Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

If my uncle brought up nuts to crack, my father was sure to have some difficulties to consult about, or some passages to read, something that made him put his whole energy forth; and when he did so, I never heard such reading. To hear him read the story of Joseph, or passages in David's history, and Psalms 6th, 11th, and 15th, or the 52d, 53d, 54th, 55th, 63d, 64th, and 40th chapters of Isaiah, or the Sermon on the Mount, or the Journey to Emmaus, or our Saviour's prayer in John, or Paul's speech on Mars' Hill, or the first three chapters of Hebrews and the latter part of the 11th or Job, or the Apocalypse; or, to pass from those divine themes--Jeremy Taylor, or George Herbert, Sir Walter Raleigh, or Milton's prose, such as the passage beginning "Come forth out of thy royal chambers, O thou Prince of all the kings of the earth!" and "Truth, indeed, came once into the world with her divine Master," or Charles Wesley's Hymns, or, most loved of all, Cowper, from the rapt "Come thou, and, added to thy many crowns," or "O that those lips had language!" to the Jackdaw, and his incomparable Letters; or Gray's Poems, Burns's "Tam O'Shanter," or Sir Walter's "Eve of St. John,"[18] and "The Gray Brother."

[18] Well do I remember when driving him from Melrose to Kelso
long ago, we came near Sandyknowe, that grim tower of
Smailholm standing erect like a warder turned to stone,
defying time and change his bursting into that noble
ballad--

"The Baron of Smaylho'me rose with day,
He spurr'd his courser on,
Without stop or stay, down the rocky way,
That leads to Brotherstone;"

and pointing out the "Watchfold height," "the eiry Beacon
Hill," and "Brotherstone."

But I beg your pardon: Time has run back with me, and fetched that blessed past, and awakened its echoes. I hear his voice; I feel his eye; I see his whole nature given up to what he is reading, and making its very soul speak.

Such a man then as I have sketched, or washed faintly in, as the painters say, was that person who sat in the corner under the gallery every Sabbath-day, and who knew his Greek Testament better than his minister. He is dead too, a few months ago, dying surrounded with his cherished hoard of books of all sizes, times, and tongues--tatterdemalion many; all however drawn up in an order of his own; all thoroughly mastered and known; among them David Hume's copy of Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_, with his autograph, which he had picked up at some stall.

I have said that my mother's death was the second epoch in my father's life. I should perhaps have said the third; the first being his mother's long illness and death, and the second his going to Elie, and beginning the battle of life at fifteen. There must have been something very delicate and close and exquisite in the relation between the ailing, silent, beautiful, and pensive mother, and that dark-eyed, dark-haired, bright and silent son; a sort of communion it is not easy to express. You can think of him at eleven slowly writing out that small book of promises in a distinct and minute hand, quite as like his mature hand, as the shy, lustrous-eyed boy was to his after-self in his manly years, and sitting by the bedside while the rest were out and shouting, playing at hide-and-seek round the little church, with the winds from Benlomond or the wild uplands of Ayrshire blowing through their hair. He played seldom, but when he did run out, he jumped higher and farther, and ran faster than any of them. His peculiar beauty must have come from his mother. He used at rare times, and with a sort of shudder, to tell of her when a lovely girl of fifteen, having been seen by a gentleman of rank, in Cheapside, hand in hand with an evil woman, who was decoying her to ruin, on pretence of showing her the way home; and how he stopped his carriage and taking in the unconscious girl, drove her to her uncle's door. But you have said all this better than I can.

His time with his mother, and the necessary confinement and bodily depression caused by it, I doubt not deepened his native thoughtful turn, and his tendency to meditative melancholy, as a condition under which he viewed all things, and quickened and intensified his sense of the suffering of this world, and of the profound seriousness and mystery in the midst of which we live and die.

