinson’sLexicon to the New Testament,sub voceδιὰ.ReturnIt has been suggested to me that the state of St. Paul’s eyesight might also furnish an explanation of his mistake in not recognizing the High Priest, which is recorded in Acts xxiii. 5, and about which some difficulty has been felt by commentators. One can picture the great apostle, who was a thorough gentleman, stretching forward, and shading his eyes, to see better, and saying, “Pardon me, I did not see it was the High Priest.” “I wist not.”ReturnIt may be worth mentioning here, that an opinion prevails in the Roman Catholic Church, that persons who have been favored with Divine visions, or to whom God wishes to give a token of his peculiar love, are frequently marked by what are specifically calledstigmas. I have not met with any account of the grounds on which this opinion is founded: but thestigmasare explained to be the marks of the Saviour’s five wounds. It is very likely that the notion is nothing more than a fantastic and superstitious explanation of the passage in Galatians vi. 17. But it is not altogether impossible that it may be the faint and imperfect echo of some early tradition in the Church as to the physical effect produced upon St. Paul by Christ’s miraculous appearance to him near Damascus. Whatever be its origin, the existence of such an opinion is not without a certain degree of curiosity and interest.ReturnLob-lye-by-the-fire.ReturnOn 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! they cost me mair trouble than a’ the lave o’ them.”ReturnA 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.ReturnOriginally prefixed to a Criticism on some paintings in the Scottish Academy.ReturnIn the thin octavo,The Office of the State, and in its twin volume onChurch Polity, there will be found in clear, strong, and singularly candid language, the first lines of the sciences of Church and State politics. It does not say much for the sense and perspicuity of the public mind, if two such books are allowed to fall aside, and such afarragoof energetic nonsense and error as Mr. Buckle’s first, and we trust last, volume on Civilization, is read and admired, and bought, with its bad logic, its bad facts, and its had conclusions. In bulk and in value his volume stands in the same relation to Mr. Dick’s, as a handful, I may say agowpenof chaff does to a grain of wheat, or a bushel of sawdust to an ounce of meal.ReturnIn our excellent National Gallery (Edinburgh), a copy of Titian’s Ariadne in Naxos is hung immediately above Wilkie’s sacred sketch of John Knox administering the Sacrament in Calder House!ReturnThis great writer was first acknowledged as such by our big quarterlies, in theNorth British Review, fourteen years ago, as follows:—“This is a very extraordinary and a very delightful book, full of truth and goodness, of power and beauty. If genius may be considered (and it is as serviceable a definition as is current) that power by which one man produces for the use or the pleasure of his fellow-men, something at once new and true, then have we here its unmistakable and inestimable handiwork. Let our readers take our word for it, and read these volumes thoroughly, giving themselves up to the guidance of this most original thinker, and most attractive writer, and they will find not only that they are richer in true knowledge, and quickened in pure and heavenly affections, but they will open their eyes upon a now world—walk under an ampler heaven, and breathe a diviner air. There are few things more delightful or more rare, than to feel such a kindling up of the whole faculties as is produced by such a work as this; it adds a ‘precious seeing to the eye,’—makes the ear more quick of apprehension, and, opening our whole inner-man to a new discipline, it fills us with gratitude as well as admiration towards him to whom we owe so much enjoyment. And what is more, and better than all this, everywhere throughout this work, we trace evidences of a deep reverence and godly fear—a perpetual, though subdued acknowledgment of the Almighty, as the sum and substance, the beginning and the ending of all truth, of all power, of all goodness, and of all beauty.“This book (Modern Painters) contains more true philosophy, more information of a strictly scientific kind, more original thought and exact observation of nature, more enlightened and serious enthusiasm, and more eloquent writing, than it would be easy to match, not merely in works of its own class, but in those of any class whatever. It gives us a new, and we think, the only true theory of beauty and sublimity; it asserts and proves the existence of a new element in landscape-painting, placing its prince upon his rightful throne; it unfolds and illustrates, with singular force, variety, and beauty, the laws of art; it explains and enforces the true nature and specific function of the imagination, with the precision and fulness of one having authority,—and all this delivered in language which, for purity and strength and native richness, would not have dishonored the early manhood of Jeremy Taylor, of Edmund Burke, or of the author’s own favorite Richard Hooker.”—J.B.Return

Many good and fine things have been said of this wonderful 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:—

“… Humor, wild wit,Quips, cranks, puns, sneers,—with clear sweet thought profound;—And stinging jests, with honey for the wound,”—The subtlest lines ofALLfine powers, splitTo their last films, then marvellously spunIn magic web, whose million hues areONE!”

