The best sketch of Kirkpatrick Sharpe in his prime is that given in

Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_, in the form of an extract from Scott’s

Diary, under the date of Sunday, the 20th November 1825. It chanced that

William Clerk and Kirkpatrick Sharpe had dined with Scott that day in

his house in Castle Street; and the Diary, after describing Clerk, thus

describes the other:—

“Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe is another very remarkable man. He was

bred for a clergyman, but never took orders. He has infinite wit, and

a great turn for antiquarian lore, as the publications of _Kirkton_,

etc., bear witness. His drawings are the most fanciful and droll

imaginable,—a mixture between Hogarth and some of those foreign

masters who painted temptations of St. Anthony and other grotesque

subjects. As a poet he has not a very strong touch. Strange that his

finger-ends can describe so well what he cannot bring out clearly and

firmly in words. If he were to make drawing a resource, it might raise

him a large income. But, though a lover of antiquities, and therefore

of expensive trifles, C. K. S. is too aristocratic to use his art to

assist his revenue. He is a very complete genealogist, and has made

detections in _Douglas_ and other books on pedigree, which our nobles

would do well to suppress if they had an opportunity. Strange that a

man should be curious after scandal of centuries old! Not but Charles

loves it fresh and fresh also; for, being very much a fashionable man,

he is always master of the reigning report, and he tells the anecdote

with such gusto that there is no helping sympathising with him,—a

peculiarity of voice adding not a little to the general effect. My

idea is that C. K. S., with his oddities, tastes, satire, and high

aristocratic feelings, resembles Horace Walpole; perhaps in his person

also in a general way.”

This description, which C. K. S. must have himself read on its first

appearance in _Lockhart_,[47] had to serve as a sufficient account of

him for the general public so long as he lived, except in so far as it

might be filled up by impressions from his own writings. After his death

there were obituary sketches of him, of course, in the Edinburgh

newspapers; and he figured posthumously, under the thin disguise of

“Fitzpatrick Smart, Esq.,” as one of the typical Edinburgh bibliomaniacs

so cleverly described by Hill Burton in his _Book-Hunter_, published in

1862. Not till 1869, however, was there any adequate commemoration of

him. In that year there was published by Messrs. Blackwood a sumptuous

large quarto entitled _Etchings by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, with

Photographs from Original Drawings, Poetical and Prose Fragments, and a

Prefatory Memoir_. The volume sufficed in every respect for those who

still felt an interest in Kirkpatrick Sharpe and his memory, save that

it contained hardly any representation of his extensive epistolary

correspondence. The defect has been amply supplied in the two large new

volumes now before us. The _Memoir_ which they contain is substantially

a reproduction of that in the now scarce volume of 1869; but they

consist chiefly of a selection of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s preserved

letters, and of letters to him, through the long period of fifty-two

years extending from 1798 to 1850. The careful editor, Mr. Allardyce,

has erred rather by excess than by defect in his selection. A good many

of the letters of Sharpe’s correspondents which he has thought worth

giving might well have been spared. With that exception, however, the

editing is admirable; and in the main, the collection is as variously

amusing, and here and there as startlingly and laughably odd, as

anything of the kind that has been published in Great Britain for many a

day.

By far the largest proportion of the letters belong to what has been

hitherto the least known period of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s life: to wit,

the period preceding his definite settlement of himself in Edinburgh in

1813. From these, together with Mr. Bedford’s prefixed _Memoir_, we

obtain the following facts:—

Born in 1781, at Hoddam Castle, in Dumfriesshire, the third son of

Charles Sharpe, Esq., of Hoddam, and with a pedigree, both on the

father’s side and on the mother’s, of specially marked connections with

some of the oldest houses of the Scottish aristocracy, and some of the

most memorable events of Scottish history, the boy had grown up to his

sixteenth year, one of a large family of well-educated brothers and

sisters, imbibing the family tastes, and strongly influenced also by the

traditions and legends of the antique family-dwelling itself, and of the

adjacent scenery of that old West Border region. Drawing, howsoever

learnt, must have been one of his earliest accomplishments; and one of

the most interesting memories of his boyhood was that, in consequence of

his father’s friendly relations with the poet Burns, he himself had seen

and spoken with the poet familiarly more than once. It was in the winter

after the poet’s death that Kirkpatrick Sharpe added to his home

education by attending a class or two in the University of Edinburgh.

The intention for the time, however, being that he should become an

English clergyman, he was sent, in 1798, at the age of seventeen, to

Christ Church, Oxford. Mainly here we see him for the next eight years,

taking his B.A. degree in 1802 and his M.A. in 1806, and meanwhile

forming intimacies with a select number of his young College and

University coevals. Chief among these were Earl Gower, afterwards Duke

of Sutherland, Viscount Newtown, afterwards Earl of Lanesborough, Lord

Lewisham, afterwards Earl of Dartmouth, the Rev. J. J. Conybeare,

afterwards Oxford Professor of Poetry, Mr. R. A. Inglis, afterwards the

well-known Sir Robert Inglis, and Elijah B. Impey, son of the famous

Indian Chief-Justice Impey. In the society of these, and of other young

Oxonians, he seems to have made a strong mark, and to have been greatly

liked,—a dandyish young fellow, but with eccentric ways and bookish

tastes, a very shrill voice and abundant sarcasm in the use of it, no

end of knowledge of art subjects, and an inimitable power of

portrait-sketching and caricaturing. Incidents of the same college

period at Oxford were some contributions by Sharpe to the

_Anti-Jacobin_, and the beginning of his acquaintance with Scott, first

by correspondence, and then personally. Through the next seven years,

when he was passing out of his twenties into his thirties, we see him,

though he still kept up his connection with Oxford and was occasionally

in residence there, yet moving about a good deal,—sometimes at Hoddam,

sometimes in Edinburgh, sometimes in London, but with frequent visits to

the country-houses of his aristocratic friends. His habits of

letter-writing were now at their briskest; and among his correspondents

through those seven years, besides the Oxonian friends already

mentioned, none of whom forgot him wherever he was, one notes the

Margravine of Anspach, and her son, the Hon. Keppel Craven, the

Marchioness of Stafford, the Countess of Dalkeith, the Count de Gramont,

the Marchioness of Queensberry, Lady Charlotte Campbell (afterwards Lady

Charlotte Bury), Miss Campbell of Monzie, and the Duchess of Buccleuch.

What ended this desultory life of wandering and fashionable

acquaintance-making in England was the death of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s

father in 1813. The lairdship of Hoddam having then descended to the

eldest son, General Matthew Sharpe,[48] the old Hoddam household was

broken up, and Kirkpatrick Sharpe, at the age of thirty-two, began, on

an allowance from his brother, that long residence in Edinburgh which

has been sketched sufficiently already.

If we were to regard Kirkpatrick Sharpe as a kind of Scottish Horace

Walpole, it would not be because his correspondence furnishes, to

anything like the same extent as Walpole’s, a continuous comment of

gossip on what was most central in the history of his time. Even the

Edinburgh portion of it will disappoint, if what is looked for in it is

a record of the most important occurrences in Edinburgh through the time

traversed. Some of the most notable persons in the society of Edinburgh,

and even in its literary society, between 1813 and 1851, are either

barely mentioned or not mentioned at all. The truth is that Kirkpatrick

Sharpe moved through the world in a track, or in a series of tracks,

determined by a few affinities of his own constitution, which led him

sometimes into social companionship, but at other times left him

stranded, and at leisure to find amusement in counting over the stray

beads of past memories. Hence, though his correspondence does contain a

good deal of historical gossip at intervals, its chief interest will be

missed by those who read it only for that kind of recompense, and do not

also find pleasure in it as a revelation of Kirkpatrick Sharpe himself.

Kirkpatrick Sharpe was, as we have hinted, a born Sir Mungo

Malagrowther. From his first youth, whether in consequence or not of

some constitutional peculiarity, such as might be supposed to be

indicated by his thin and shrill voice,—by the bye, Sir Walter, when he

introduces the original Sir Mungo in his _Nigel_, expressly notes that

the voice of that original was “high-pitched and querulous,”—the lad of

elegant accomplishments from Hoddam Castle was marked by a disposition

to snarl at things, express shrill and sarcastic views of things,

ventilate the absurdest little momentary animosities. In the very first

of his letters, which is of date November 1798, and announces to his

mother his entry into Christ Church College, his description of the

young men of the college he has yet seen is that they “are all ugly,

conceited, and putting themselves in postures like Mr. Don, and have the

worst legs I ever beheld, crooked thirty different ways, east, west,

north, south, that it is a very shame to be seen”; and in a later letter

the Rev. Dr. Cyril Jackson, the head of the college, is described as “an

inspired swine.” These irreverences and causticities, characteristic

from the first of the conversation and the letters of a young fellow of

indubitable natural talent otherwise, and of gentlemanly tastes and

belongings, must, in fact, have been one cause of that zest for his

society when it could be had, and for continued epistolary intercourse

at other times, which was felt by so many of his college comrades of the

most aristocratic set, and communicated by them to the seniors of their

families. In English country-houses, and among great ladies, what more

privileged person than the weak-voiced young Kirkpatrick Sharpe, with

his witty cynicisms and budget of queer stories? And so to the end, with

only the difference made by change of residence back to Scotland,

increasing age, and increasing carelessness in dress,—always a

privileged person, just because he was recognised as so amusing a

Malagrowther. Here, from the abundance in the volumes before us, are a

few of his characteristic Malagrowtherisms, arranged in the

chronological order of their subjects:—

_Character of the Countess of Mar, his own ancestress._—“Her good

qualities were not proportioned, as is generally the case, to her

rank. She basked all her life in the beams of royalty, with a pension

from the Crown, and yet cultivated the Kirk, and hounded out her

whelps to bark and bite in favour of the Solemn League and Covenant.”