The second epoch was that of his leaving home with his guinea, the last he ever got from any one but himself; and his going among utter strangers to be master of a school one half of the scholars of which were bigger and older than himself, and all rough colts--wilful and unbroken. This was his first fronting of the world. Besides supporting himself, this knit the sinews of his mind, and made him rely on himself in action as well as in thought. He sometimes, but not often, spoke of this, never lightly, though he laughed at some of his predicaments. He could not forget the rude shock. Generally those familiar revelations were at supper, on the Sabbath evening, when, his work over, he enjoyed and lingered over his meal.

From his young and slight, almost girlish look, and his refined, quiet manners, the boys of the school were inclined to annoy and bully him. He saw this, and felt it was now or never,--nothing between. So he took his line. The biggest boy, much older and stronger, was the rudest, and infected the rest. The "_wee maister_" ordered him, in that peremptory voice we all remember, to stand up and hold out his hand, being not at all sure but the big fellow might knock him down on the word. To the astonishment of the school, and to the big rebel's too, he obeyed and was punished on the instant, and to the full; out went the hand, down came the "_taws_" and bit like fire. From that moment he ruled them by his eye, the _taws_ vanished.

There was an incident at this time of his life which I should perhaps not tell, and yet I don't know why I shouldn't, it so perfectly illustrates his character in many ways. He had come home during the vacation of his school to Langrig, and was about to go back; he had been renewing his intercourse with his old teacher and friend whom you mention, from whom he used to say he learned to like Shakspeare, and who seems to have been a man of genuine literary tastes. He went down to bid him good-bye, and doubtless they got on their old book loves, and would be spouting their pet pieces. The old dominie said, "John, my man, if you are walking into Edinburgh, I'll convoy you a bit." "John" was too happy, so next morning they set off, keeping up a constant fire of quotation and eager talk. They got past Mid-Calder to near East, when my father insisted on his friend returning, and also on going back a bit with him; on looking at the old man, he thought he was tired, so on reaching the well-known "Kippen's Inn," he stopped and insisted on giving him some refreshment. Instead of ordering bread and cheese and a bottle of ale, he, doubtless full of Shakspeare, and great upon sack and canary, ordered _a bottle of wine_! Of this, you may be sure, the dominie, as he most needed it, had the greater share, and doubtless it warmed the cockles of his old heart. "John" making him finish the bottle, and drink the health of "Gentle Will," saw him off, and went in to pay the reckoning. What did he know of the price of wine! It took exactly every penny he had; I doubt not, most boys, knowing that the landlord knew them, would have either paid a part, or asked him to score it up. This was not his way; he was too proud and shy and honest for such an expedient. By this time, what with discussing Shakspeare, and witnessing his master's leisurely emptying of that bottle, and releasing the

"Dear prisoned spirits of the impassioned grape,"

he found he must run for it to Edinburgh, or rather Leith, fourteen miles; this he did, and was at the pier just in time to jump into the Elie pinnace, which was already off. He often wondered what he would have done if he had been that one moment late. You can easily pick out the qualities this story unfolds.

His nature, capable as it was of great, persistent, and indeed dogged labor, was, from the predominance of the nervous system in his organization, excitable, and therefore needed and relished excitement--the more intense the better. He found this in his keen political tastes, in imaginative literature, and in fiction. In the highest kind of poetry he enjoyed the sweet pain of tears; and he all his life had a steady liking, even a hunger, for a good novel. This refreshed, lightened, and diverted his mind from the strain of his incessant exegesis. He used always to say that Sir Walter and Goldsmith, and even Fielding, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Miss Ferrier, were true benefactors to the race, by giving such genuine, such secure and innocent pleasure; and he often repeated with admiration Lord Jeffrey's words on Scott, inscribed on his monument. He had no turn for gardening or for fishing or any field sports or games; his sensitive nature recoiled from the idea of pain, and above all, needless pain. He used to say the lower creation had groans enough, and needed no more burdens; indeed, he was fierce to some measure of unfairness against such of his brethren--Dr. Wardlaw, for instance[19]--as resembled the apostles in fishing for other things besides men.

[19] After a tight discussion between these two attached friends,
Dr. Wardlaw said, "Well, I can't answer you, but fish I must
and shall."

