To say what ought to be said concerning Dr. John Brown, a man should have
known him well and long, and should remember much of that old generation
of Scotchmen to whom the author of "Rab and his Friends" belonged. But
that generation has departed. One by one these wits and scholars of the
North, these _epigoni_ who were not, indeed, of the heroes, but who had
seen and remembered Scott and Wilson, have passed away. Aytoun and
Carlyle and Dr. Burton, and last, Dr. Brown, are gone. Sir Theodore
Martin alone is left. In her memoir of Dr. Burton--the historian of
Scotland, and author of "The Book-hunter"--Mrs. Burton remarks that, in
her husband's later days, only Dr. John Brown and Professor Blackie
remained of all her husband's ancient friends and coevals, of all who
remembered Lockhart, and Hogg, and their times. But many are left who
knew Dr. Brown far better and more intimately than the author of this
notice. I can hardly say when I first became acquainted with him,
probably it was in my childhood. Ever since I was a boy, certainly, I
used to see him at intervals, especially in the Christmas vacations. But
he seldom moved from Edinburgh, except in summer, which he frequently
passed in the country house of certain friends of his, whose affection
made much of the happiness of his latest years, and whose unfailing
kindness attended him in his dying hours. Living always in Scotland, Dr.
Brown was seen but rarely by his friends who resided in England. Thus,
though Dr. Brown's sweetness of disposition and charm of manner, his
humour, and his unfailing sympathy and encouragement, made one feel
toward him as to a familiar friend, yet, of his actual life I saw but
little, and have few reminiscences to contribute. One can only speak of
that singular geniality of his, that temper of goodness and natural
tolerance and affection, which, as Scotsmen best know, is not universal
among the Scots. Our race does not need to pray, like the mechanic in
the story, that Providence will give us "a good conceit of ourselves."
But we must acknowledge that the Scotch temper is critical if not
captious, argumentative, inclined to look at the seamy side of men and of
their performances, and to dwell on imperfections rather than on merits
and virtues. An example of these blemishes of the Scotch disposition,
carried to an extreme degree in the nature of a man of genius, is offered
to the world in the writings and "Reminiscences" of Mr. Carlyle.
Now, Dr. John Brown was at the opposite pole of feeling. He had no
mawkish toleration of things and people intolerable, but he preferred not
to turn his mind that way. His thoughts were with the good, the wise,
the modest, the learned, the brave of times past, and he was eager to
catch a reflection of their qualities in the characters of the living, of
all with whom he came into contact. He was, for example, almost
optimistic in his estimate of the work of young people in art or
literature. From everything that was beautiful or good, from a summer
day by the Tweed, or from the eyes of a child, or from the humorous
saying of a friend, or from treasured memories of old Scotch worthies,
from recollections of his own childhood, from experience of the stoical
heroism of the poor, he seemed to extract matter for pleasant thoughts of
men and the world, and nourishment for his own great and gentle nature. I
have never known any man to whom other men seemed so dear--men dead, and
men living. He gave his genius to knowing them, and to making them
better known, and his unselfishness thus became not only a great personal
virtue, but a great literary charm. When you met him, he had some "good
story" or some story of goodness to tell--for both came alike to him, and
his humour was as unfailing as his kindness. There was in his face a
singular charm, blended, as it were, of the expressions of mirth and of
patience. Being most sensitive to pain, as well as to pleasure, he was
an exception to that rule of Rochefoucauld's--"_nous avons tous assez de
force pour supporter les maux d'autrui_." {2}
He did not bear easily the misfortunes of others, and the evils of his
own lot were heavy enough. They saddened him; but neither illness, nor
his poignant anxiety for others, could sour a nature so unselfish. He
appeared not to have lost that anodyne and consolation of religious hope,
which had been the strength of his forefathers, and was his best
inheritance from a remarkable race of Scotsmen. Wherever he came, he was
welcome; people felt glad when they had encountered him in the
streets--the streets of Edinburgh, where almost every one knows every one
by sight--and he was at least as joyously received by the children and
the dogs as by the grown-up people of every family. A friend has kindly
shown me a letter in which it is told how Dr. Brown's love of dogs, his
interest in a half-blind old Dandy which was attached to him, was evinced
in the very last hours of his life. But enough has been said, in general
terms, about the character of "the beloved physician," as Dr. Brown was
called in Edinburgh, and a brief account may be given, in some detail, of
his life and ways.
