Chapter XIII: Part III: 1822–1828 (3)

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.