But the exercise and the excitement he most of all others delighted in, was riding; and had he been a country gentleman and not a clergyman, I don't think he could have resisted fox-hunting. With the exception of that great genius in more than horsemanship, Andrew Ducrow, I never saw a man sit a horse as he did. He seemed inspired, gay, erect, full of the joy of life, fearless and secure. I have heard a farmer friend say if he had not been a preacher of the gospel he would have been a cavalry officer, and would have fought as he preached.

He was known all over the Upper Ward and down Tweeddale for his riding. "There goes the minister," as he rode past at a swift canter. He had generally well-bred horses, or as I would now call them, ponies; if he had not, his sufferings from a dull, hardmouthed, heavy-hearted and footed, plebeian horse were almost comic. On his gray mare, or his little blood bay horse, to see him setting off and indulging it and himself in some alarming gambols, and in the midst of his difficulties, partly of his own making, taking off his hat or kissing his hand to a lady, made one think of "young Harry with his beaver up." He used to tell with much relish, how, one fine summer Sabbath evening after preaching in the open air for a collection, in some village near, and having put the money, chiefly halfpence, into his handkerchief, and that into his hat, he was taking a smart gallop home across the moor, happy and relieved, when three ladies--I think, the Miss Bertrams of Kersewell--came suddenly upon him; off went the hat, down bent the head, and over him streamed the cherished collection, the ladies busy among the wild grass and heather picking it up, and he full of droll confusion and laughter.

The gray mare he had for many years. I can remember her small head and large eyes; her neat, compact body, round as a barrel; her finely flea-bitten skin, and her thorough-bred legs. I have no doubt she had Arabian blood. My father's pride in her was quite curious. Many a wild ride to and from the Presbytery at Lanark, and across flooded and shifting fords, he had on her. She was as sweet-tempered and enduring, as she was swift and sure; and her powers of running were appreciated and applied in a way which he was both angry and amused to discover. You know what riding the _bruse_ means. At a country wedding the young men have a race to the bridegroom's home, and he who wins, brings out a bottle and glass and drinks the young wife's health. I wish Burns had described a _bruse_; all sorts of steeds, wild, unkempt lads as well as colts, old broken-down thorough-breds that did wonders when _soopled_, huge, grave cart horses devouring the road with their shaggy hoofs, wilful ponies, etc. You can imagine the wild hurry-skurry and fun, the comic situations and upsets over a rough road, up and down places one would be giddy to look at.

Well, the young farmers were in the habit of coming to my father, and asking the loan of the mare to go and see a friend, etc., etc., praising knowingly the fine points and virtues of his darling. Having through life, with all his firmness of nature, an abhorrence of saying "No" to any one, the interview generally ended with, "Well, Robert, you may have her, but take care of her, and don't ride her fast." In an hour or two Robert was riding the _bruse_, and flying away from the crowd, Gray first, and the rest nowhere, and might be seen turning the corner of the farm-house with the victorious bottle in his uplifted hand, the motley pack panting vainly up the hill. This went on for long, and the gray was famous, almost notorious, all over the Upper Ward; sometimes if she appeared, no one would start, and she trotted the course. Partly from his own personal abstraction from outward country life, and partly from Uncle Johnston's sense of waggery keeping him from telling his friend of the gray's last exploit at Hartree Mill, or her leaping over the "best man" at Thriepland, my father was the last to hear of this equivocal glory of "the minister's _meer_." Indeed, it was whispered she had once won a whip at Lanark races. They still tell of his feats on this fine creature, one of which he himself never alluded to without a feeling of shame. He had an engagement to preach somewhere beyond the Clyde on a Sabbath evening, and his excellent and attached friend and elder, Mr. Kello of Lindsay-lands, accompanied him on his big plough horse. It was to be in the open air, on the river side. When they got to the Clyde they found it in full flood, heavy and sudden rains at the head of the water having brought it down in a wild _spate_. On the opposite side were the gathered people and the tent. Before Mr. Kello knew where he was, there was his minister on the mare swimming across, and carried down in a long diagonal, the people looking on in terror. He landed, shook himself, and preached with his usual fervor. As I have said, he never liked to speak of this bit of hardihood, and he never repeated it; but it was like the man--there were the people, that was what he would be at, and though timid for anticipated danger as any woman, _in_ it he was without fear.