“… Humor, wild wit,

Quips, cranks, puns, sneers,—with clear sweet thought profound;—

And stinging jests, with honey for the wound,”—

The subtlest lines ofALLfine powers, split

To their last films, then marvellously spun

In magic web, whose million hues areONE!”

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 solemnity; I dare say, 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 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 photography), in the corner of which he had written, with a hand trembling with age and fun, “Adam’s-sunfecit”—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 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 preceptor, 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, particularly 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 feeling may be imagined when the doctor finally returned it to his own pocket.Return

It is not easy giving this look by one word; it was expressive of her being so much of her life alone.Return

A Highland game-keeper, when asked why a certain terrier, of singular pluck, was so much more solemn than the other dogs, said, “Oh, Sir, life’s full o’ sairiousness to him—he just never can get enuff o’ fechtin’.”Return

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 their exercise. Dr. Charles Stewart, of Dunearn, whose rare gifts and graces as a physician, a divine, a scholar, and a gentleman, 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 abuirdlyman come along the passage, he would instinctively draw himself up, measure his imaginary antagonist, and forecast how he would deal with him, his hands meanwhile condensing into fists, and tending to “square.” He must have been a hard hitter if he boxed as he preached—what “The Fancy” would call “an ugly customer.”Return

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 remembering—“Ay, aince.” “What on?” “Cauld mutton!”Return

InThe Dog, by Stonehenge, an excellent book, there is a woodcut 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,from kindness of heart”—a suspicion, my dear “Stonehenge,” which is true, and shows your own “kindness of heart,” as well as sense.Return

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 discoverer 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.Return

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’sἀγχίνοιαandεὐστοχία. The latter of these,εὐστοχία, Aristotle mentions incidentally when treating ofεὐβουλία, or good deliberation.Eth. Nic.bk. vi. ch. 9. Good deliberation, he says, is notεὐστοχία, 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 thatἀγχίνοιαis a sort ofεὐστοχία. But he speaks ofἀγχίνοιαmore fully inAna. Post.i. 34:—‘Άγχίνοιαis a sort of 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 conversing 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 observations confused and perplexing by reducing them to his logical formula.

“The derivation of the words will confirm this view.Εὐστοχίαis a hitting themarksuccessfully, 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 (ἄνευ τε γὰρ λογου), 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 guessing. 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 ofεὐστοχία.

“Άγχίνοια, on the other hand, is anearness 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 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 intellectual it is ready wit. It is a sort of shorter or more limitedεὐστοχία. It is more of a natural gift thanεὐστοχία, 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.Εὐστοχίαis more akin to genius,ἀγχίνοιαto practical common sense.”Return

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 coming 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 way. “Tibbie” is now living at Thankerton.Return

This sofa, which was henceforward sacred in 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.Return

I have been told thatoncein the course of the sermon his voice trembled, and many feared he was about to break down.Return

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,” “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 noo.”Return

On a low chest of drawers in this room there lay for many years my mother’s parasol, by his orders—I daresay, for long, the only one in Biggar.Return

His reading aloud of everything from John Gilpin to John Howe was a fine and high art, or rather gift. Henderson could not have given

“The dinner waits, and we are tired;”Says Gilpin, “So am I,”

“The dinner waits, and we are tired;”

Says Gilpin, “So am I,”

better; and to hear him sounding 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 unsearchable 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 of profound religious feeling, of which they were the utterance; and he rejoiced over the warlike airs and choruses of “Judas Maccabæus.” You have recorded his estimate of the religious nature of him of theterribile via; he said it was a relief to his mind to know that such a mighty genius walked humbly with his God.Return

With the practices of this last worthy, when carried on moderately, and for the sport’s sake, he had a special sympathy.Return

I 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.”Return

He was curiously destitute of all literary ambition or show; like thecactusin the desert, always plump, always taking in the dew of heaven, and caring little to give it out. He wrote many papers in theRepositoryandMonitor, an acute and clever tract on the Voluntary controversy, entitledCalm 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 Arbuthnot. 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 thisneveris best in a book; he is always greater than his work.Return

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 spurr’d his courser on,Without stop or stay, down the rocky way,That leads to Brotherstone;”