_Milton._—“I think Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ a heap of blasphemy and

obscenity, with, certainly, numberless poetical beauties. Milton was a

Whig, and in my mind an Atheist. I am persuaded his poem was composed

to apologise for the Devil, who certainly was the first Whig on

record.”

_Mrs. Siddons._—“I met Mrs. Siddons at dinner one day, just before the

death of her spouse,—’twas at Walter Scott’s,—and you cannot imagine

how it annoyed me to behold Belvidera guzzle boiled beef and mustard,

swill streams of porter, cram up her nose with handfuls of snuff, and

laugh till she made the whole room shake again.”

_Madame de Stäel._—“Her face was that of a blackamoor attempted to be

washed white. She wore a wig like a bunch of withered heather, and

over that a turban which looked as if it had been put on in the dark;

a short neck, and shoulders rising so much behind that they almost

amounted to a hump. With all this ugliness all the airs of a

beauty,—for ever tormenting her shawl into new draperies, and

distorting her fingers as you see them in the ridiculous French

portraits by Mignard and his followers.”

_Queen Caroline._—“Her eyes projected, like those of the royal family.

She made her head large by wearing an immense wig; she also painted

her eyebrows, which gave her face a strange, fierce look. Her

skin,—and she showed a great deal,—was very red. She wore very

high-heeled shoes, so that she bent forward when she stood or walked:

her feet and ankles were dreadful.”

_Shelley._—“We have lately had a literary sun shine forth upon us here

[at Oxford], before whom our former luminaries must hide their

diminished heads,—a Mr. Shelley, of University College, who lives upon

arsenic, aquafortis, half-an-hour’s sleep in the night, and is

desperately in love with the memory of Margaret Nicholson.”

_The Rev. Dr. M’Crie._—“The villainous biographer of John Knox.” “That

villain, Dr. M’Crie.”

_The Rev. H. Philpotts (afterwards Bishop of Exeter)._—“A hideous

fellow of the name of Fillpot.”

_Sir Walter Scott_:—(1) _First Sight of Scott at Oxford in 1803._—“The

Border Minstrel paid me a visit some time since on his way to town,

and I very courteously invited him to breakfast. He is dreadfully

lame, and much too _poetical_. He spouts without mercy, and pays

compliments so high-flown that my self-conceit, though a tolerable

good shot, could not even wing one of them.” (2) _Opinion of the

Waverley Novels in 1839, seven years after Scott’s death._—“As to Sir

Walter’s harmless _romances_,—not harmless, however, as to bad

English,—they contain _nothing_: pictures of manners that never were,

are, or will be, besides ten thousand blunders as to chronology,

costume, etc. etc., which must mislead the million who admire such

captivating comfits.”

_Rachel and Jenny Lind._—“I have seen and heard Misses Rachel and J.

Lind. The Jewess has a good voice,—far inferior, however, to that of

Mrs. Siddons,—but an ungraceful and often vulgar action. As to Miss

Jenny, she sings very prettily; but her highest note is a downright

squall, and the buzz like a bee she can make (I have heard boys in

Annandale do something like it) is a trick,—not music.”

These are specimens of what may be called the Malagrowtherism of

Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s disposition,—his readiness to snarl and snap at

everything; but they leave unrepresented the two special forms of his

Malagrowtherism which strike one most constantly and startlingly in his

correspondence. Like Swift, one of his constitutional resemblances to

whom was an extreme personal fastidiousness,—an extreme sensitiveness to

anything about himself that was offensive to eye, ear, or nostril,—he

tended, in a most inordinate degree, in his writings and letters, as if

by revenge against this constitutional nicety, to descriptions and

imaginations of the physically nasty; and, like Swift also, and probably

from some similar radical cause, he tended, in a most inordinate degree,

to sexual allusions, and to all scandals and speculations of the sexual

order. Illustrations will not be expected here, but will be found in

sufficient number in the volumes which Mr. Allardyce has edited. Mr.

Allardyce has been a bold editor; for there are in the volumes passages

of both the specified kinds that verge on the bounds of what many people

nowadays might regard as the unpublishable. Some of these passages, it

is curious to observe, occur in letters to Sharpe’s lady-correspondents;

one or two of whom, it is also curious to remark, do not seem at all

discomposed, but even,—those were the days of the Regency!—reciprocate

with due elegance. The worst of the matter is that poor Sir Walter

himself, honest man! does not escape uninvolved. In one or two frank

moments, knowing his friend’s tastes, he had sent him communications

which he thought would suit them; and lo! these now in printed black and

white! Hurrah for old Peveril all the same! What can ever smirch _him_?

It would be wrong to leave our readers with the impression that Charles

Kirkpatrick Sharpe was nothing more than a Sir Mungo Malagrowther of the

first half of the present century. At the back of his Malagrowtherism,

as appears from plenty of testimony in these volumes, there was much

gentlemanly courtesy, a good deal of kindliness and willingness to

oblige, a highly cultivated critical judgment in minute matters of art

and literature, a sensitiveness to whatever of the fine and poetical in

Scottish tradition he could discern amid the gross and scandalous, and,

most especially, a real sense of humour. In this last particular his

fondness for little scraps of whimsical or nonsensical verse may be

taken as a sure sign. There must have been some heart of intrinsic fun

in the man who could go about in the streets, or sit alone in his room,

repeating to himself, as we know he did, such scraps as these:—

“Yours till death, till death doth come,

And shut me up in the cold _tum_.”

“What is impossible can’t be,

And never, never comes to pass.”

“Hey, the haggis o’ Dunbar,

Fatharalinkum feedle;

Mony better, few waur,

Fatharalinkum feedle.”

Above all, we must remember how many attached friends Kirkpatrick Sharpe

had drawn around him in the course of his life, and how all that

survived of the earliest of these kept up their liking for him, and an

affectionate intercourse with him, to the last. In September 1831, when

the dying Scott was departing on his final journey to the Mediterranean

in quest of health, almost the last friend he wrote to was his “Dear

Charles”: and the letter contained these words—“I should like to have

shaken hands with you, as there are few I regret so much to part with.

But it will not be. I will keep my eyes dry if possible, and therefore

content myself with bidding you a long, perhaps an eternal, farewell.”

That, surely, is a testimony by itself. All in all, then, need we wonder

at the rumour that there are some persons in Edinburgh now so peculiarly

tempered, or so ill-satisfied with their present mercies, that they

would be willing to exchange any three or four of those whom they are

pleased to characterise as the more insipid present celebrities of the

town for the re-apparition among us of that crabbed old gentleman who

was to be seen forty years ago in the Edinburgh streets, with his

light-brown wig, faded blue surtout, ribbon-tied pumps, and green silk

umbrella?

JOHN HILL BURTON[49]

Dr. Hill Burton used to be a little annoyed by the praises bestowed on

him for his _Book-Hunter_. He had written books far more laborious and

important, he thought; and why should the public, why should his own

friends even, be always paying him such special compliments on account

of a mere piece of literary bye-play?

The feeling was natural on Dr. Burton’s part; and it is certainly not to

this casual production of his, published originally in 1862, that one

would now point as the most solid exhibition of his powers. Yet the

public were not wrong in their extraordinary fondness for _The

Book-Hunter_. Not only was it a book of deliciously amusing matter, such

as one prays for on a dull evening or a rainy day; but it was pervaded,

in an unusual degree, by the flavour of the author’s own peculiar

character. If not the most valuable of Dr. Burton’s writings, it is the

most thoroughly Burtonian. Hence a real propriety in the form of the

present republication. If any one of Dr. Burton’s books was to be

converted, by the care of his publishers, into a memorial of himself,

and set forth, therefore, in all the beauties of quarto size, thick

ribbed paper, wide margins, and gilt binding, and with the

accompaniments of a portrait, illustrative vignettes, and a prefixed

biography, which could it be but _The Book-Hunter_? Messrs. Blackwood

have done well in perceiving this, and in making reaccessible such a

famous book about books, unfortunately so long out of print, in a new

edition devised so expressly, in the first place, for book-lovers of

very æsthetic tastes and correspondingly superior purses.

No need at this time of day to revert to the book itself for description

of the richly humorous variety of its contents, or for specification of

the parts that are most fascinating and memorable. No need either to

point out the errors into which the author sometimes fell in his hurry,

and some of which remain in the present text,—as, for example, the

extraordinary blunder of making Gilbert Rule “the founder and first

Principal of the University of Edinburgh.” We prefer attending to what

is really the most important, as well as the most charming, feature of

distinction between this new edition of _The Book-Hunter_ and the older

and smaller editions. Biographic sketches of Dr. Burton, some of them in

the shape of obituary notices, have already made the public acquainted

with the main facts of his life; but there has been no such full,

intimate, or interesting account of him as that furnished in the “Memoir

of the Author” which opens the present volume, and bears the signature

of his widow, “Katharine Burton.” Consisting of no fewer than 104 pages,

and sketching the whole life with sufficient continuity, and with a

pleasant abundance of personal detail, it is exactly the kind of

biographical introduction that one would desire to see prefixed to the

most characteristic work, or to the collected works, of any deceased

author. We should have been grateful for so much information about Dr.

Burton and his habits in whatever form it had been communicated; but the

form itself deserves praise. Although there has been evidence of Mrs.

Burton’s literary ability and skill in former writings of hers, in none

of them has she been more successful than in this. The style is easy;

and the narrative is managed throughout with an admirable combination of

fidelity to fact, dutiful affection for the subject, and artistic

perception of what is historically significant, or racy, or picturesque.

One is struck, also, by the frank candour of the writer, her abstinence

from exaggeration, her resolution that Dr. Burton should be seen in her

pages exactly as he was. In two or three passages this honesty of the

writer, so rare in biographies by relatives, comes upon the reader with

the effect of a surprise.