One more illustration of his character in connection with his riding. On coming to Edinburgh he gave up this kind of exercise; he had no occasion for it, and he had enough, and more than enough of excitement in the public questions in which he found himself involved, and in the miscellaneous activities of a popular town minister. I was then a young doctor--it must have been about 1840--and had a patient, Mrs. James Robertson, eldest daughter of Mr. Pirie, the predecessor of Dr. Dick in what was then Shuttle Street congregation, Glasgow. She was one of my father's earliest and dearest friends,--a mother in the Burgher Israel, she and her cordial husband "given to hospitality," especially to "the Prophets." She was hopelessly ill at Juniper Green, near Edinburgh. Mr. George Stone, then living at Muirhouse, one of my father's congregation in Broughton Place, a man of equal originality and worth, and devoted to his minister, knowing my love of riding, offered me his blood-chestnut to ride out and make my visit. My father said, "John, if you are going, I would like to ride out with you;" he wished to see his dying friend. "You ride!" said Mr. Stone, who was a very Yorkshireman in the matter of horses. "Let him try," said I. The upshot was, that Mr. Stone sent the chestnut for me, and a sedate pony--called, if I forget not, Goliath--for his minister, with all sorts of injunctions to me to keep him off the thorough-bred, and on Goliath.

My father had not been on a horse for nearly twenty years. He mounted and rode off. He soon got teased with the short, pattering steps of Goliath, and looked wistfully up at me, and longingly to the tall chestnut, stepping once for Goliath's twice, like the Don striding beside Sancho. I saw what he was after, and when past the toll he said in a mild sort of way, "John, did you promise _absolutely_ I was not to ride your horse?" "No, father, certainly not. Mr. Stone, I daresay, wished me to do so, but I didn't." "Well then, I think we'll change; this beast shakes me." So we changed. I remember how noble he looked; how at home: his white hair and his dark eyes, his erect, easy, accustomed seat. He soon let his eager horse slip gently away. It was first _evasit_, he was off, Goliath and I jogging on behind; then _erupit_, and in a twinkling--_evanuit_. I saw them last flashing through the arch under the Canal, his white hair flying. I was uneasy, though from his riding I knew he was as yet in command, so I put Goliath to his best, and having passed through Slateford, I asked a stonebreaker if he saw a gentleman on a chestnut horse. "Has he white hair?" "Yes." "And een like a gled's?" "Yes." "Weel then, he's fleein' up the road like the wund; he'll he at Little Vantage" (about nine miles off) "in nae time if he haud on." I never once sighted him, but on coming into Juniper Green there was his steaming chestnut at the gate, neighing cheerily to Goliath. I went in, he was at the bedside of his friend, and in the midst of prayer; his words as I entered were, "When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee;" and he was not the least instant in prayer that his blood was up with his ride. He never again saw Mrs. Robertson, or as she was called when they were young, Sibbie (Sibella) Pirie. On coming out he said nothing, but took the chestnut, mounted her, and we came home quietly. His heart was opened; he spoke of old times and old friends; he stopped at the exquisite view at Hailes into the valley, and up the Pentlands beyond, the smoke of Kate's Mill rising in the still and shadowy air, and broke out into Cowper's words: Yes,--

"HE sets the bright procession on its way,
And marshals all the order of the year;
And ere one flowery season fades and dies,
Designs the blooming wonders of the next."

Then as we came slowly in, the moon shone behind Craiglockhart hill among the old Scotch firs; he pulled up again, and gave me Collins' Ode to Evening, beginning--

"If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song,
May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,
Thy springs, and dying gales;"

repeating over and over some of the lines, as

"Thy modest ear,
Thy springs, and dying gales."
"--And marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil."