Dr. John Brown was born in Biggar, one of the gray, slaty-looking little
towns in the pastoral moorlands of southern Scotland. These towns have
no great beauty that they should be admired by strangers, but the
natives, as Scott said to Washington Irving, are attached to their "gray
hills," and to the Tweed, so beautiful where man's greed does not pollute
it, that the Border people are all in love with it, as Tyro, in Homer,
loved the divine Enipeus. We hold it "far the fairest of the floods that
run upon the earth." How dear the border scenery was to Dr. John Brown,
and how well he knew and could express its legendary magic, its charm
woven of countless ancient spells, the music of old ballads, the sorcery
of old stories, may be understood by readers of his essay on "Minchmoor."
{3} The father of Dr. Brown was the third in a lineage of ministers of
the sect called Seceders. To explain who the Seceders were, it would be
necessary to explore the sinking morasses of Scotch ecclesiastical
history. The minister was proud of being not only a "Seceder" but a
"Burgher." He inherited, to be brief, the traditions of a most
spiritually-minded and most spirited set of men, too much bent, it may
appear to us, on establishing delicate distinctions of opinions, but
certainly most true to themselves and to their own ideals of liberty and
of faith. Dr. Brown's great-grandfather had been a shepherd boy, who
taught himself Greek that he might read the New Testament; who walked
twenty-four miles--leaving his folded sheep in the night--to buy the
precious volume in St. Andrews, and who, finally, became a teacher of
much repute among his own people. Of Dr. Brown's father, he himself
wrote a most touching and beautiful account in his "Letter to John
Cairns, D.D." This essay contains, perhaps, the very finest passages
that the author ever penned. His sayings about his own childhood remind
one of the manner of Lamb, without that curious fantastic touch which is
of the essence of Lamb's style. The following lines, for example, are a
revelation of childish psychology, and probably may be applied, with
almost as much truth, to the childhood of our race:--
"Children are long of seeing, or at least of looking at what is above
them; they like the ground, and its flowers and stones, its 'red
sodgers' and lady-birds, and all its queer things; _their world is
about three feet high_, and they are more often stooping than gazing
up. I know I was past ten before I saw, or cared to see, the ceilings
of the rooms in the manse at Biggar."
I have often thought that the earliest fathers of our race, child-like in
so many ways, were child-like in this, and worshipped, not the phenomena
of the heavens, but objects more on a level with their eyes--the "queer
things" of their low-lying world. In this essay on his father, Dr. Brown
has written lines about a child's first knowledge of death, which seem as
noteworthy as Steele's famous passage about his father's death and his
own half-conscious grief and anger. Dr. Brown describes a Scottish
funeral--the funeral of his own mother--as he saw it with the eyes of a
boy of five years old, while his younger brother, a baby of a few months--
"leaped up and crowed with joy at the strange sight--the crowding
horsemen, the coaches, and the nodding plumes of the hearse . . .
Then, to my surprise and alarm, the coffin, resting on its bearers,
was placed over the dark hole, and I watched with curious eye the
unrolling of those neat black bunches of cords, which I have often
enough seen since. My father took the one at the head, and also
another much smaller, springing from the same point as his, which he
had caused to be placed there, and unrolling it, put it into my hand.