“The Baron of Smaylho’me rose with day,

He spurr’d 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.”Return

After a tight discussion between these two attached friends, Dr. Wardlaw said, “Well, I can’t answer you, but fish I must and shall.”Return

He gave us all the education we got at Biggar.Return

One day my mother, and her only sister, Agnes—married to James Aitken of Cullands, a man before his class and his time, for long the only Whig and Seceder laird in Peeblesshire, and with whom my father shared theEdinburgh Reviewfrom 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 of a stocking;” and he was right, he had noticed her make over this “kittle” turn to her mother.Return

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.”Return

David Hume’sTreatise on Human Naturehe 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.”Return

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 collecting 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 include all his friends, ancient and modern, but they allwerehis friends:—

Robert Hall—Dr. Carey—Melancthon—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—Shakspeare (a small oil painting 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.Return

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^t 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^t she wold embak on Wedensday. 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 remarkable marginal note:—

Edinburgh, Douglas’ Hotel,26th December 1856.My Dear Sir,—I owe you my sincerest thanks for your kindness in favoring me with a sight of the volume of Baxter’s Life, which formerly belonged to my ancestrix, Anna, Countess of Argyll. The MS. note inserted by her in it respecting 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 very interesting information.—Believe me, my dear Sir, your much obliged and faithful servant,Lindsay.John Brown,Esq.M.D.Return

Edinburgh, Douglas’ Hotel,26th December 1856.

My Dear Sir,—I owe you my sincerest thanks for your kindness in favoring me with a sight of the volume of Baxter’s Life, which formerly belonged to my ancestrix, Anna, Countess of Argyll. The MS. note inserted by her in it respecting 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 very interesting information.—Believe me, my dear Sir, your much obliged and faithful servant,

Lindsay.

John Brown,Esq.M.D.Return

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 to see a man earnest once a week, about anything.” It is related of David Hume, that having heard my great-grandfather preach, he said, “That’s the man for me, he means what he says, he speaks as if Jesus Christ was at his elbow.”Return

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 associations of thought that were not of a purely logical character was afforded, we used to think, by the decided and almost contemptuous 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 absolutely 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 power 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 happiness is to be found in the life matrimonial, or in any of the approaches towards it. Every intelligent student of Shakspeare’s, however, will at once feel that the poet’s mind speedily passes away from the idea with which he starts, and becomes merged in a far wider theme, viz., in the disenchantment 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 he 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.”Return

“One instance of his imperfect discernment of associations of thought that were not of a purely logical character was afforded, we used to think, by the decided and almost contemptuous 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 absolutely 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 power to say “Behold!”The jaws of darkness do devour it up;So quick bright things come to confusion.’

‘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 power 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 happiness is to be found in the life matrimonial, or in any of the approaches towards it. Every intelligent student of Shakspeare’s, however, will at once feel that the poet’s mind speedily passes away from the idea with which he starts, and becomes merged in a far wider theme, viz., in the disenchantment 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 he 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.”Return

On one occasion, Mr. Hall of Kelso, an excellent but very odd man, in whom theegowas 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 himself, met Dr. Belfrage in the lobby of the Synod, and drawing himself up as he passed, he muttered, “high and michty!” “There’s a pair of us, Mr. Hall.”Return

Such an occasional paroxysm of eloquence is thus described by Dr. Cairns:—“At certain irregular intervals, when the loftier themes of the gospel ministry were to be handled, his manner underwent a transformation which was startling, and even electrical. He became rapt and excited as with new inspiration; his utterance grew thick and rapid; his voice trembled and faltered with emotion; his eye gleamed with a wild unearthly lustre, in which his countenance shared; and his whole frame heaved to and fro, as if each glowing thought and vivid figure that followed in quick succession were only a fragment of some greater revelation which he panted to overtake. The writer of this notice has witnessed nothing similar in any preacher, and numbers the effects of a passage which he once heard upon the scenes and exercises of the heavenly world among his most thrilling recollections of sacred oratory.”—Memoir prefixed to posthumous volume of Discourses.Return

James i. 15, 16. It is plain that “do not err” should have been in verse 15th.Return

“The youth Story was in all respects healthy, and even robust; he died of overwork, or rather, as I understand, of a two years’ almost total want of exercise, which it was impossible to induce him to take.’—Arnold’s Report to the Committee of Council on Education, 1860.Return