And when she looked out on us clear and full, "Yes--

"The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of her birth."

As we passed through Slateford, he spoke of Dr. Belfrage, his great-hearted friend, of his obligations to him, and of his son, my friend, both lying together in Colinton churchyard; and of Dr. Dick, who was minister before him, of the Coventrys, and of Stitchel and Sprouston, of his mother, and of himself,--his doubts of his own sincerity in religion, his sense of sin, of God--reverting often to his dying friend. Such a thing only occurred to me with him once or twice all my life; and then when we were home, he was silent, shut up, self-contained as before. He was himself conscious of this habit of reticence, and what may be called _selfism_ to us, his children, and lamented it. I remember his saying in a sort of mournful joke, "I have a well of love; I know it; but it is a _well_, and a _draw_-well, to your sorrow and mine, and it seldom overflows, but," looking with that strange power of tenderness as if he put his voice and his heart into his eyes, "you may always come hither to draw;" he used to say he might take to himself Wordsworth's lines,--

"I am not one who much or oft delights
To season my fireside with personal talk."

And changing "though" into "if:"

"A well of love it may be deep,
I trust it is, and never dry;
What matter, though its waters sleep
In silence and obscurity?"

The expression of his affection was more like the shock of a Leyden jar, than the continuous current of a galvanic circle.

There was, as I have said, a permanent chill given by my mother's death, to what may be called the outer surface of his nature, and we at home felt it much. The blood was thrown in upon the centre, and went forth in energetic and victorious work, in searching the Scriptures and saving souls; but his social faculty never recovered that shock! it was blighted; he was always desiring to be alone and at his work. A stranger who saw him for a short time, bright, animated, full of earnest and cordial talk, pleasing and being pleased, the life of the company, was apt to think how delightful he must always be,--and so he was; but these times of bright talk were like angels' visits; and he smiled with peculiar benignity on his retiring guest, as if blessing him not the less for leaving him to himself. I question if there ever lived a man so much in the midst of men, and in the midst of his own children,[20] in whom the silences, as Mr. Carlyle would say, were so predominant. Every Sabbath he spoke out of the abundance of his heart, his whole mind; he was then communicative and frank enough: all the week, before and after, he would not unwillingly have never opened his mouth. Of many people we may say that their mouth is always open except when it is shut; of him that his mouth was always shut except when it was opened. Every one must have been struck with the seeming inconsistency of his occasional brilliant, happy, energetic talk, and his habitual silentness--his difficulty in getting anything to say. But, as I have already said, what we lost, the world and the church gained.

[20] He gave us all the education we got at Biggar.

When travelling he was always in high spirits and full of anecdote and fun. Indeed I knew more of his inner history in this _one_ way, than during years of living with him. I recollect his taking me with him to Glasgow when I must have been about fourteen; we breakfasted in "_The Ram's Horn Tavern_" and I felt a new respect for him at his commanding the waiters. He talked a great deal during our short tour, and often have I desired to recall the many things he told me of his early life, and of his own religious crises, my mother's death, his fear of his own death, and all this intermingled with the drollest stories of his boy and student life.

We went to Paisley and dined, I well remember, we two alone, and, as I thought, magnificently, in a great apartment in "_The Saracen's Head_," at the end of which was the county ball-room. We had come across from Dunoon and landed in a small boat at the _Water Neb_ along with Mrs. Dr. Hall, a character Sir Walter or Galt would have made immortal. My father with characteristic ardor took an oar, for the first time in his life, and I believe for the last, to help the old boatman on the Cart, and wishing to do something decided, missed the water, and went back head over heels to the immense enjoyment of Mrs. Hall, who said, "Less pith, and mair to the purpose, my man." She didn't let the joke die out.