I twisted it firmly round my fingers, and awaited the result; the
burial men with their real ropes lowered the coffin, and when it
rested at the bottom it was too far down for me to see it. The grave
was made very deep, as he used afterwards to tell us, that it might
hold us all. My father first and abruptly let his cord drop, followed
by the rest. This was too much. I now saw what was meant, and held
on and fixed my fist and feet, and I believe my father had some
difficulty in forcing open my small fingers; he let the little black
cord drop, and I remember, in my misery and anger, seeing its open end
disappearing in the gloom." {4}
The man who wrote this, and many another passage as true and tender,
might surely have been famous in fiction, if he had turned his powers
that way. He had imagination, humour, pathos; he was always studying and
observing life; his last volume, especially, is like a collection of
fragments that might have gone toward making a work, in some ways not
inferior to the romances of Scott. When the third volume of Essays was
published, in the spring of his last year, a reviewer, who apparently had
no personal knowledge of Dr. Brown, asked why he did not write a novel.
He was by that time over seventy years of age, and, though none guessed
it, within a few weeks of his death. What he might have done, had he
given himself to literature only, it is impossible to guess. But he
caused so much happiness, and did so much good, in that gentle profession
of healing which he chose, and which brought him near to many who needed
consolation more than physic, that we need not forget his deliberate
choice. Literature had only his _horae subsecivae_, as he said:
_Subseciva quaedam tempora quae ego perire non patior_, as Cicero writes,
"shreds and waste ends of time, which I suffer not to be lost."
The kind of life which Dr. Brown's father and his people lived at Biggar,
the austere life of work, and of thought intensely bent on the real aim
of existence, on God, on the destiny of the soul, is perhaps rare now,
even in rural Scotland. We are less obedient than of old to the motto of
that ring found on Magus Moor, where Archbishop Shairp was murdered,
_Remember upon Dethe_. If any reader has not yet made the acquaintance
of Dr. Brown's works, one might counsel him to begin with the "Letter to
John Cairns, D.D.," the fragment of biography and autobiography, the
description of the fountainheads from which the genius of the author
flowed. In his early boyhood, John Brown was educated by his father, a
man who, from his son's affectionate description, seems to have confined
a fiery and romantic genius within the channels of Seceder and Burgher
theology. When the father received a call to the "Rose Street Secession
Church," in Edinburgh, the son became a pupil of that ancient Scottish
seminary, the High School--the school where Scott was taught not much
Latin and no Greek worth mentioning. Scott was still alive and strong in
those days, and Dr. Brown describes how he and his school companions
would take off their hats to the Shirra as he passed in the streets.
"Though lame, he was nimble, and all rough and alive with power; had you
met him anywhere else, you would say he was a Liddesdale store farmer,
come of gentle blood--'a stout, blunt carle,' as he says of himself, with
the swing and stride and the eye of a man of the hills--a large, sunny,
out-of-door air all about him. On his broad and stooping shoulders was
set that head which, with Shakespeare's and Bonaparte's, is the best
known in all the world." Scott was then living in 39 Castle Street. I
do not know whether the many pilgrims, whom one meets moving constantly
in the direction of Melrose and Abbotsford, have thought of making
pilgrimage to Castle Street, and to the grave, there, of Scott's "dear
old friend,"--his dog Camp. Of Dr. Brown's schoolboy days, one knows
little--days when "Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary Street from
the High School, our heads together, and our arms intertwisted, as only
lovers and boys know how or why." Concerning the doctor's character, he
has left it on record that he liked a dog-fight. "'A dog-fight,' shouted
Bob, and was off, and so was I, both of us all hot, praying that it might
not be over before we were up . . . Dogs like fighting; old Isaac (Watts,
not Walton) says they 'delight' in it, and for the best of all reasons;
and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight. This is a
very different thing from a love of making dogs fight." And this was the
most famous of all dog-fights--since the old Irish Brehons settled the
laws of that sport, and gravely decided what was to be done if a child
interfered, or an idiot, or a woman, or a one-eyed man--for this was the
dog-fight in which Rab first was introduced to his historian.