In the first portion of the Memoir we are with young Burton in Aberdeen,

where he was born in 1809, and where he mainly resided till 1830. We see

him in his boyhood and early youth, growing up hardily among the quaint

and old-fashioned domesticities of his maternal relatives, the Patons of

Grandholm, or moving about between the two almost contiguous towns, the

main Aberdeen and the smaller Old Aberdeen, that share the mouths of the

Dee and the Don. By-the-bye, why does Mrs. Burton lavish all her

affection on Old Aberdeen, calling it “a sweet, still, little place,”

and dilating on the charms of its college and cathedral and antique

streets, while she has nothing more to say for New Aberdeen than that it

is “a highly prosperous commercial city, as utterly devoid of beauty or

interest as any city under the sun”? About Old Aberdeen all will agree

with her; but who that really knows the Granite City will agree with her

about the New? Is it nothing to be able to walk along the whole length

of her noble Union Street, whether on fair summer mornings, when the sun

is shining, or again in the frosty winter nights, when the eye is held

by the undulating perspective of the lamps, and the very houses glitter

keenly in the starlight, and the aurora borealis is seen dancing at its

best in the northward sky over the chasm from Union Bridge? Is it

nothing to saunter down by the bustling quays and ship-yards, and thence

to the extreme of the harbour, where the great out-jutting pier of

stonework commands the miles of breakers and of sandy beach to the left,

and spikes the wrath of the German Ocean?

To young Burton, at all events, these and other sights and experiences

of his native city were by no means nothing. Familiar, like all other

Aberdonians, with the quiet little old town of the Don, he was a

nursling more peculiarly of the new town of the Dee,—historically the

older town, after all. It was at the Grammar School of New Aberdeen that

he received his first instruction in Latin; and, when he passed to the

University, it was not to King’s College in Old Aberdeen, but to the

amorphous hulk of a building, off the Broadgate, in the New Town, then

famous as Marischal College and University, where Dugald Dalgetty had

been educated long before him. For a while, indeed, it seemed as if

Burton was to be a denizen of New Aberdeen all his days. Hardly had he

left the University when he was apprenticed to an Aberdeen writer, and

began the drudgery of officework, with a view to being an Aberdeen

writer himself. Two passions, however, had already been developed in

him, which made the prospect of such a life unendurably irksome. One was

a passion for rambling about the country. To the last Dr. Burton was an

indefatigable pedestrian, thinking nothing of a walk of fifty or even

sixty miles in a day, over any tract of country and in any kind of

weather; and the habit, Mrs. Burton tells us, and proves by letters, had

been formed in his boyhood. Nothing more common with him then than to

set off, in the holiday season, with a pound in his pocket, accomplish

some incredible distance on that sum in the Aberdeenshire, Banffshire,

or Morayshire Highlands, and reappear, draggled and footworn, when the

sum was spent. His other passion was for literature. Letter-writing he

disliked, and avoided as much as he could; but for every other purpose

he had always a pen in his hand. Heaps of early manuscript of his, Mrs.

Burton informs us, are yet extant, conspicuously weak in the spelling,

but showing an extraordinary versatility of taste in the matter. He

wrote verse as well as prose, drama as well as narrative, but had a

special propensity to terrific prose-stories of the blood and murder

sort. There were newspapers in Aberdeen, and even a magazine, at that

date; and, where editors were so good-natured and not over-burdened, it

was not difficult for a clever young scribbler to get a percentage of

his writings into print. The Memoir does not give us particulars; but

Aberdonian legend still preserves the memory of those old days when

young Burton, young Joseph Robertson, young Spalding, and others, began

their literary lives together, and had no higher ambition as yet than

astonishing the Devanha and being read in the Gallowgate.

Released, by happy chance, from his detested Aberdeen writership, Burton

came to Edinburgh in November 1830, at the age of one-and-twenty, and

was able, by passing some forms of examination, which seem to have been

easier and more rapid than the corresponding forms now, to qualify

himself at once for the Scottish Bar. He was called in 1831; and from

that date he was a citizen of Edinburgh, never leaving it save for one

of his country rambles, or for an occasional visit to London or the

Continent. From that date, too, his membership of the Bar leading to

little or no practice, but only to more and more distinct recognition of

him as one of the Whig politicians of the Parliament House, literature

was his avowed profession.

The fifty years of Burton’s Edinburgh life are sketched for us in Mrs.

Burton’s Memoir with chronological and topographical precision. The

substance is as follows:—

The thirteen years of his continued bachelorship, from 1831 to 1844,

when he was domiciled with his mother and sister, first in Warriston

Crescent, and then in Howard Place, with a little summer cottage at

Brunstane, were a period of extraordinary and most varied literary

industry, chiefly anonymous. He wrote for newspapers and reviews; he

wrote schoolbooks and other compilations; he wrote no one knows what or

how much. “Dr. Burton’s whole resources at this time,” we are informed,

“were derived from his pen.”

It was the same during the five years of his first married life, from

1844 to 1849, when he and his wife resided in Scotland Street, and then

in Royal Crescent, his mother and sister having taken up house by

themselves,—not at Brunstane, which was given up about this time,—but at

Liberton Bank. It was during those five years, however, that, while

still engaged in a great amount of miscellaneous hackwork, he emerged

into independent authorship in his _Life and Correspondence of David

Hume_, his _Lives of Lord Lovat and Duncan Forbes of Culloden_, his

_Benthamiana_, and his _Political and Social Economy_,—the last written

for the Messrs. Chambers. This was the time, too, of his fullest relish

for general companionship, his most frequent appearances at Edinburgh

dinner tables, and perhaps his highest reputation for humorous

sociability and powers of table talk.

The sad death of his wife in 1849, leaving him a widower in his fortieth

year, with three young daughters, produced a change in that respect from

which he never quite recovered. He was all but shattered by the blow,

and went about for a time broken-hearted, shunning all ordinary society,

and finding relief only in aimless walks by night and day, and in

strenuous and solitary work. Through the whole of his widowerhood, in

fact, he remained very much of a recluse, living laboriously with his

children and his books, first in Castle Street and then in Ann Street,

and having intercourse only with a few intimates: such as Joseph

Robertson, John Ritchie, Alexander Russel and other _Scotsman_ friends,

and Professor Cosmo Innes. With the last of these, especially, he was in

the habit of taking long Saturday and Sunday walks; which ended

generally in his dining with the Innes family, the one guest at their

table in Inverleith Row, of a Saturday or Sunday evening. This, we

believe, was the time of the beginning of his important connection with

_Blackwood’s Magazine_, as it was certainly of the publication of his

_Narratives from Criminal Trials in Scotland_, his _Treatise of the Law

of Bankruptcy in Scotland_, and his _History of Scotland from the

Revolution to the Extinction of the last Jacobite Rebellion_. His

appointment in 1854 to the Secretaryship of the Scottish Prisons Board,

with a salary of £700 a year, made his circumstances easier, and at the

same time provided him with that regular occupation in official business

for so many hours every day which he thought desirable for any man of

letters. The appointment caused him to remove to a largish, semi-rural

house in Lauriston Place, backing on the Meadows, the site of which is

now occupied by the Simpson Memorial Hospital.

In August 1855 he married his second wife,—the daughter of his friend

Cosmo Innes, and writer of the present Memoir. As is natural, she

devotes a considerable proportion of the Memoir to recollections of the

subsequent six-and-twenty years of her husband’s life. Till March 1861

they remained in Lauriston Place,—where three more children were born to

Dr. Burton, a son and two daughters; but in that month they entered on

the tenancy of Craighouse, a quaint old-sixteenth century fortalice,

near the Braid Hills, and two miles out of Edinburgh, on which they had

set their hearts, partly for the charm of its own ruinous

picturesqueness, partly for its historical associations with the reigns

of Queen Mary and James VI., and partly on account of the singular

beauty of the views in its vicinity. Here, having reduced the ruin into

habitable and pleasant order, they lived till 1878, on the verge of the

Edinburgh world, and sufficiently close to it for the daily business

purposes of such an inveterate pedestrian as Burton, but still so much

out of it that the recluse evening habits into which he had settled

could be interrupted only when he chose, whether by the reception of a

friend or two now and then under his own roof, or by the still rarer

accident of a visit to some friend’s house in town.

Incidents of those seventeen years at Craighouse, besides the birth of

his seventh child and youngest son, were his honorary graduation as

LL.D. by the University of Edinburgh, his election to the membership of

the Athenæum Club in London, his appointment to the dignity of the

Historiographership-Royal for Scotland, and his honorary graduation as

D.C.L. by the University of Oxford. These honours were successive

acknowledgments of that growth of his literary reputation which had

attended the appearance of such results of his continued industry for

Blackwood as his _Book-Hunter_ and his _Scot Abroad_, but, above all,

the publication of his completed _History of Scotland_ in eight volumes.

Hardly had this last, his largest, work been finished when he projected

his _History of the Reign of Queen Anne_.

That work, however, prosecuted slowly and intermittently, and requiring

visits to London and to the Continent for its preparation, was not

concluded in Craighouse, but in another country house, called Morton

House, at the foot of the Pentland Hills, to which he was reluctantly

obliged to remove in 1878, when a new speculation affecting the future

property of Craighouse and its neighbourhood dispossessed him from that

much-loved home. The last three years of his life, marked by the

publication of his _History of the Reign of Queen Anne_, in three

volumes, and then, as if in final farewell to authorship of any kind, by

the sale of his library, were spent in this Morton House; and here he

died in 1881. As he had by that time retired from his official duties in

connection with the Prisons Board, and had few business occasions for

being in Edinburgh, he was even more of a recluse at Morton than he had

been before. Many of the younger Edinburgh generation, however, that

knew nothing of him personally in his prime, must have a vivid

recollection of casual glimpses of him in those still recent years, when

his stooping, eccentric figure, very untidily dressed, and with the most

battered and back-hanging of hats, would be seen pushing rapidly along

Princes Street, or some other thoroughfare, with a look that seemed to

convey the decided intimation: “Don’t stop me; I care for none of you.”

But, if you did have a meeting with Burton in circumstances that made

colloquy possible, he was the most kindly of men in his rough and

unsophisticated way, with a quantity of the queerest and most

entertaining old lore, and no end of good Scottish stories.