Another time--it was when his second marriage was fixed on, to our great happiness and his--I had just taken my degree of M. D., and he took Isabella, William, and myself to Moffat. By a curious felicity we got into Miss Geddes' lodgings, where the village circulating library was kept, the whole of which we aver he read in ten days. I never saw him so happy, so open and full of mirth, reading to us, and reciting the poetry of his youth. On these rare but delightful occasions he was fond of exhibiting, when asked, his powers of rapid speaking, in which he might have rivalled old Matthews or his son. His favorite feat was repeating "Says I to my Lord, quo' I--what for will ye no grund ma barley-meal mouter-free, says I to my Lord, quo' I, says I, I says." He was brilliant upon the final, "I says." Another _chef-d'oeuvre_ was, "On Tintock tap there is a mist, and in the mist there is a kist (a chest), and in the kist there is a cap (a wooden bowl), and in the cap there is a drap, tak' up the cap, and sup the drap, and set the cap on Tintock tap." This he could say, if I mistake not, five times without drawing breath. It was a favorite passage this, and he often threatened to treat it exegetically; laughing heartily when I said, in that case, he would not have great trouble with the _context_, which in others cost him a good deal.

His manners to ladies, and indeed to all women, was that of a courtly gentleman; they could be romantic in their _empressement_ and devotion, and I used to think Sir Philip Sydney, or Ariosto's knights and the Paladins of old, must have looked and moved as he did. He had great pleasure in the company of high-bred, refined thoughtful women; and he had a peculiar sympathy with the sufferings, the necessary mournfulness of women, and with all in their lot connected with the fruit of that forbidden tree--their loneliness, the sorrows of their time, and their pangs in travail, their peculiar relation to their children. I think I hear him reading the words, "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea" (as if it was the next thing to impossible), "she may forget, yet will not I forget thee." Indeed, to a man who saw so little of, and said so little to his own children, perhaps it may be _because_ of all this, his sympathy for mothers under loss of children, his real suffering for their suffering, not only endeared him to them as their minister, their consoler, and gave him opportunities of dropping in divine and saving truth and comfort, when the heart was full and soft, tender, and at his mercy, but it brought out in his only loss of this kind, the mingled depth, tenderness, and also the peremptoriness of his nature.

In the case of the death of little Maggie--a child the very image of himself in face, lovely and pensive, and yet ready for any fun, with a keenness of affection that perilled everything on being loved, who must cling to some one and be clasped, made for a garden, for the first garden, not for the rough world, the child of his old age--this peculiar meeting of opposites was very marked. She was stricken with sudden illness, malignant sore throat; her mother was gone, and so she was to my father as a flower he had the sole keeping of: and his joy in her wild mirth, his watching her childish moods of sadness, as if a shadow came over her young heaven, were themselves something to watch. Her delicate life made no struggle with disease; it as it were declined to stay on such conditions. She therefore sunk at once and without much pain, her soul quick and unclouded, and her little forefinger playing to the last with my father's silvery curls, her eyes trying in vain to brighten his:--

"Thou wert a dew-drop which the morn brings forth,
Not fitted to be trailed along the soiling earth;
But at the touch of wrong, without a strife,
Slips in a moment out of life."

His distress, his anguish at this stroke, was not only intense, it was in its essence permanent; he went mourning and looking for her all his days; but after she was dead, that resolved will compacted him in an instant. It was on a Sabbath morning she died, and he was all day at church, not many yards from where lay her little corpse alone in the house. His colleague preached in the forenoon, and in the afternoon he took his turn, saying before beginning his discourse:--"It has pleased the Father of Lights to darken one of the lights of my dwelling--had the child lived I would have remained with her, but now I have thought it right to arise and come into the house of the Lord and worship." Such violence to one part of his nature by that in it which was supreme, injured him: it was like pulling up on the instant an express train; the whole inner organization is minutely, though it may be invisibly hurt; its molecular constitution damaged by the cruel stress and strain. Such things are not right; they are a cruelty and injustice and injury from the soul to the body, its faithful slave, and they bring down, as in his case they too truly did, their own certain and specific retribution. A man who did not feel keenly might have preached; a man whose whole nature was torn, shattered, and astonished as his was, had in a high sense _no right_ so to use himself; and when too late he opened his eyes to this. It was part of our old Scottish severe unsparing character--calm to coldness outside, burning to fierceness, tender to agony within.

