Chapter XIV: Part III: 1822–1828 (4)

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.

Of whatever other productions of Dr. John Brown’s pen this may be asserted, of whatever other things of his it may be said that they are thus masterly at all points and “done to the quick,” that supreme praise must be accorded, at all events, to the two papers I have reserved to the last,—_Rab and his Friends_ and _Our Dogs_. Among the many fine and humane qualities of our late fellow-citizen it so happened that love of the lower animals, and especially of the most faithful and most companionable of them, was one of the chief. Since Sir Walter Scott limped along Princes Street, and the passing dogs used to fawn upon him, recognising him as the friend of their kind, there has been no such lover of dogs, no such expert in dog-nature, in this city at least, as was Dr. John Brown. It was impossible that he should leave this part of himself, one of the ruling affections of his life, unrepresented in his literary effusions. Hence, while there are dogs incidentally elsewhere in his writings, these two papers are all but dedicated to dogs. What need to quote from them? What need to describe them? They have been read, one of them at least, by perhaps two millions of the English-reading population of the earth: the very children of our Board Schools know the story of _Rab and his Friends_. How laughingly it opens; with what fun and rollick we follow the two boys in their scamper through the Edinburgh streets sixty years ago after the hullabaloo of the dog-fight near the Tron Kirk! What a sensation on our first introduction, in the Cowgate, under the South Bridge, to the great Rab, the carrier’s dog, rambling about idly “as if with his hands in his pockets,” till the little bull-terrier that has been baulked of his victory in the former fight insanely attacks him and finds the consequence! And then what a mournful sequel, as we come, six years afterwards, to know the Howgate carrier himself and his wife, and the wife is brought to the hospital at Minto House, and the carrier and Rab remain there till the operation is over, and the dead body of poor Ailie is carried home by her husband in his cart over the miles of snowy country road, and the curtain falls black at last over the death of the carrier too and the end of poor Rab himself! Though the story, as the author vouches, “is in all essentials strictly matter of fact,” who could have told it as Dr. John Brown did? Little wonder that it has taken rank as his masterpiece, and that he was so commonly spoken of while he was alive as “The author of _Rab and His Friends_.” It is by that story, and by those other papers that may be associated with it as also masterly in their different varieties, as all equally “done to the quick,” that his name will live. Yes, many long years hence, when all of us are gone, I can imagine that a little volume will be in circulation, containing _Rab and his Friends_ and _Our Dogs_, and also let us say the _Letter to Dr. Cairns_, and _Queen Mary’s Child-Garden_, and _Jeems the Doorkeeper_, and the paper called _Mystifications_, and that called _Pet Marjorie_ or _Marjorie Fleming_, and that then readers now unborn, thrilled by that peculiar touch which only things of heart and genius can give, will confess to the charm that now fascinates us, and will think with interest of Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh.

LITERARY HISTORY OF EDINBURGH

A GENERAL REVIEW[51]

I

The Literary History of Edinburgh, in any special sense, may be said to have begun in the reigns of the Scottish Kings James IV. (1488–1513) and James V. (1513–1542.) There had been a good deal of scattered literary activity in Scotland before,—all, of course, in manuscript only,—in which Edinburgh had shared; but it was not till those two reigns,—when Edinburgh had become distinctly the capital of the Scottish Kingdom, and was in possession of a printing-press or two,—it was not till then that Edinburgh could claim to be the central seat of the Scottish Muses. What was there anywhere over the rest of Scotland in the shape of new literary product that could then compete with the novelties that came from that cluster of “makars” and men of genius,—Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lindsay the three best remembered of them,—whose habitual residence was in Edinburgh, and whose figures were to be seen daily in the picturesque long slope of the High Street and the Canongate which connects the ancient Castle with the venerable Holyrood?

From the Edinburgh of the two reigns mentioned we pass to the Edinburgh of the Regencies for the infant and absent Queen Mary, of Queen Mary’s own short resident reign, and of the beginnings of the reign of James VI. Through this period, carrying us from 1542 to about 1580, Edinburgh still maintained her metropolitan distinction in literature, as in other things; though with the enormous difference imported into literature, as into other things, by the Reformation struggle and its consequences. Lindsay, the last of the bright poetic triad of the two bygone reigns, survived far into the Reformation struggle,—in which indeed he was a champion of the first mark and importance on the Protestant side; and, though he died before the conclusive Reformation enactment of the Scottish Estates in 1560, he had lived long enough to know personally, and as it were to put his hands on, those who were to be the foremost intellects of Scotland in her new and Protestantised condition. When John Knox and George Buchanan returned from their Continental exile and wanderings to spend their veteran days in their native land,—Knox with his already acquired reputation by English theological writings and pamphlets, and Buchanan with the rarer European fame of superb Latinist and scholar, _poetarum sui sæculi facile princeps_, as his foreign admirers already universally applauded him,—where could they settle but in Edinburgh? For thirteen years, accordingly, Knox was minister of Edinburgh and her most powerful citizen, writing industriously still, while he preached and directed Scottish politics; and it was in Edinburgh, in 1572, that he died and was buried. Of Buchanan’s life after his return to Scotland, portions were spent at St. Andrews or in Stirling; but Edinburgh had most of _him_ too. It was in Edinburgh that he published his _Baptistes_, his _De Jure Regni apud Scotos_, and others of his writings in verse or in prose; and it was in an Edinburgh lodging that he died in 1582, after having sent to the press the last proof-sheets of his _Rerum Scoticarum Historia_, or Latin History of Scotland. Recollect such minor Edinburgh contemporaries of those two, of literary repute of one kind or another, as Sir Richard Maitland, Robert Pont, Thomas Craig, and the collector George Bannatyne,—not forgetting that before 1580 Edinburgh had glimpses of the new force that was at hand for all Scotland, literary as well as ecclesiastical, in Andrew Melville,—and it will be seen that, though the Reformation had changed notably the character of the intellectual pursuits and interests of the Scottish capital, as of Scotland generally, yet there had been no real interruption so far of that literary lustre of the town which had begun with Dunbar at the Court of James IV. In fact, the first eighty years of the sixteenth century may be regarded (the pre-Reformation authorship and the post-Reformation authorship taken together) as one definitely marked age, and the earliest, in the literary history of Edinburgh. It was an age of high credit in Scottish literary history all in all. Scotland was then no whit inferior to contemporary England in literary power and productiveness. On the contrary, as it is admitted now by the historians of English Literature that in the long tract of time between the death of Chaucer and the appearance of Spenser it was in Scotland rather than in England that the real succession to Chaucer was kept up in the British Islands, so it must be admitted that it was in the last eighty years of that long period of comparative gloom in England that the torch that had been kindled in Scotland was passed there most nimbly and brilliantly from hand to hand.