For the filling-out of this mere chronological scheme with the

particulars that make it lively and interesting, the reader must go to

Mrs. Burton’s own pages. She has judiciously interwoven her own

narrative with a selection from the simple and chatty letters which,

with all his dislike of letter-writing, he did punctually send to his

family whenever he chanced to be absent from them. Of her account of his

domestic habits, and of the singular honesty which tempers, as we have

said, her affectionate estimate of his character all-in-all, the

following sentences, strung together from different parts of the Memoir,

will be a sufficient specimen here:—

“His defect in conversation was that he was a bad listener. His own

part was well sustained. His enormous store of varied information

poured forth naturally and easily, and was interspersed with a

wonderful stock of lively anecdotes and jokes. But he always lacked

that greatest power of the conversationalist, the subtle ready

sympathy which draws forth the best powers of others. He was

invaluable at a dull dinner-table, furnishing the whole _frais de la

conversation_ himself.... His mode of life at that time [during his

residence at Lauriston Place and at Craighouse] was to repair to the

office of the Prison Board, in George Street, about eleven. He

remained there till four, and made it a matter of conscience neither

to do any extra-official writing nor to receive visits during those

hours.... Returning from his office to dinner at five, he would, after

dinner, retire to the library for twenty minutes or half-an-hour’s

perusal of a novel as mental rest. His taste in novels has been

already described. Although he would read only those called exciting,

they did not, apparently, excite him, for he read them as slowly as if

he was learning them by heart. He would return to the drawing-room to

drink a large cup of extremely strong tea, then retire again to the

library to commence his day of literary work about eight in the

evening. He would read or write without cessation, and without the

least appearance of fatigue or excitement, till one or two in the

morning.... Constitutionally irritable, energetic, and utterly

persistent, Dr. Burton did not know what dulness or depression of

spirits was. With grief he was indeed acquainted, and while such a

feeling lasted it engrossed him; but his spirits were naturally

elastic, and both by nature and on principle he discouraged in himself

and others any dwelling on the sad or pathetic aspects of life. He has

said that the nearest approach he had ever felt to low spirits was

when he had finished some great work and had not yet begun another....

John Hill Burton can never have been handsome, and he so determinedly

neglected his person as to increase its natural defects. His greatest

mental defect was an almost entire want of imagination. From this

cause the characters of those nearest and dearest to him remained to

his life’s end a sealed book.... Dr. Burton was excessively

kind-hearted within the limits placed by this great want. To any

sorrow or suffering which he could understand he craved with

characteristic impatience to carry immediate relief; and the greatest

enjoyment of his life, especially of its later years, was to give

pleasure to children, poor people, or the lower animals. Many humble

folks will remember the bunches of flowers he thrust silently into

their hands, and the refreshment he never failed to press on their

acceptance in his own peculiar manner. He was liberal of money to a

fault. He never refused any application even from a street beggar....

No printer’s devil or other chance messenger failed to receive his

sixpence or shilling, besides a comfortable meal.... Many of the

‘motley crew’ along with whom Dr. Burton received his education fell

into difficulties in the course of their lives. Application from one

of them always met with a prompt response. To send double the amount

asked on such occasions was his rule, if money was the object desired.

In his earlier life he would also spare no trouble in endeavouring to

help these unfortunates to help themselves. As he grew older he was

less zealous, probably from being less sanguine of success, in this

service.”

The illustrations that accompany the Memoir deserve a word. The portrait

of Dr. Burton, etched by Mr. W. B. Hole, A.R.S.A., after a photograph,

and representing him walking away, with a book in his hand, from an old

book-stall near Candlemaker Row, is done to the life, slightly tidied

perhaps in the look of the costume, but catching his gait and the keen

expression of his eyes and face with wonderful fidelity. Very faithful

and pleasing, also, are the vignettes of Craighouse Avenue and

Craighouse itself, the view of a nook in the library of Craighouse, and

the vignette of Dalmeny Churchyard, where Dr. Burton lies buried, all

drawn by his daughter Miss Rose Burton, and engraved by her sister Miss

E. P. Burton.

DR. JOHN BROWN OF EDINBURGH[50]

Since the last session of our University, Edinburgh has lost two of her

citizens of literary mark. Dr. John Brown died, in his house in Rutland

Street, on the 11th of May, in the seventy-second year of his age; and

his friend, Dr. William Hanna, died in London on the 24th of the same

month, aged seventy-three. They were both buried in Edinburgh. As I had

the honour of knowing them both well, I cannot let the present occasion

pass without asking you to join with me in remembering them

affectionately. I could say much to you of Dr. Hanna, the son-in-law and

biographer of Dr. Chalmers. I could dwell on the merits of his _Life_ of

that great man and of his other well-known works, and on his fine

liberality of intellect and the keen and warm geniality of his

Scoto-Irish heart. In this place, however, it is naturally of Dr. John

Brown that I feel myself entitled to speak at some length. He was, in a

sense, during the latter part of his life, peculiarly our Edinburgh man

of letters, the man most fondly thought of in that character by many

people at a distance. They had begun, long before his death, to call him

“The Scottish Charles Lamb”; and the name is applied to him still by

English critics.

Born at Biggar in Lanarkshire, in 1810, the son of the Secession

minister of that town, and of a family already in the third generation

of its remarkable distinction in the Scottish religious world as “The

Browns of Haddington,” our friend came to Edinburgh in 1822, when he was

twelve years old. His father had then removed from Biggar, to assume

that pastorate of the Rose Street Secession Church in this city in

which, and subsequently in his ministry in the Broughton Place Church,

and in his Theological Professorship in connection with the Associate

Synod, he attained his celebrity. When I first knew Edinburgh there was

no more venerable-looking man in it than this Dr. John Brown of

Broughton Place Church. People would turn in the streets to observe his

dignified figure as he passed; and strangers who went to hear him preach

were struck no less by the beauty of his appearance in the pulpit, the

graceful fall of the silver locks round his fine head and sensitive

face, than by the Pauline earnestness of his doctrine. At that time, the

phrase “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh,” if used in any part of Scotland

away from the metropolis, would have been taken as designating this

venerable Calvinistic clergyman, and not his son.

The son, meanwhile, it is true, was becoming well enough known within

Edinburgh on his own account. Having been educated at the High School

and the University, and having chosen the medical profession, and been

apprenticed for some time to the famous surgeon, Syme, he had taken his

degree of M.D. in 1833, and had then,—with no other previous medical

experience out of Edinburgh than a short probation among the sailors at

Chatham,—settled down permanently in Edinburgh for medical practice.

From that date, therefore, on to the time when I can draw upon my own

first recollections of him,—say about 1846,—there had been two Dr. John

Browns in Edinburgh, the father and the son, the theological doctor and

the medical doctor. It was the senior or theological doctor, as I have

said, that was then still the “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh” _par

excellence_, and the name had not transferred itself to the younger with

its new signification. He was then about thirty-six years of age, with

some little practice as a physician; and my remembrance of him at that

time is of a darkish-haired man, of shorter stature than his father,

with fine soft eyes, spirited movement, and very benignant manner, the

husband of a singularly beautiful young wife, and greatly liked and

sought after in the Edinburgh social circles in which he and she

appeared. This was partly from the charm of his vivid temperament and

conversation, and partly because of a reputation for literary ability

that had been recently gathering round him on account of occasional

semi-anonymous articles of his in newspapers and periodicals, chiefly

art-criticisms. For the hereditary genius of “The Browns of Haddington”

had, in this fourth generation of them, turned itself out of the

strictly theological direction, to work in new ways. While Dr. Samuel

Brown, a younger cousin of our Dr. John, had been astonishing Edinburgh

by his brilliant speculations in Chemistry, Dr. John himself, in the

midst of what medical practice came in his way, had been toying with

Literature. Toying only it had been at first, and continued to be for a

while; but, by degrees,—and especially after 1847, when the editorship

of the _North British Review_, which had been founded in 1844, passed

into the hands of his friend Dr. Hanna,—his contributions to periodical

literature became more various and frequent. At length, in 1858, when he

was forty-eight years of age, and had contributed pretty largely to the

periodical named and to others, he came forth openly as an author, by

publishing a volume of what he called his _Horæ Subsecivæ_, consisting

mainly of medical biographies and other medico-literary papers collected

from the said periodicals, but including also his immortal little

Scottish idyll called “Rab and His Friends.” His father had died in that

year, so that thenceforward, if people chose, the designation “Dr. John

Brown of Edinburgh” could descend to the son without ambiguity.

And it did so descend. For eleven years before that appearance of the

first collection of his _Horæ Subsecivæ_, with “Rab and His Friends”

included in it, I had been resident in London, and I remained there for

seven years more. During all those eighteen years, therefore, my direct

opportunities of cultivating his acquaintance had ceased; and, while I

could take note through the press of the growth of his literary

reputation, it was only by hearsay at a distance, or by a letter or two

that passed between us, or by a glimpse of him now and then when I came

north on a visit, that I was kept aware of his Edinburgh doings and

circumstances. Not till the end of 1865, when I resumed residence in

Edinburgh, were we brought again into close neighbourhood and

intercourse. Then, certainly, I found him, at the age of five-and-fifty,

as completely and popularly our “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh” in the new

sense as ever his father had been in the old one. His pen had been still

busy in newspapers and periodicals, the subjects ranging away more and

more from the medical; another volume of his _Horæ Subsecivæ_, or

collected articles, had been published; and some of his papers, selected

from that volume or its predecessor, or taken more directly from the

manuscript, had been brought out separately, in various forms, under the

discerning care of his friend and publisher, Mr. David Douglas, and had

been in circulation almost with the rapidity of one of the serial parts

of a novel by Dickens. Of both his _Minchmoor_ and his _Jeems the

Doorkeeper_ more than 10,000 copies had been sold; his _Pet Marjorie_

had passed the sale of 15,000 copies; and _Rab and His Friends_ was

already in its 50th thousand.