Six years passed after this battle, and Dr. Brown was a medical student
and a clerk at Minto Hospital. How he renewed his acquaintance there,
and in what sad circumstances, with Rab and his friends, it is
superfluous to tell, for every one who reads at all has read that story,
and most readers not without tears. As a medical student in Edinburgh,
Dr. Brown made the friendship of Mr. Syme, the famous surgeon--a
friendship only closed by death. I only saw them once together, a very
long time ago, and then from the point of view of a patient. These
occasions are not agreeable, and patients, like the old cock which did
not crow when plucked, are apt to be "very much absorbed"; but Dr.
Brown's attitude toward the man whom he regarded with the reverence of a
disciple, as well as with the affection of a friend, was very remarkable.
When his studies were over, Dr. Brown practised for a year as assistant
to a surgeon in Chatham. It must have been when he was at Chatham that a
curious event occurred. Many years later, Charles Dickens was in
Edinburgh, reading his stories in public, and was dining with some
Edinburgh people. Dickens began to speak about the panic which the
cholera had caused in England: how ill some people had behaved. As a
contrast, he mentioned that, at Chatham, one poor woman had died,
deserted by every one except a young physician. Some one, however,
ventured to open the door, and found the woman dead, and the young doctor
asleep, overcome with the fatigue that mastered him on his patient's
death, but quite untouched by the general panic. "Why, that was Dr. John
Brown," one of the guests observed; and it seems that, thus early in his
career, the doctor had been setting an example of the courage and charity
of his profession. After a year spent in Chatham, he returned to
Edinburgh, where he spent the rest of his life, busy partly with his art
of healing, partly with literature. He lived in Rutland Street, near the
railway station, by which Edinburgh is approached from the west, and
close to Princes Street, the chief street of the town, separated by a
green valley, once a loch, from the high Castle Rock. It was the room in
which his friends were accustomed to see Dr. Brown, and a room full of
interest it was. In his long life, the doctor had gathered round him
many curious relics of artists and men of letters; a drawing of a dog by
Turner I remember particularly, and a copy of "Don Juan," in the first
edition, with Byron's manuscript notes. Dr. Brown had a great love and
knowledge of art and of artists, from Turner to Leech; and he had very
many friends among men of letters, such as Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Thackeray.
Dr. Brown himself was a clever designer of rapid little grotesques, rough
sketches of dogs and men. One or two of them are engraved in the little
paper-covered booklets in which some of his essays were separately
published--booklets which he was used to present to people who came to
see him and who were interested in all that he did. I remember some
vivacious grotesques which he drew for one of my brothers when we were
schoolboys. These little things were carefully treasured by boys who
knew Dr. Brown, and found him friendly, and capable of sustaining a
conversation on the points of a Dandy Dinmont terrier and other mysteries
important to youth. He was a bibliophile--a taste which he inherited
from his father, who "began collecting books when he was twelve, and was
collecting to his last hours."
The last time I ever saw Dr. Brown, a year before his death, he was kind
enough to lend me one of the rarest of his treasures, "Poems," by Mr.
Ruskin. Probably Mr. Ruskin had presented the book to his old friend; in
no other way were it easy to procure writings which the author withdrew
from publication, if, indeed, they ever were, properly speaking,
published. Thus Dr. Brown was all things to all men, and to all boys. He
"had a word for every one," as poor people say, and a word to the point,
for he was as much at home with the shepherd on the hills, or with the
angler between Hollylea and Clovenfords, as with the dusty book-hunter,
or the doggy young Border yeoman, or the child who asked him to "draw her
a picture," or the friend of genius famous through all the world,
Thackeray, when he "spoke, as he seldom did, of divine things."