Edinburgh: printed privately, 1859.Return

Miss Graham’s genealogy in connection with Claverhouse—the same who was killed at Killiecrankie—is as follows:—John Graham of Claverhouse married the Honorable Jean Cochrane, daughter of William Lord Cochrane, eldest son of the first Earl of Dundonald. Their only son, an infant, died December 1689. David Graham, his brother, fought at Killiecrankie, and was outlawed in 1690—died without issue—when the representation of the family devolved on his cousin, David Graham of Duntrune. Alexander Graham of Duntrune died 1782; and on the demise of his last surviving son, Alexander, in 1804, the property was inherited equally by his four surviving sisters, Anne, Amelia, Clementina, and Alison. Amelia, who married Patrick Stirling, Esq., of Pittendreich, was her mother. Clementina married Captain Gavin Drummond of Keltie; their only child was Clementina Countess of Airlie, and mother of the present Earl.Return

They are strange beings, these lexicographers. Richardson, for instance, under the wordSNAIL, gives this quotation from Beaumont and Fletcher’sWit at Several Weapons,—

“Oh, Master Pompey! how is ’t, man?Clown—Snails, I’m almost starved with love and cold, and one thing or other.”

“Oh, Master Pompey! how is ’t, man?

Clown—Snails, I’m almost starved with love and cold, and one thing or other.”

Any one else knows of course that it is “‘s nails”—the contraction of the old oath or interjection—God’s nails.Return

Can the gifted author of these lines and of their music not be prevailed on to give them and others to the world, as well as to her friends?Return

The passage from Shakspeare prefixed to this paper, contains probably as much as can be said of the mental, not less than the affectionate conditions, under which such a record asIn Memoriamis produced, and may give us more insight into the imaginative faculty’s mode of working, than all our philosophizing and analysis. It seems to let out with the fulness, simplicity, and unconsciousness of a child—“Fancy’s Child”—the secret mechanism or procession of the greatest creative mind our race has produced. In itself, it has no recondite meaning, it answers fully its own sweet purpose. We are not believers, like some folks, in the omniscience of even Shakspeare. But, like many things that he and other wise men and many simple children say, it has a germ of universal meaning, which it is quite lawful to bring out of it, and which may be enjoyed to the full without any wrong to its own original beauty and fitness. A dew-drop is not the less beautiful that it illustrates in its structure the law of gravitation which holds the world together, and by which “the most ancient heavens are fresh and strong.” This is the passage. The Friar speaking of Claudio, hearing that Hero “died upon his word,” says,—

“The idea of her life shall sweetly creepInto his study of imagination;And every lovely organ of her lifeShall come apparelled in more precious habit—More moving delicate, and full of life,Into the eye and prospect of his soul,Than when she lived indeed.”

“The idea of her life shall sweetly creep

Into his study of imagination;

And every lovely organ of her life

Shall come apparelled in more precious habit—

More moving delicate, and full of life,

Into the eye and prospect of his soul,

Than when she lived indeed.”

We have here expressed in plain language the imaginative memory of the beloved dead, rising upon the past, like moonlight upon midnight,—

“The gleam, the shadow, and the peace supreme.”

“The gleam, the shadow, and the peace supreme.”

This is its simple meaning—the statement of a truth, the utterance of personal feeling. But observe its hidden abstract significance—it is the revelation of what goes on in the depths of the soul, when the dead elements of what once was, are laid before the imagination, and so breathed upon as to be quickened into a new and higher life. We have first theIdea of her Life—all he remembered and felt of her, gathered into one vague shadowy image, not any one look, or action, or time—then the idea of her lifecreeps—is in before he is aware, andSWEETLYcreeps,—it might have been softly or gently, but it is the addition of affection to all this, and bringing in another sense—and now it is in hisstudy of imagination—what a place! fit for such a visitor. Then out comes theIdea, more particular, more questionable, but still ideal, spiritual—every lovely organ of her life—then the clothing upon, the mortal putting on its immortal, spiritual body—shall come apparelled in more precious habit, more moving delicate—this is the transfiguring, the putting on strength, thepoco più—the little more which makes immortal,—more full of life, and all this submitted to—the eye and prospect of the soul.Return

“Dark house, by which once more I standHere in the long unlovely street;Doors, where my heart was wont to beatSo quickly, waiting for a hand.”—In Memoriam.