From 1580 onwards there was a woeful change. “Let not your Majesty doubt,” Napier of Merchiston ventured to say to James VI., while that King was still Sovereign of Scotland only, but after he had shown his own literary ambition in his _Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie_ and other Edinburgh publications, “let not your Majesty doubt that there are within your realm, as well as in other countries, godly and good ingines, versed and exercised in all manner of honest science and godly discipline, who by your Majesty’s instigation might yield forth works and fruits worthy of memory, which otherwise, lacking some mighty Mæcenas to encourage them, may perchance be buried with eternal silence.” The augury, so far as it was one of hope, was not fulfilled. Through the last forty-five years of the reign of James, and then through all the rest of the seventeenth century, including the reign of Charles I., the interregnum of the English Commonwealth and the Oliverian Protectorate, the Restoration reigns of Charles II., and James II., and the reign of William and Mary,—through all that long period, the greatest and richest in the literary annals of England, the time when she made herself the astonishment of the nations by her Elizabethan splendour in Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, and their many contemporaries, and then by the succession to these in the great series of which Hobbes, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Bunyan, Dryden, and Locke were the chiefs,—what had Scotland to show in comparison? In the first section of the period Napier of Merchiston himself and Drummond of Hawthornden,—a pair well worthy of attention, and both of them specially Edinburgh men; but after these only or mainly a straggle of mediocrities, or of lower than mediocrities. A tradition, it is true, in Arthur Johnston and others, of an excellent Scottish Latinity in discipleship to Buchanan,—the more the pity in so far as this prevented a free and brave exercise of the vernacular; the apparition here and there, too, of a spirit of finer quality among the ecclesiastics, such as Rutherford and Leighton, or of an individual book of mark, such as Baillie’s _Letters_ or Stair’s _Institutes_; but, for the rest, within Scotland, and without tracking any continuation of the old race of the _Scoti extra Scotiam agentes_, only such small mercies as a Mure of Rowallan, a Semple of Beltrees, or a Cleland, among the versifiers, or, in prose, a Hume of Godscroft, a Spotswood, a Sir Thomas Urquhart, or a Sir George Mackenzie!

What was the cause of this poverty? The loss of the benefits of a resident Scottish kingship, consequent on the removal of the Court to England in 1603, may have had some effect. No chance after that of Napier’s desired agency of a mighty royal Mæcenas in Holyrood for stirring the Scottish “ingines.” A more certain cause, however, is to be found in the agonising intensity with which, through the whole of the century and a quarter from 1580 onwards, the soul and heart of Scotland, in all classes of the community alike, were occupied with the successive phases of the one vexed question of Presbytery-versus-Episcopacy in Church government, and its theological and political concomitants. It was in the nature of this controversy, agitated as it was with such persevering, such life-or-death vehemence, in Scotland, to strangle all the ordinary muses. Here, however, lies the historical compensation. There are other interests in a nation, other duties, than those of art and literature; and he would be but a wretched Scotsman who, while hovering over the history of his country in the seventeenth century and noting her deficiencies then in literary respects in comparison with England, should forget that this very century was the time of the most powerful action ever exerted by Scotland in the general history of the British Islands, and that, when the great British Revolution of that century was over, its accounts balanced, and the residuum of indubitably successful and useful result summed up, no little of that residuum was traceable to Scotland’s obstinate perseverance so long in her own peculiar politico-ecclesiastical controversy, and to what had been argued or done in the course of it, on one side or the other, by such men as Andrew Melville, Alexander Henderson, Argyle, Montrose, Claverhouse, and Carstares. But it is on Scottish Literature that we are now reporting, and for that the report must remain as has been stated. From Dan to Beersheba, from Hawick to Thurso, all through the Scottish century and a quarter under view, very few roses or other flowers, and not much even of happy thistle-bloom!