Three volumes of essays are all that Dr. Brown has left in the way of
compositions: a light, but imperishable literary baggage. His studies
are usually derived from personal experience, which he reproduced with
singular geniality and simplicity, or they are drawn from the tradition
of the elders, the reminiscences of long-lived Scotch people, who,
themselves, had listened attentively to those who went before them. Since
Scott, these ancient ladies with wonderful memories have had no such
attentive listener or appreciative reporter as Dr. Brown. His paper
called "Mystifications," a narrative of the pranks of Miss Stirling
Graham, is a brief, vivid record of the clever and quaint society of
Scotland sixty years ago. Scotland, or at least Scottish society, is now
only English society--a little narrower, a little prouder, sometimes even
a little duller. But old people of position spoke the old Scotch tongue
sixty years ago, and were full of wonderful genealogies, full of
reminiscences of the "'45," and the adventures of the Jacobites. The
very last echoes of that ancient world are dying now from memory, like
the wide reverberations of that gun which Miss Nelly MacWilliam heard on
the day when Prince Charles landed, and which resounded strangely all
through Scotland.
The children of this generation, one fears, will hardly hear of these old
raids and duels, risings and rebellions, by oral tradition handed down,
unbroken, through aunts and grandmothers. Scott reaped a full, late
harvest of the memories of clannish and feudal Scotland; Dr. Brown came
as a later gleaner, and gathered these stirring tales of "A Jacobite
Family" which are published in the last volume of his essays. When he
was an observer, not a hearer only, Dr. Brown chiefly studied and best
wrote of the following topics: passages and characters of humour and
pathos which he encountered in his life and profession; children, dogs,
Border scenery, and fellow-workers in life and science. Under one or
other of these categories all his best compositions might be arranged.
The most famous and most exquisite of all his works in the first class is
the unrivalled "Rab and his Friends"--a study of the stoicism and
tenderness of the Lowland character worthy of Scott. In a minor way the
little paper on "Jeems," the door-keeper in a Dissenting house of the
Lord, is interesting to Scotch people, though it must seem a rather
curious revelation to all others. "Her last Half-crown" is another study
of the honesty that survived in a starving and outcast Scotch girl, when
all other virtues, as we commonly reckon virtue, had gone before her
character to some place where, let us hope, they may rejoin her; for if
we are to suffer for the vices which have abandoned us, may we not get
some credit for the virtues that we have abandoned, but that once were
ours, in some heaven paved with bad resolutions unfulfilled? "The Black
Dwarf's Bones" is a sketch of the misshapen creature from whom Scott
borrowed the character that gives a name to one of his minor Border
stories. The real Black Dwarf (David Ritchie he was called among men)
was fond of poetry, but hated Burns. He was polite to the fair, but
classed mankind at large with his favourite aversions: ghosts, fairies,
and robbers. There was this of human about the Black Dwarf, that "he
hated folk that are aye gaun to dee, and never do't." The village
beauties were wont to come to him for a Judgment of Paris on their
charms, and he presented each with a flower, which was of a fixed value
in his standard of things beautiful. One kind of rose, the prize of the
most fair, he only gave thrice. Paris could not have done his dooms more
courteously, and, if he had but made judicious use of rose, lily, and
lotus, as prizes, he might have pleased all the three Goddesses; Troy
still might be standing, and the lofty house of King Priam.
Among Dr. Brown's papers on children, that called "Pet Marjorie" holds
the highest place. Perhaps certain passages are "wrote too
sentimentally," as Marjorie Fleming herself remarked about the practice
of many authors. But it was difficult to be perfectly composed when
speaking of this wonderful fairy-like little girl, whose affection was as
warm as her humour and genius were precocious. "Infant phenomena" are
seldom agreeable, but Marjorie was so humorous, so quick-tempered, so
kind, that we cease to regard her as an intellectual "phenomenon." Her
memory remains sweet and blossoming in its dust, like that of little
Penelope Boothby, the child in the mob cap whom Sir Joshua painted, and
who died very soon after she was thus made Immortal.