With all this applause beating in upon him from the reading public, in

Scotland, in England, and in America, there he still was in his old

Edinburgh surroundings: a widower now for some years, domesticated with

his two children, and more solitary in his habits than he had been; but

to be seen walking along Princes Street of a forenoon, or sometimes at

some hospitable dinner-table of an evening, always the same simple,

wise, benevolent, lovable, and much-loved Dr. John. And so for sixteen

years more, and to the very end. The sixties crept upon him after the

fifties, and the white touch of the first seventies followed, and the

vivid darkish-haired Dr. John of my first memory had changed into the

bald-headed and spectacled veteran you may see in the later

photographs,—the spectacles before his fine eyes if he were looking to

the front, but raised over the placid forehead if he were looking

downwards at a print or a book. But these changes had come softly, and

with a mellowing rather than withering effect; and, as late as last

winter, what veteran was there in our community whose face and presence

in any company was more desired or gave greater pleasure? If a stranger

of literary tastes visited Edinburgh, about whom did he inquire more

curiously, or whom was he more anxious to see, if possible, than Dr.

John Brown? We knew, most of us, that his calm face concealed sorrows;

we remembered his long widowerhood; we were aware too of the occasional

glooms and depressions that withdrew him from common society; but, when

he did appear among us, whether in any public gathering or in more

private fashion, how uniformly cheerful he was, how bright and sunny! It

has been stated, in one obituary notice of him, that his medical

practice declined as his literary reputation increased. I doubt the

truth of the statement, and imagine that the reverse might be nearer the

truth. To the end he loved his profession; to the end he practised it;

to the end there were not a few families, in and about Edinburgh, who

would have no other medical attendant, if they could help it, than their

dear and trusted Dr. John. My impression rather is that he was wrapt up

in his profession more and more in his later days, using his pen only

for a new trifle now and then as the whim struck him, and content in the

main with the continued circulation of his former writings or their

reissue in new shapes. It was on the 12th of April in the present year,

or only a month before his death, that he put the last prefatory touch

to the first volume of that new edition of his _Horæ Subsecivæ_ in three

volumes in which his complete literary remains are now accessible.

The title _Horæ Subsecivæ_, borrowed by Dr. John from the title-pages of

some old volumes of the minor English literature of the seventeenth

century, indicates, and was intended to indicate, the nature of his

writings. They are all “Leisure Hours,” little things done at times

snatched from business. There are between forty and fifty of them in

all, none of them long, and most of them very short. It is vain in his

case to repeat the regret, so common in similar cases, that the author

did not throw his whole strength into some one or two suitable subjects,

and produce one or two important works. By constitution, I believe, no

less than by circumstances, Dr. John Brown was unfitted for large and

continuous works, and was at home only in short occasional papers. One

compensation is the spontaneity of his writings, the sense of immediate

throb and impulse in each. Every paper he wrote was, as it were, a

moment of himself, and we can read his own character in the collected

series.

A considerable proportion of his papers, represented most directly by

his _Plain Lectures on Health addressed to Working People_, his little

essay entitled _Art and Science_, and his other little essays called

_Excursus Ethicus_ and _Education through the Senses_, but also by his

_Locke and Sydenham_ and others of his sketches of eminent physicians,

are in a didactic vein. Moreover, they are all mainly didactic on one

string. When these papers are read, it is found that they all propound

and illustrate one idea, which had taken such strong hold of the author

that it may be called one of his characteristics. It is the idea of the

distinction or contrast between the speculative, theoretical, or

scientific habit of mind, and the practical or active habit. In medical

practice and medical education, more particularly, Dr. John Brown

thought there had come to be too much attention to mere science, too

much faith in mere increase of knowledge and in exquisiteness of

research and apparatus, and too little regard for that solid breadth of

mind, that soundness of practical observation and power of decision in

emergencies, that instinctive or acquired sagacity, which had been

conspicuous among the best of the older physicians. As usual, he has put

this idea into the form of humorous apologue:—

A DIALOGUE.

SCENE.—Clinical wards of Royal Infirmary. The Physician and his Clerk

_loquuntur_.

John Murdoch, in the clinical ward with thoracic aneurism of the

aorta, had at his bedside a liniment of aconite, etc. Under the stress

of a paroxysm of pain, he drank it off, and was soon dead.

_Physician._—Well, Sir, what about Murdoch? Did you see him alive?

_Clerk._—Yes, Sir.

_Physician._—Did you feel his pulse?

_Clerk._—No, Sir.

_Physician._—Did you examine his eyes?

_Clerk._—No, Sir.

_Physician._—Did you observe any frothing at the mouth and nose?

_Clerk._—No, Sir.

_Physician._—Did you count his respirations?

_Clerk._—No, Sir.

_Physician._—Then, Sir, what the d——l _did_ you do?

_Clerk._—_I ran for the stomach-pump._

Dr. John was never tired of inculcating this distinction; it is the

backbone of almost all those papers of his that have been just

mentioned, and it reappears in others. In his special little essay

called _Art and Science_ he formulates it thus:—

IN MEDICINE

SCIENCE

Looks to essence and cause.

Is diagnostic.

Has a system.

Is _post-mortem_.

Looks to structure more than function.

Studies the phenomena of poisoning.

Submits to be ignorant of nothing.

Speaks.

ART

Looks to symptoms and occasions.

Is therapeutic and prognostic.

Has a method.

Is _ante-mortem_.

Looks to function more than structure.

Runs for the stomach-pump.

Submits to be ignorant of much.

Acts.

Now, in the particular matter in question, so far as it is here

represented, we should, doubtless, all agree with our friend. We should

all, for ourselves, in serious illness, infinitely prefer the attendance

of any tolerable physician of the therapeutic and prognostic type to

that of the ablest of the merely diagnostic type, especially if we

thought that the genius of the latter inclined him to a _post-mortem_

examination. Hence we may be disposed to think that Dr. John did good

service in protesting against the run upon science, ever new science, in

the medicine of his day, and trying to hark back the profession to the

good old virtues of vigorous rule of thumb. What I detect, however,

underneath all his expositions of this possibly salutary idea, and

prompting to his reiterations of it, is something deeper. It is a

dislike in his own nature to the abstract or theoretical in all matters

whatsoever. Dr. John Brown’s mind, I should say, was essentially

anti-speculative. His writings abound, of course, with tributes of

respect to science and philosophy, and expressions of astonishment and

gratitude for their achievements; but it may be observed that the

thinkers and philosophers to whom he refers most fondly are chiefly

those older magnates, including Bacon, Newton, Locke, and Bishop Butler

among the English, whose struggle was over long ago, whose results are

an accepted inheritance, and who are now standards of orthodoxy. All

later drifts of speculative thought, and especially the latest drifts of

his own day, seem to have made him uncomfortable. He actually warns

against them as products of what he calls “the lust of innovation.” This

is a matter of so much consequence in the study of Dr. John Brown’s

character that it ought not to be passed over lightly.

There can be no doubt that his dislike of the purely speculative spirit,

and especially of recent speculation of certain kinds, was rooted in

some degree in the fine devoutness of his nature, his unswerving

fidelity to his inherited religion. The system of beliefs which had been

consecrated for him so dearly and powerfully by the lives and example of

his immediate progenitors was still substantially that with which he

went through the world himself, though it had been softened in the

course of transmission, stripped of its more angular and sectarian

features, and converted into a contemplative _Religio Medici_, not

unlike that of his old English namesake, the philosopher and physician

of Norwich. Like that philosopher, for whom he had all the regard of a

felt affinity, he delighted in an _O altitudo!_, craved the refuge of an

_O altitudo!_ in all the difficulties of mere reason, and held that in

that craving itself there is the sure gleam for the human spirit of the

one golden key that unlocks those difficulties. A difference, however,

between him and old Browne of Norwich is that he had much less of clear

and definite thought, of logical grasp of prior propositions and

reasonings, with which to prepare for an _altitudo_, justify it, and

prop it up. Take as a specimen a passage relating to that very

distinction between Art and Science which he valued so much:—

“It may be thought that I have shown myself, in this parallel and

contrast, too much of a partisan of Art as against Science, and the

same may be not unfairly said of much of the rest of this volume. It

was in a measure on purpose,—the general tendency being counteractive

of the purely scientific and positive, or merely informative, current

of our day. We need to remind ourselves constantly that this kind of

knowledge puffeth up, and that it is something quite else that

buildeth up. It has been finely said that Nature is the Art of God,

and we may as truly say that all Art,—in the widest sense, as

practical and productive,—is His Science. He knows all that goes to

the making of everything; for He is Himself, in the strictest sense,

the only maker. He knows what made Shakespeare and Newton, Julius

Cæsar and Plato, what we know them to have been; and they are His by

the same right as the sea is His, and the strength of the hills, for

He made them and His hands formed them, as well as the dry land. This

making the circle for ever meet, this bringing Omega eternally round

to Alpha, is, I think, more and more revealing itself as a great

central, personal, regulative truth, and is being carried down more

than ever into the recesses of physical research, where Nature is fast

telling her long-kept secrets: all her tribes speaking, each in their

own tongue, the wonderful works of God,—the sea saying ‘It is not in

me,’ everything giving up any title to anything like substance, beyond

being the result of one Supreme Will. The more chemistry, and

electrology, and life, are searched into by the keenest and most

remorseless experiment, the more do we find ourselves admitting that

motive power and force, as manifested to us, is derived, is in its

essence immaterial, is direct from Him in whom we live and move, and

to whom, in a sense quite peculiar, belongeth power.”

This is fine, it is eloquent, it is likeable; but one cannot call it

lucid. Indeed, if interpreted literally, it is incoherent, for the end

contradicts the beginning. “Abstain from excess of theory or

speculation,” it substantially says, “for theory and speculation, when

prosecuted to the very utmost, lead to a profound religiousness.” This

is the only verbal construction of the passage; but it is the very

opposite of what was meant.