“Dark house, by which once more I stand

Here in the long unlovely street;

Doors, where my heart was wont to beat

So quickly, waiting for a hand.”—In Memoriam.

This is a mistake, as his friend Dr. A. P. Stanley thus corrects:—“‘The long unlovely street’ was Wimpole Street, No. 67, where the Hallams lived; and Arthur used to say to his friends, You know you will always find us at sixes and sevens.’”Return

We had read these Lives, and had remarked them, before we knew whose they were, as being of rare merit. No one could suppose they were written by one so young. We give his estimate of the character of Burke. “The mind of this great man may perhaps be taken as a representation of the general characteristics of the English intellect. Its groundwork was solid, practical, and conversant with the details of business; but upon this, and secured by this, arose a superstructure of imagination and moral sentiment. He saw little,because it was painful to himto see anything beyond the limits of the national character. In all things, while he deeply reverenced principles, he chose to deal with the concrete rather than with abstractions. He studied men rather than man.” The words in italics imply an insight into the deepest springs of human action, the conjunct causes of what we call character such as few men of large experience can attain.Return

This will remind the reader of a fine passage inEdwin the Fair, on the specific differences in the sounds made by the ash, the elm, the fir, &c., when moved by the wind; and of some lines by Landor on flowers speaking to each other; and of something more exquisite than either, inConsuelo—the description of the flowers in the old monastic garden, at “the sweet hour of prime.”Return

Remains, vol. iii. p. 105.Return

“An unfortunate reference (Acts xiv. 15), for the apostle’s declaration is, that he and his brethren were of ‘like passions” (James v. 17);—liable to the same imperfections and mutations of thought and feeling as other men, and as the Lystrans supposed their gods to be; while the God proclaimed by him to them is not so. AndthatGod is the God of the Jews as well as of the Christians; for there is butoneGod. Hallam’s thought is an important and just one, but not developed with his usual nice accuracy.”

“An unfortunate reference (Acts xiv. 15), for the apostle’s declaration is, that he and his brethren were of ‘like passions” (James v. 17);—liable to the same imperfections and mutations of thought and feeling as other men, and as the Lystrans supposed their gods to be; while the God proclaimed by him to them is not so. AndthatGod is the God of the Jews as well as of the Christians; for there is butoneGod. Hallam’s thought is an important and just one, but not developed with his usual nice accuracy.”

For this note, as for much else, I am indebted to my father, whose powers of compressed thought I wish I had inherited.Return

Abraham “was called the friend of God;” “with him (Moses) will I (Jehovah) speak mouth to mouth, even apparently,”—“as a man to his friend;” David was “a man after mine own heart.”Return

This is the passage referred to in Henry Taylor’s delightfulNotes from Life(“Essay on Wisdom”):—

“Fear, indeed, is the mother of foresight: spiritual fear, of a foresight that reaches beyond the grave; temporal fear, of a foresight that falls short; but without fear there is neither the one foresight nor the other; and as pain has been truly said to be ‘the deepest thing in our nature,’ so is it fear that will bring the depths of our nature within our knowledge. A great capacity ofsufferingbelongs to genius; and it has been observed that an alternation of joyfulness and dejection is quite as characteristic of the man of genius as intensity in either kind.” In hisNotes from Books, p. 216, he recurs to it:—“‘Pain,’ says a writer whose early death will not prevent his being long remembered, ‘pain is the deepest thing that we have in our nature, and union through pain has always seemed more real and more holy than any other.’”Return

“Fear, indeed, is the mother of foresight: spiritual fear, of a foresight that reaches beyond the grave; temporal fear, of a foresight that falls short; but without fear there is neither the one foresight nor the other; and as pain has been truly said to be ‘the deepest thing in our nature,’ so is it fear that will bring the depths of our nature within our knowledge. A great capacity ofsufferingbelongs to genius; and it has been observed that an alternation of joyfulness and dejection is quite as characteristic of the man of genius as intensity in either kind.” In hisNotes from Books, p. 216, he recurs to it:—“‘Pain,’ says a writer whose early death will not prevent his being long remembered, ‘pain is the deepest thing that we have in our nature, and union through pain has always seemed more real and more holy than any other.’”Return

We are given to understand that peach-fed pork is a poor pork after all, and goes soon into decomposition. We are not sorry to know this.Return