It is superfluous to quote from the essay on Marjorie Fleming; every one
knows about her and her studies: "Isabella is teaching me to make simme
colings, nots of interrigations, peorids, commoes, &c." Here is a
Shakespearian criticism, of which few will deny the correctness:
"'Macbeth' is a pretty composition, but awful one." Again, "I never read
sermons of any kind, but I read novelettes and my Bible." "'Tom Jones'
and Gray's 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard' are both excellent, and much
spoke of by both sex, particularly by the men." Her Calvinistic belief
in "_unquestionable_ fire and brimston" is unhesitating, but the young
theologian appears to have substituted "unquestionable" for
"unquenchable." There is something humorous in the alteration, as if
Marjorie refused to be put off with an "excellent family substitute" for
fire and brimstone, and demanded the "unquestionable" article, no other
being genuine, please observe trade mark.
Among Dr. Brown's contributions to the humorous study of dogs, "Rab," of
course, holds the same place as Marjorie among his sketches of children.
But if his "Queen Mary's Child Garden," the description of the little
garden in which Mary Stuart did _not_ play when a child, is second to
"Marjorie," so "Our Dogs" is a good second to "Rab." Perhaps Dr. Brown
never wrote anything more mirthful than his description of the sudden
birth of the virtue of courage in Toby, a comic but cowardly mongrel, a
cur of low degree.
"Toby was in the way of hiding his culinary bones in the small gardens
before his own and the neighbouring doors. Mr. Scrymgeour, two doors
off, a bulky, choleric, red-faced man--_torvo vultu_--was, by law of
contrast, a great cultivator of flowers, and he had often scowled Toby
into all but non-existence by a stamp of his foot and a glare of his
eye. One day, his gate being open, in walks Toby with a huge bone,
and making a hole where Scrymgeour had two minutes before been
planting some precious slip, the name of which on paper and on a stick
Toby made very light of, substituted his bone, and was engaged
covering it, or thinking he was covering it up with his shovelling
nose, when S. spied him through the inner glass door, and was out upon
him, like the Assyrian, with a terrific _gowl_. I watched them.
Instantly Toby made at him with a roar too, and an eye more torve than
Scrymgeour's, who, retreating without reserve, fell prostrate, there
is reason to believe, in his own lobby. Toby contented himself with
proclaiming his victory at the door, and, returning, finished his bone-
planting at his leisure; the enemy, who had scuttled behind the glass
door, glared at him. From this moment Toby was an altered dog. Pluck
at first sight was lord of all . . . That very evening he paid a visit
to Leo, next door's dog, a big tyrannical bully and coward . . . To
him Toby paid a visit that very evening, down into his den, and walked
about, as much as to say, 'Come on, Macduff'; but Macduff did not come
on."
This story is one of the most amazing examples of instant change of
character on record, and disproves the sceptical remark that "no one was
ever converted, except prize-fighters, and colonels in the army." I am
sorry to say that Dr. Brown was too fond of dogs to be very much attached
to cats. I never heard him say anything against cats, or, indeed,
against anybody; but there are passages in his writings which tend to
show that, when young and thoughtless, he was not far from regarding cats
as "the higher vermin." He tells a story of a Ghazi puss, so to speak, a
victorious cat, which, entrenched in a drain, defeated three dogs with
severe loss, and finally escaped unharmed from her enemies. Dr. Brown's
family gloried in the possession of a Dandy Dinmont named John Pym, whose
cousin (Auld Pepper) belonged to one of my brothers. Dr. Brown was much
interested in Pepper, a dog whose family pride was only matched by that
of the mother of Candide, and, at one time, threatened to result in the
extinction of this branch of the House of Pepper. Dr. Brown had
remarked, and my own observations confirm it, that when a Dandy is not
game, his apparent lack of courage arises "from kindness of heart."
Among Dr. Brown's landscapes, as one may call his descriptions of
scenery, and of the ancient historical associations with Scotch scenery,
"Minchmoor" is the most important. He had always been a great lover of
the Tweed. The walk which he commemorates in "Minchmoor" was taken, if I
am not mistaken, in company with Principal Shairp, Professor of Poetry in
the University of Oxford, and author of one of the most beautiful of
Tweedside songs, a modern "Bush aboon Traquair:"--
"And what saw ye there,
At the bush aboon Traquair;
Or what did ye hear that was worth your heed?