It is much the same with Dr. John Brown in smaller matters. If he wants

a definition or a distinction on any subject, he generally protests

first against the desire for definitions and distinctions, maintaining

the superiority of healthy practical sense and feeling over mere theory;

then he produces, in his own words, some “middle axiom,” or passable

first-hand notion on the subject, as sufficient for the purpose if

anything theoretical is wanted; and then he proceeds to back this up by

interesting quotations from favourite and accredited authors. In short,

Dr. John Brown lived in an element of the “middle propositions,” the

accredited axioms, on all subjects, and was impatient of reasoning,

novelty of theory, or search for ultimate principles. It is but the same

thing in another form,—though it deserves separate statement,—to say

that he disliked controversy. He shrank from controversy in all matters,

social as well as intellectual; was irritated when it came near him; and

kept rather on the conservative side in any new “cause” or “movement”

that was exciting his neighbourhood. Perhaps the most marked exception

in his writings to this disposition to rest in existing social

arrangements, and also to his prevailing dislike of speculation, was his

assertion of his unhesitating assent to that extreme development of Adam

Smith’s doctrines which would abolish the system of state-licensing for

particular professions, or at all events for the profession of Medicine.

He advocates this principle more than once in his papers, and he

signifies his adherence to it in almost the last words he wrote. “I am

more convinced than ever,” he says in the prefatory note to the

collected edition of his _Horæ Subsecivæ_, “of the futility and worse of

the Licensing System, and think, with Adam Smith, that a mediciner

should be as free to exercise his gifts as an architect or a

mole-catcher. The public has its own shrewd way of knowing who should

build its house or catch its moles, and it may quite safely be left to

take the same line in choosing its doctor.” This is bold enough, and

speculative enough; but the fact is that this acceptance of the

principle of absolute _laissez-faire_, or non-interference of the state,

or any other authority, in Medicine, or in any analogous art or craft,

was facilitated for him by his hereditary Voluntaryism in Church

matters, and indeed came to him ready-made in that form. What is

surprising, and what corroborates our view of the essentially

non-theoretical character of his intellect, is the unsystematic manner

in which he was content to hold his principle, his failure to carry it

out consistently, his apparent inability to perceive the full sweep of

its logical consequences. Thus, to the words just quoted he appends

these,—“Lawyers, of course, are different, as they have to do with the

state, with the law of the land.” Was there ever a more innocent _non

sequitur_? If any one may set up as a curer of diseases and make a

living in that craft by charging fees from those who choose to employ

him, why may not any one set up as a lawyer, and why may not I select

and employ any one I please to plead my cause in court, instead of being

bound to employ one of a limited number of wigged and gowned gentlemen?

If, then, it was not in theory or speculation that Dr. John Brown

excelled,—and that there was no deficiency of hereditary speculative

faculty in his family, but much the reverse, is proved not only by the

theological distinction of his predecessors in the family, and by the

brilliant career of his cousin, Dr. Samuel Brown, but also by the

reputation among us at this moment of his still nearer relative, the

eminent Philosophical Chemist of Edinburgh University,—in what was it

that he did excel? It was in what I may call an unusual

_appreciativeness_ of all that did recommend itself to him as good and

admirable. In few men has there been such a fulfilment of the memorable

apostolic injunction: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are

honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure,

whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report,—if

there be any virtue, and if there be any praise,—think on these things.”

The context of that passage shows that what was enjoined on the

Philippians was a habit of meditative and ruminative appreciation of all

that was noteworthy, of every variety, within accredited and prescribed

limits. Dr. John Brown was a model in this respect. Within the limits of

his preference for the concrete and practical over the abstract and

theoretical, he was a man of peculiarly keen relish for anything

excellent, and of peculiar assiduity in imparting his likings to others.

His habit of appreciativeness is seen, on the small scale, even in such

a matter as his appropriation and use of pithy phrases and anecdotes

picked up miscellaneously. “‘Pray, Mr. Opie, may I ask what you mix your

colours with?’ said a brisk dilettante student to the great painter.

‘With brains, sir,’ was the gruff reply.” Having met this story in some

Life of the painter Opie, Dr. John Brown had fastened on it, or it had

adhered to him; and not only did he hang one whole paper on it, entitled

_With Brains, Sir_, but he made it do duty again and again in other

papers. At times when Dr. Chalmers happened to be talked to about some

person not already known to him, and was told that the person was a man

of ability, “Yes, but has he _wecht_, Sir, has he _wecht_?” was his

common question in reply; and, as Dr. John Brown had also perceived that

it is not mere cleverness that is effective in the world, and that

_weight_ is the main thing, he was never tired of bringing in Dr.

Chalmers’s phrase to enforce that meaning. When Dr. John wanted to

praise anything of the literary kind as being of the most robust

intellectual quality, not food for babes but very “strong meat” indeed,

he would say “This is lions’ marrow.” As he was not a man to conceal his

obligations, even for a phrase, we learn from him incidentally that he

had taken the metaphor originally from this passage in one of the pieces

of the English poet Prior:—

“That great Achilles might employ

The strength designed to ruin Troy,

He dined on lions’ marrow, spread

On toasts of ammunition bread.”

Dr. John had a repertory of such individual phrases and aphorisms,

picked up from books or conversation, which he liked to use as

flavouring particles for his own text. He dealt largely also in extracts

and quotations of greater length. Any bit that struck him as fine in a

new book of verses, any scrap of old Scottish ballad not generally

known, any interesting little poem by a friend of his own that he had

seen in manuscript, or any similar thing communicated to him as not

having seen the light before, was apt to be pounced upon, stamped with

his _imprimatur_, and turned into service in his own papers, as motto,

relevant illustration, or pleasant addition. His fondness for quotation

from his favourite prose authors has already been mentioned. In fact,

some of his papers are little more than patches of quotations connected

by admiring comments. In such cases it is as if he said to his readers,

“How nice this is, how capital! don’t you agree with me?” Sometimes you

may not quite agree with him, or you may wish that he had thrown fewer

quotations at you, and had said more on the subject out of his own head;

but you always recognise his appreciativeness.

On the larger scale of the papers themselves the same appreciativeness

is discernible. Take first the papers which are most in the nature of

criticisms. Such are those entitled _Henry Vaughan_, _Arthur H. Hallam_,

_Thackeray’s Death_, _Notes on Art_, _John Leech_, _Halle’s Recital_,

and _Sir Henry Raeburn_. Whether in the literary papers of this group,

or in the art papers, you can see how readily and strongly Dr. John

Brown could admire, and what a propagandist he was of his admirations.

If Henry Vaughan the Silurist, the quaint and thoughtful English poet of

the seventeenth century, is now a better known figure in English

literary history than he was a generation ago, it is owing, I believe,

in some measure, to Dr. John Brown’s resuscitation of him. So, when

Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_ appeared in 1850, and all the world was moved

by that extraordinary poem, who but Dr. John Brown could not rest till

he had ascertained all that was possible about young Arthur Hallam, by

obtaining a copy of his “Remains in Verse and Prose,” privately printed

in 1834, with a memoir by the author’s father, Hallam the historian, and

till he had been permitted to give to the public, in liberal extracts

from the memoir, and by quotation from the pieces themselves, such an

authentic account of Tennyson’s dead friend as all were desiring? The

paper called _Thackeray’s Death_, though the only paper on Thackeray now

to be found among Dr. John Brown’s collected writings, is by no means, I

believe, the only paper he wrote on Thackeray. If there was a

Thackeray-worshipper within the British Islands, it was Dr. John Brown

of Edinburgh. Thackeray was his greatest man by far, after Scott, or

hardly after Scott, among our British novelists,—his idol, almost his

demigod; he had signified this, if I mistake not, in an article on

Thackeray while Thackeray’s fame was still only in the making; and the

particular paper now left us is but a re-expression of this high regard

for Thackeray as an author, blended with reminiscences of his own

meetings with Thackeray in Edinburgh, and testimonies of his warm

affection for the man. Another of his chief admirations was Ruskin. I

can remember how, when the first volume of the _Modern Painters_

appeared, the rumour of it ran at once through Edinburgh, causing a most

unusual stir of interest in the new book, and in the extraordinary

“Oxford Graduate” who was its author; and I am pretty sure now that it

was Dr. John Brown that had first imported the book among us, and had

enlightened Dr. Chalmers and others as to its merits. There is no

article on Ruskin among the collected papers; but there are frequent

references to him, and his influence can be discerned in all the

Art-criticisms. These Art-criticisms of Dr. John Brown, however, are

hardly criticisms in the ordinary sense. No canons of Art are expounded

or applied in them. All that the critic does is to stand, as it were,

before the particular picture he is criticising,—a Wilkie, a Raeburn, a

Turner, a Landseer, a Delaroche, a Holman Hunt, or, as it might happen,

some new performance by one of his Edinburgh artist-friends, Duncan, Sir

George Harvey, or Sir Noel Paton,—exclaiming “How good this is, how

true, how powerful, how pathetic!” while he attends to the direct human

interest of the subject, interprets the story of the picture in his own

way, and throws in kindly anecdotes about the painter. It is the same,

_mutatis mutandis_, for music, in his notices of pieces by Beethoven and

others, as heard at Halle’s concerts. His most elaborate paper of

Art-criticism is that entitled _John Leech_. It is throughout a glowing

eulogium on the celebrated caricaturist, with notices of some of his

best cartoons, but passing into an affectionate memoir of the man, on

his own account and as the friend of Thackeray, and indeed incorporating

reminiscences of Leech and Thackeray that had been supplied him by a

friend of both as material for a projected Memoir of Leech on a larger

scale. If not in this particular paper, at least here and there in some

of the others, the query may suggest itself whether the laudation is not

excessive. One asks sometimes whether the good Dr. John was not carried

away by the amiable fault of supposing that what happens to be present

before one of a decidedly likeable kind at any moment, especially if it

be recommended by private friendship, must be the very nonsuch of its

kind in the whole world. Another query forced on one is whether there

did not sometimes lurk under Dr. John’s superlative admiration of a

chief favourite in any walk an antipathy to some other in the same walk.