We confess to being considerably affected when we look at this odd little fellow, as he sits there with his innocent upturned toes, and a certain forlorn dignity and meek sadness, as of “one who once had wings.” What is he? and whence? Is he a surface or a substance? is he smooth and warm? is he glossy, like a blackberry? or has he on him “the raven down of darkness,” like an unfledged chick of night? and if we smoothed him, would he smile? Does that large eye wink? and is it a hole through to the other side? (whatever that may be;) and is that a small crescent moon of darkness swimming in its disc? or does the eye disclose a bright light from within, where his soul sits and enjoys bright day? Is he a point of admiration whose head is too heavy, or a quaver or crotchet that has lost his neighbors, and fallen out of the scale? Is he an aspiring Tadpole in search of an idea? What have been and what will be the fortunes of this our small Nigel (Nigellus)? Think of “Elia” having him sent up from the Goblin Valley, packed in wool, and finding him lively! how he and “Mary” would doat upon him, feeding him upon some celestial, unspeakablepap, “sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes, or Cytherea’s breath.” How the brother and sister would croon over him “with murmurs made to bless,” calling him their “tender novice” “in the first bloom of his nigritude,” their belated straggler from the “rear of darkness thin,” their little night-shade, not deadly, their infantile Will-o’-the-wisp caught before his sins, their “poor Blot,” “their innocent Blackness,” their “dim Speck.”Return

Mark i. 35; Luke xxi. 37.Return

Gen. ix. 16.Return

In his Preface he explains the title Bornnatural, as meaning “one who inherits the natural sentiments and tastes to which he was born, still artunsullied and customfree.”Return

ex. gr.—Konstantinopolitanischerdudelsackspfeifergeselle. Here is a word as long as the sea-serpent—but, like it, having a head and tail, being what lawyers callunum quid—not an up and down series of infatuatedphocæ, as Professor Owen somewhat insolently asserts. Here is what the Bornnatural would have made of it—

A Constantinopolitanbagpiperoutofhisapprenticeship.Return

A Constantinopolitanbagpiperoutofhisapprenticeship.Return

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 flavor; 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 perception and keen sensibility, his mind and his body continued 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, exclaimed 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!Return

“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.Return

This seems to have been the view taken by Calvin, but with that logical acuteness which was characteristic of him, he at the same time perceived that it was inaccordant with the expression, “if it had been possible.” In his commentary upon the passage, therefore, he substitutes “si opus sit” for the apostle’s words; thus, of course, assuming that St. Paul had adopted an inapt phrase to express his meaning. But I need scarcely say that such a mode of interpretation is altogether inadmissible, the only legitimate rule being to take the words of the text as they stand, and thence to infer the circumstances or conditions under which they were used.Return

See Robinson’sLexicon to the New Testament,sub voceδιὰ.Return

It has been suggested to me that the state of St. Paul’s eyesight might also furnish an explanation of his mistake in not recognizing the High Priest, which is recorded in Acts xxiii. 5, and about which some difficulty has been felt by commentators. One can picture the great apostle, who was a thorough gentleman, stretching forward, and shading his eyes, to see better, and saying, “Pardon me, I did not see it was the High Priest.” “I wist not.”Return

It may be worth mentioning here, that an opinion prevails in the Roman Catholic Church, that persons who have been favored with Divine visions, or to whom God wishes to give a token of his peculiar love, are frequently marked by what are specifically calledstigmas. I have not met with any account of the grounds on which this opinion is founded: but thestigmasare explained to be the marks of the Saviour’s five wounds. It is very likely that the notion is nothing more than a fantastic and superstitious explanation of the passage in Galatians vi. 17. But it is not altogether impossible that it may be the faint and imperfect echo of some early tradition in the Church as to the physical effect produced upon St. Paul by Christ’s miraculous appearance to him near Damascus. Whatever be its origin, the existence of such an opinion is not without a certain degree of curiosity and interest.Return

Lob-lye-by-the-fire.Return

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! they cost me mair trouble than a’ the lave o’ them.”Return

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.Return

Originally prefixed to a Criticism on some paintings in the Scottish Academy.Return

In the thin octavo,The Office of the State, and in its twin volume onChurch Polity, there will be found in clear, strong, and singularly candid language, the first lines of the sciences of Church and State politics. It does not say much for the sense and perspicuity of the public mind, if two such books are allowed to fall aside, and such afarragoof energetic nonsense and error as Mr. Buckle’s first, and we trust last, volume on Civilization, is read and admired, and bought, with its bad logic, its bad facts, and its had conclusions. In bulk and in value his volume stands in the same relation to Mr. Dick’s, as a handful, I may say agowpenof chaff does to a grain of wheat, or a bushel of sawdust to an ounce of meal.Return