I heard the cushie croon
Thro' the gowden afternoon,
And the Quair burn singing doon to the vale o' Tweed."
There is in the country of Scott no pleasanter walk than that which Dr.
Brown took in the summer afternoon. Within a few miles, many places
famous in history and ballad may be visited: the road by which Montrose's
men fled from Philiphaugh fight; Traquair House, with the bears on its
gates, as on the portals of the Baron of Bradwardine; Williamhope, where
Scott and Mungo Park, the African explorer, parted and went their several
ways. From the crest of the road you see all the Border hills, the
Maiden Paps, the Eildons cloven in three, the Dunion, the Windburg, and
so to the distant Cheviots, and Smailholm Tower, where Scott lay when a
child, and clapped his hands at the flashes of the lightning, _haud sine
Dis animosus infans_, like Horace.
From the crest of the hill you follow Dr. Brown into the valley of
Yarrow, and the deep black pools, now called the "dowie dens," and so,
"through the pomp of cultivated nature," as Wordsworth says, to the
railway at Selkirk, passing the plain where Janet won back Tamlane from
the queen of the fairies. All this country was familiar to Dr. Brown,
and on one of the last occasions when I met him, he was living at
Hollylea, on the Tweed, just above Ashestiel, Scott's home while he was
happy and prosperous, before he had the unhappy thought of building
Abbotsford. At the time I speak of, Dr. Brown had long ceased to write,
and his health suffered from attacks of melancholy, in which the world
seemed very dark to him. I have been allowed to read some letters which
he wrote in one of these intervals of depression. With his habitual
unselfishness, he kept his melancholy to himself, and, though he did not
care for society at such times, he said nothing of his own condition that
could distress his correspondent. In the last year of his life,
everything around him seemed to brighten: he was unusually well, he even
returned to his literary work, and saw his last volume of collected
essays through the press. They were most favourably received, and the
last letters which I had from him spoke of the pleasure which this
success gave him. Three editions of his book ("John Leech, and Other
Essays") were published in some six weeks. All seemed to go well, and
one might even have hoped that, with renewed strength, he would take up
his pen again. But his strength was less than we had hoped. A cold
settled on his lungs, and, in spite of the most affectionate nursing, he
grew rapidly weaker. He had little suffering at the end, and his mind
remained unclouded. No man of letters could be more widely regretted,
for he was the friend of all who read his books, as, even to people who
only met him once or twice in life, he seemed to become dear and
familiar.
In one of his very latest writings, "On Thackeray's Death," Dr. Brown
told people (what some of them needed, and still need to be told) how
good, kind, and thoughtful for others was our great writer--our greatest
master of fiction, I venture to think, since Scott. Some of the lines
Dr. Brown wrote of Thackerary might be applied to himself: "He looked
always fresh, with that abounding silvery hair, and his young, almost
infantile face"--a face very pale, and yet radiant, in his last years,
and mildly lit up with eyes full of kindness, and softened by sorrow. In
his last year, Mr. Swinburne wrote to Dr. Brown this sonnet, in which
there seems something of the poet's prophetic gift, and a voice sounds as
of a welcome home:--
"Beyond the north wind lay the land of old,
Where men dwelt blithe and blameless, clothed and fed
With joy's bright raiment, and with love's sweet bread,--
The whitest flock of earth's maternal fold,
None there might wear about his brows enrolled
A light of lovelier fame than rings your head,
Whose lovesome love of children and the dead
All men give thanks for; I, far off, behold
A dear dead hand that links us, and a light
The blithest and benignest of the night,--
The night of death's sweet sleep, wherein may be
A star to show your spirit in present sight
Some happier isle in the Elysian sea
Where Rab may lick the hand of Marjorie."