It is told of Sir Philip Francis, the reputed author of _Junius_, that,

when he was an old man, he gave this counsel to a promising young member

of the House of Commons whom he had heard deliver a speech distinguished

by the generosity of its praises of some of his fellow-members,—“Young

man, take my advice; never praise anybody unless it be _in odium

tertii_,” _i.e._ “unless it be to the discredit of some third party.” No

man ever acted less in the spirit of this detestable, this truly

diabolic, advice than Dr. John Brown; and one’s question rather is

whether he did not actually reverse it by never attacking or finding

fault with any one unless it were _in laudem tertii_, to the increased

credit of some third party. Whether he was so actuated, consciously or

unconsciously, in his declaration of irreconcilable dislike to Maclise,

and his exceptionally severe treatment of that artist, I will not

venture to say; but I can find no other sufficient explanation of his

habitual depreciation of Dickens. His antipathy to Dickens, his

resentment of any attempted comparison between Dickens and Thackeray,

was proverbial among his friends, and amounted almost to a monomania.

While, as will have been seen, Dr. John was by no means insensible to

impressions from anything excellent coming from besouth the Tweed, it

was naturally in his own Scotland, and among the things and persons

immediately round about him there, that his faculty of appreciation

revelled most constantly. With the majority of his literary

fellow-countrymen that have attained popularity in Scotland during the

last fifty years, he derived many of his literary instincts from the

immense influence of “Scotticism” which had been infused into the

preceding generation, and is seen, in his choice of themes, following

reverently in the wake of the great Sir Walter. He reminds one somewhat

of Aytoun in this respect, though with a marked Presbyterian difference.

Most of his papers are on Scottish subjects; and in some of them, such

as his _Queen Mary’s Child-Garden_, his _Minchmoor_, the paper called

_The Enterkin_, that entitled _A Jacobite Family_, and that entitled

_Biggar and the House of Fleming_, we have descriptions of Scottish

scenes and places very much in the spirit of Sir Walter, though by no

means slavishly so, with notes of their historical associations, and

recovery of local legends, romances, and humours. In a more original

vein, though also principally Scottish, are those papers which may be

described as memoirs and character-sketches in a more express sense than

the three or four already referred to as combining memoir with

criticism. By far the most important of these is his Memoir of his own

Father, in supplement to the Life of his Father by the Rev. Dr. John

Cairns, and published under the too vague title of _Letter to John

Cairns, D.D._ It is a really beautiful piece of writing, not only full

of filial affection, and painting for us his father’s life and character

with vivid fidelity, but also interesting for its reminiscences of the

author’s own early years, and its sketches of several eminent ministers

of the Scottish Secession communion whom he had known as friends of his

father. The paper entitled _Dr. Chalmers_, though not particularly good,

attests the strength of the impression made by that great man on Dr.

John Brown, as on every one else that knew Dr. Chalmers. Better, and

indeed fine, though slight, are _Edward Forbes_, _Dr. George Wilson_,

_The Duke of Athole_, _Struan_, and _Miss Stirling Graham of Duntrune_.

On the whole, however, the most characteristic papers of the Memoir

class are those of Medical Biography, including _Locke and Sydenham_,

_Dr. Andrew Combe_, _Dr. Henry Marshall and Military Hygiene_, _Our

Gideon Grays_, _Dr. Andrew Brown and Sydenham_, _Dr. Adams of Banchory_,

_Dr. John Scott and His Son_, _Mr. Syme, and Sir Robert Christison_.

Sydenham was Dr. John Brown’s ideal of a physician, and his account of

that English physician and of his place in the history of medicine is of

much value. The medical profession is indebted to him also for his

warm-hearted vindication of those whom he calls, after Scott, “Our

Gideon Grays,”—the hard-working and often poorly paid medical

practitioners of our Scottish country villages and parishes,—and for the

justice he has done to such a scholarly representative of that class as

the late Dr. Adams of Banchory, and to such recent medical reformers as

Dr. Andrew Combe and Dr. Henry Marshall. Especially interesting to us

here ought to be the obituary sketches of Syme and Christison, so

recently the ornaments of the Medical School of Edinburgh University. He

threw his whole heart into his sketch of Syme, his admiration of whom,

dating from the days when he had been Syme’s pupil and apprentice in

surgery, had been increased by life-long intimacy. I may therefore dwell

a little on this sketch, the rather because it reminds me of perhaps the

only occasion on which I was for some hours in the society of Syme and

Dr. John Brown together.

In the autumn of 1868, Carlyle, then Lord Rector of our University, and

in the seventy-third year of his age, was persuaded, on account of some

little ailment of his, to come to Edinburgh and put himself under the

care of Professor Syme for surgical treatment. Syme, proud of such a

patient, and resolved that he should have his best skill, would hear of

no other arrangement than that Carlyle should be his guest for the

necessary time. For a fortnight or more, accordingly, Carlyle resided

with Syme in his beautiful house of Millbank in the southern suburb of

our city. Pains were taken to prevent the fact from becoming known, that

Carlyle might not be troubled by visitors. But one day, when Carlyle was

convalescent, there was a quiet little dinner party at Millbank to meet

him. Besides Syme and Carlyle, and one or two of the members of Syme’s

family, there were present only Dr. John Carlyle, Dr. John Brown, and

myself. It was very pleasant, at the dinner table, to observe the

attention paid by the manly, energetic, and generally peremptory and

pugnacious, little surgeon to his important guest, his satisfaction in

having him there, and his half-amused, half-wondering glances at him as

a being of another _genus_ than his own, but whom he had found as

lovable in private as he was publicly tremendous. There was no “tossing

and goring of several persons” by Carlyle, in that dining-room at all

events, but only genial and cheerful talk about this and that. After

dinner, we five went upstairs to a smaller room, where the talk was

continued, still more miscellaneously, Syme and Carlyle having most of

it. That very day there had been sent to Carlyle, by his old friend

David Laing, a copy of the new edition which Laing had just privately

printed of the rare _Gude and Godly Ballates_ by the brothers

Wedderburn, originally published in 1578; and Carlyle, taking up the

volume from the table, would dip into it here and there, and read some

passages aloud for his own amusement and ours. One piece of fourteen

stanzas he read entire, with much gusto, and with excellent chaunt and

pronunciation of the old Scotch. Here are three of the stanzas:—

“Thocht thow be Paip or Cardinall,

Sa heich in thy Pontificall,

Resist thow God that creat all,

Than downe thou sall cum, downe.

“Thocht thow be Archebischop or Deane,

Chantour, Chanslar, or Chaplane,

Resist thow God, thy gloir is gane,

And downe thow sall cum, downe.

“Thocht thow flow in Philosophie,

Or graduate in Theologie,

Yit, and thow fyle the veritie,

Than downe thow sall cum, downe.”

Most pleasant of all it was when, later in the evening, we moved to the

low trellised verandah on the south side of the house, opening on the

beautiful garden of flowers and evergreens in which Syme took such

delight. It was a fine, still evening; and, as the talk went on in the

open air, with the garden stretching in front of us and the views of the

hills beyond, only with the accompaniment now of wreaths of

tobacco-smoke, Syme, who disliked tobacco, was smilingly tolerant even

of that accompaniment, in honour of the chief smoker.

For more than twelve years after that evening, which I remember now like

a dream, Carlyle was still in the land of the living, advancing from his

seventy-third year to his eighty-sixth; but hardly a year of the twelve

had elapsed when the great surgeon who had entertained him, and who was

so much his junior, was struck by the paralysis which carried him off.

It is from Dr. John Brown that we have this touching record of Syme’s

last days:—

“I was the first to see him when struck down by _hemiplegia_. It was

in Shandwick Place, where he had his chambers,—sleeping and enjoying

his evenings in his beautiful Millbank, with its flowers, its

matchless orchids and heaths and azaleas, its bananas and grapes and

peaches: with Blackford Hill,—where Marmion saw the Scottish host

mustering for Flodden,—in front, and the Pentlands, with Cairketton

Hill, their advanced guard, cutting the sky, its ruddy porphyry

_scaur_ holding the slanting shadows in its bosom. He was, as before

said, in his room in Shandwick Place, sitting in his chair, having

been set up by his faithful Blackbell. His face was distorted. He

said—‘John, this is the conclusion’; and so it was, to his, and our,

and the world’s sad cost. He submitted to his fate with manly

fortitude, but he felt it to the uttermost,—struck down in his prime,

full of rich power, abler than ever to do good to men, his soul

surviving his brain, and looking on at its steady ruin during many sad

months. He became softer, gentler,—more easily moved, even to tears;

but the judging power, the perspicacity, the piercing to the core,

remained untouched. Henceforward, of course, life was maimed. How he

bore up against this, resigning his delights of teaching, of doing

good to men, of seeing and cherishing his students, of living in the

front of the world,—how he accepted all this only those nearest him

can know. I have never seen anything more pathetic than when, near his

death, he lay speechless, but full of feeling and mind, and made known

in some inscrutable way to his old gardener and friend that he wished

to see a certain orchid which he knew should be then in bloom. The

big, clumsy, knowing Paterson, glum and victorious (he was for ever

getting prizes at the Horticultural), brought it,—the _Stanhopea

Tigrina_,—in without a word. It was the very one,—radiant in beauty,

white, with a brown freckle, like Imogen’s mole, and, like it, ‘right

proud of that most delicate lodging.’ He gazed at it, and, bursting

into a passion of tears, motioned it away as insufferable.”