In our excellent National Gallery (Edinburgh), a copy of Titian’s Ariadne in Naxos is hung immediately above Wilkie’s sacred sketch of John Knox administering the Sacrament in Calder House!Return

This great writer was first acknowledged as such by our big quarterlies, in theNorth British Review, fourteen years ago, as follows:—

“This is a very extraordinary and a very delightful book, full of truth and goodness, of power and beauty. If genius may be considered (and it is as serviceable a definition as is current) that power by which one man produces for the use or the pleasure of his fellow-men, something at once new and true, then have we here its unmistakable and inestimable handiwork. Let our readers take our word for it, and read these volumes thoroughly, giving themselves up to the guidance of this most original thinker, and most attractive writer, and they will find not only that they are richer in true knowledge, and quickened in pure and heavenly affections, but they will open their eyes upon a now world—walk under an ampler heaven, and breathe a diviner air. There are few things more delightful or more rare, than to feel such a kindling up of the whole faculties as is produced by such a work as this; it adds a ‘precious seeing to the eye,’—makes the ear more quick of apprehension, and, opening our whole inner-man to a new discipline, it fills us with gratitude as well as admiration towards him to whom we owe so much enjoyment. And what is more, and better than all this, everywhere throughout this work, we trace evidences of a deep reverence and godly fear—a perpetual, though subdued acknowledgment of the Almighty, as the sum and substance, the beginning and the ending of all truth, of all power, of all goodness, and of all beauty.“This book (Modern Painters) contains more true philosophy, more information of a strictly scientific kind, more original thought and exact observation of nature, more enlightened and serious enthusiasm, and more eloquent writing, than it would be easy to match, not merely in works of its own class, but in those of any class whatever. It gives us a new, and we think, the only true theory of beauty and sublimity; it asserts and proves the existence of a new element in landscape-painting, placing its prince upon his rightful throne; it unfolds and illustrates, with singular force, variety, and beauty, the laws of art; it explains and enforces the true nature and specific function of the imagination, with the precision and fulness of one having authority,—and all this delivered in language which, for purity and strength and native richness, would not have dishonored the early manhood of Jeremy Taylor, of Edmund Burke, or of the author’s own favorite Richard Hooker.”—J.B.Return

“This is a very extraordinary and a very delightful book, full of truth and goodness, of power and beauty. If genius may be considered (and it is as serviceable a definition as is current) that power by which one man produces for the use or the pleasure of his fellow-men, something at once new and true, then have we here its unmistakable and inestimable handiwork. Let our readers take our word for it, and read these volumes thoroughly, giving themselves up to the guidance of this most original thinker, and most attractive writer, and they will find not only that they are richer in true knowledge, and quickened in pure and heavenly affections, but they will open their eyes upon a now world—walk under an ampler heaven, and breathe a diviner air. There are few things more delightful or more rare, than to feel such a kindling up of the whole faculties as is produced by such a work as this; it adds a ‘precious seeing to the eye,’—makes the ear more quick of apprehension, and, opening our whole inner-man to a new discipline, it fills us with gratitude as well as admiration towards him to whom we owe so much enjoyment. And what is more, and better than all this, everywhere throughout this work, we trace evidences of a deep reverence and godly fear—a perpetual, though subdued acknowledgment of the Almighty, as the sum and substance, the beginning and the ending of all truth, of all power, of all goodness, and of all beauty.

“This book (Modern Painters) contains more true philosophy, more information of a strictly scientific kind, more original thought and exact observation of nature, more enlightened and serious enthusiasm, and more eloquent writing, than it would be easy to match, not merely in works of its own class, but in those of any class whatever. It gives us a new, and we think, the only true theory of beauty and sublimity; it asserts and proves the existence of a new element in landscape-painting, placing its prince upon his rightful throne; it unfolds and illustrates, with singular force, variety, and beauty, the laws of art; it explains and enforces the true nature and specific function of the imagination, with the precision and fulness of one having authority,—and all this delivered in language which, for purity and strength and native richness, would not have dishonored the early manhood of Jeremy Taylor, of Edmund Burke, or of the author’s own favorite Richard Hooker.”—J.B.Return

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