To have been such a chronicler of the excellent as Dr. John Brown was

required more than endowment, however extraordinary, in any mere passive

quality of appreciativeness. It required the poetic eye, the imaginative

faculty in its active form, the power of infusing himself into his

subject, the discernment and subtlety of a real artist. Visible to some

extent in his criticisms of books and pictures, and also in his memoirs

and character-sketches, and in a still higher degree in those papers of

local Scottish description, legend, and reminiscence to which I have

already referred,—_Queen Mary’s Child Garden_, _Minchmoor_, _The

Enterkin_, _A Jacobite Family_, and _Biggar and the House of

Fleming_,—this rising of sympathetic appreciation into poetic art and

phantasy appears most conspicuously of all in those papers or parts of

papers in which the matter is whimsical or out of the common track.

Perhaps it is his affection for out-of-the-way subjects, evident even in

the titles of some of his papers, that has led to the comparison of Dr.

John Brown with Charles Lamb. Like that English humourist, he did go

into odd corners for his themes,—still, however, keeping within Scottish

ground, and finding his oddities, whether of humour or of pathos, in

native Scottish life and tradition. Or rather, by his very

appreciativeness, he was a kind of magnet to which stray and hitherto

unpublished curiosities, whether humorous or pathetic, floating in

Scottish society, attached themselves naturally, as if seeking an

editor. In addition to the illustrations of this furnished by the

already-mentioned papers of Scottish legend, or by parts of them, one

may mention now his paper entitled _The Black Dwarf’s Bones_, that

entitled _Mystifications_, his _Marjorie Fleming_ or _Pet Marjorie_, his

_Jeems the Doorkeeper_, and the quaint little trifle entitled _Oh! I’m

wat, wat_. In the first three of these Dr. John Brown is seen distinctly

as the editor of previously unpublished curiosities. There were relics

of information respecting that strange being, David Ritchie, the

deformed misanthropist of Peeblesshire, who had been the original of one

of Scott’s shorter novels. These came to Dr. John Brown, and he strung

them together, extracts and quotations, on a thread of connecting

narrative. Again, having had the privilege of knowing intimately that

venerable Miss Stirling Graham of Duntrune who is the subject of one of

his memorial sketches, and who used to reside in Edinburgh every winter

till within a few years of her death in 1877 at the age of ninety-five,

who but Dr. John Brown first persuaded the venerable lady to give to the

world her recollections of her marvellous dramatic feats in her earlier

days, when she used to mystify Scott, and Jeffrey, and Lord Gillies, and

John Clerk of Eldin, and Count Flahault, and whole companies of their

contemporaries in Edinburgh drawing-rooms, by her disguised appearances

in the dress and character of an eccentric old Scottish gentlewoman; and

who but Dr. John immortalised the tradition by telling her story over

again, and re-imagining for us the whole of that Edinburgh society of

1820–21 in which Miss Stirling Graham had moved so bewitchingly? Ten

years before that, or in December 1811, there had died in Edinburgh a

little girl of a family with whom Scott was particularly intimate, and

who lived near him. She was but in her ninth year; but for several years

she had been the pet and wonder of her friends, for her childish humours

and abilities, her knowledge of books and poetry, the signs of a quaint

genius in her behaviour, and in her own little exercises in prose and in

verse. Many a heart was sore, Scott’s for one, we are told, when poor

little “Pet Marjorie” died; and no one that knew her ever forgot her.

One sister of hers, who survived her for seventy years, cherished her

memory to the last like a religion, and had preserved all her childish

and queerly spelt letters and journals, with other scraps of writing,

tied up with a lock of her light-brown hair. To these faded letters and

papers Dr. John Brown had access; and the result was his exquisitely

tender _Pet Marjorie_ or _Marjorie Fleming_,—the gem in its kind among

all his papers, and perhaps the most touching illustration in our

language of Shakespeare’s text, “How quick bright things come to

confusion!” Here, as in some other cases, it may be said that Dr. John

Brown only edited material that came ready to his hand. Even in that

view of the matter, one could at least wish that there were more such

editing; but it is an insufficient view. He had recovered the long-dead

little Marjorie Fleming for himself; and the paper, though consisting

largely of quotations and extracts, is as properly his own as any of the

rest. But, should there be a disposition still with some to distinguish

between editing and invention, and to regard _Mystifications_ and

_Marjorie Fleming_ as merely well-edited curiosities of a fascinating

kind, no such distinction will trouble one who passes to _Jeems the

Doorkeeper_. A real person, as the writer tells us, sat for that sketch

too, and we have a portrait of the actual Jeems who officiated as his

father’s beadle in Broughton Place Church; but with what originality and

friskiness of humour is the portrait drawn, and how fantastically the

paper breaks in the end into streaks of a skyward sermon! There is the

same quaint originality, or Lamb-like oddity of conglomerate, in the

little fragment called “_Oh, I’m wat, wat_,” and in one or two other

trifles, with similarly fantastic titles, which I have not named.

There is no better test of imaginative or poetic faculty in a man than

susceptibility to anything verging on the preternaturally solemn or

ghastly. Of the strength of this susceptibility in Dr. John Brown’s

nature there are evidences, here and there, in not a few of his

writings. Take for example the following reminiscence, in his paper

entitled _Thackeray’s Death_, of a walk with Thackeray in one of the

suburbs of Edinburgh:—

“We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December when

he was walking with two friends along the Dean Road, to the west of

Edinburgh,—one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was a lovely

evening,—such a sunset as one never forgets: a rich dark bar of cloud

hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying

bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills there

was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip colour,

lucid, and as it were the very body of heaven in its clearness; every

object standing out as if etched upon the sky. The north-west end of

Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this

pure radiance; and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry below, was

so placed as to assume the figure of a cross: there it was,

unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed

at it silently. As they gazed, he gave utterance, in a tremulous,

gentle, and rapid voice, to what we all were feeling, in the word

‘CALVARY!’ The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other

things.”

Even a more remarkable example is that furnished by the paper entitled

“_In Clear Dream and Solemn Vision_.” The paper purports to be the

record of a singular dream, dreamt by a man whom Dr. John Brown counted

among his friends, and of whose great abilities, powers of jest and

whimsical humour, and powers of a still higher kind, there are yet

recollections in the lawyer-world of Edinburgh,—the late A. S. Logan,

Sheriff of Forfarshire. I prefer here to tell the dream in my own words,

as it has remained in my memory since I first heard it described many

years ago. This I do because, while the version of it I have so retained

came to me originally from Dr. John Brown himself, it seems to me better

than the version subsequently given by him in his own paper, attenuated

as it is there by explanations and comments, and by the insertion of a

weak metrical expansion of it by Logan himself.

The Dream may be entitled _The Death of Judas_, and was as follows:—The

dreamer seemed to be in a lonely, dreary landscape somewhere, the nearer

vicinity of which consisted of a low piece of marshy ground, with dull,

stagnant pools, overgrown with reeds. The air was heavy and thick: not a

sound of life, or sight of anything indicating human presence or

habitation, save that on the other side of the marshy ground from the

dreamer, and near the margin of the pools and reeds, was what seemed to

be a deserted wooden hut, the door half-broken, and the side-timbers and

rafters also ragged, so that through the rifts there was a dim

perception of the dark interior. But lo! as the dreamer gazed, it

appeared as if there were a motion of something or other within the hut,

signs of some living thing in it moving uneasily and haggardly to and

fro. Hardly has one taken notice of this when one is aware of a new

sight outside the hut,—a beautiful dove, or dove-like bird, of spotless

white, that has somehow stationed itself close to the door, and is

brooding there, intent and motionless, in a guardian-like attitude. For

a while the ugly, ragged hut, with the mysterious signs of motion inside

of it, and this white dove-like creature outside at its door, are the

only things in the marshy tract of ground that hold the eye. But,

suddenly, what is this third thing? Round from the gable of the hut it

emerges slowly towards the marshy front, another bird-like figure, but

dark and horrible-looking, with long and lean legs and neck, like a

crane. Past the hut it stalks and still forward, slowly and with

loathsome gait, its long neck undulating as it moves, till it has

reached the pools and their beds of reeds. There, standing for a moment,

it dips down its head among the reeds into the ooze of one of the pools;

and, when it raises its head again, there is seen wriggling in its mouth

something like a small, black, slimy snake, or worm. With this in its

mouth, it stalks slowly back, making straight for the white dove that is

still brooding at the door of the hut. When it has reached the door,

there seems to be a struggle of life and death between the two

creatures,—the obscene, hideous, crane-like bird, and the pure, white

innocent,—till, at last, by force, the dove is compelled to open its

throat, into which its enemy drops the worm or snake. Immediately the

dove drops dead; and at that same instant the mysterious motion within

the hut increases and becomes more violent,—no mere motion now, but a

fierce strife and commotion, with nothing distinctly visible or

decipherable even yet, but a vague sense of some agony transacting

itself in the dark interior within the loop-holed timbers and rafters,

and of two human arms swung round and round like flails. Then, all at

once, it flashed upon the dreamer what he had been beholding. It was

Judas that was within the hut, and that was the suicide of the Betrayer.

Every author is to be estimated by specimens of him at his very best.

Dr. John Brown had a favourite phrase for such specimens of what he

thought the very best in the authors he liked. Of a passage, or of a

whole paper, that seemed to him perfect in its kind, perfect in

workmanship as well as in conception, he would say that it was “done to

the quick.” The phrase indicates, in the first place, Dr. John Brown’s

notions of what constitutes true literature of any kind, or at least

true literature of a popular kind, as distinct from miscellaneous

printed matter. It must be something that will reach the feelings. This

being presupposed, then that is best in any author which reaches the

feelings most swiftly and directly,—cuts at once, as it were, with

knife-like acuteness, to the most sensitive depths. That there are not a

few individual passages scattered through Dr. John’s own writings, and

also some entire papers of his, that answer this description, will have

appeared by our review of his writings so far as they have been yet

enumerated. In such papers and passages, as every reader will observe,

even the workmanship is at its best. The author gathers himself up, as

it were; his artistic craft becomes more decisive and subtle with the

heightened glow of his feelings; and his style, apt to be a little

diffuse and slipshod at other times, becomes nervous and firm.