I was saying how much my father enjoyed women's company. He liked to look on them, and watch them, listening[21] to their keen, unconnected, and unreasoning, but not unreasonable talk. Men's argument, or rather arguing, and above all debating, he disliked. He had no turn for it. He was not combative, much less contentious. He was, however, warlike. Anything that he could destroy, any falsehood or injustice, he made for, not to discuss, but to expose and kill. He could not fence with his mind much less with his tongue, and had no love for the exploits of a nimble dialectic. He had no readiness either in thought or word for this; his way was slowly to _think out_ a subject, to get it well "bottomed," as Locke would say; he was not careful as to recording the steps he took in their order, but the spirit of his mind was logical, as must be that of all minds who seek and find truth, for logic is nothing else than the arithmetic of thought; having therefore _thought it out_, he proceeded to put it into formal expression. This he did so as never again to undo it. His mind seemed to want the wheels by which this is done, _vestigia nulla retrorsum_, and having stereotyped it, he was never weary of it; it never lost its life and freshness to him, and he delivered it as emphatically thirty years after it had been cast, as the first hour of its existence.

[21] One day my mother, and her only sister, Agnes--married to
James Aitken of Cullands, a man before his class and his
time, for long the only Whig and Seceder laird in
Peeblesshire, and with whom my father shared the _Edinburgh
Review_ from its beginning--the two sisters who were, the
one to the other, as Martha was to Mary, sat talking of
their household doings; my aunt was great upon some things
she could do; my father looked up from his book, and said,
"There is one thing, Mrs. Aitken, you cannot do--you cannot
turn the heel of a stocking;" and he was right, he had
noticed her make over this "kittle" turn to her mother.

I have said he was no swordsman, but he was a heavy shot; he fired off his ball, compact, weighty, the _maximum_ of substance in the _minimum_ of bulk; he put in double charge, pointed the muzzle, and fired, with what force and sharpness we all remember. If it hit, good; if not, all he could do was to load again, with the same ball, and in the same direction. You must come to him to be shot, at least you must stand still, for he had a want of mobility of mind in great questions. He could not stalk about the field like a sharp-shooter; his was a great sixty-eight pounder, and it was not much of a swivel. Thus it was that he rather dropped into the minds of others his authoritative assertions, and left them to breed conviction. If they gave them entrance and cherished them, they would soon find how full of primary truth they were, and how well they would serve them, as they had served him. With all this heavy artillery, somewhat slow and cumbrous, on great questions, he had no want, when he was speaking off-hand, of quick, _snell_ remark, often witty and full of spirit, and often too unexpected, like lightning--flashing, smiting, and gone. In Church Courts this was very marked. On small ordinary matters, a word from him would settle a long discussion. He would, after lively, easy talk with his next neighbor, set _him_ up to make a speech which was conclusive. But on great questions he must move forward his great gun with much solemnity and effort, partly from his desire to say as much of the truth at once as he could, partly from the natural concentration and rapidity of his mind in action, as distinguished from his slowness when _incubating_, or in the process of thought,--and partly from a sort of self-consciousness--I might almost call it a compound of pride and nervous diffidence--which seldom left him. He desired to say it so that it might never need to be said again or otherwise by himself, or any one else.

This strong personality, along with a prevailing love to be alone, and dwell with thoughts rather than with thinkers, pervaded his entire character. His religion was deeply personal,[22] not only as affecting himself, but as due to a personal God, and presented through the sacrifice and intercession of the God-man; and it was perhaps owing to his "conversation" being so habitually in heaven--his social and affectionate desires filling themselves continually from "all the fulness of God," through living faith and love--that he the less felt the need of giving and receiving human affection. I never knew any man who lived more truly under the power, and sometimes under the shadow of the world to come. This world had to him little reality except as leading to the next; little interest, except as the time of probation and sentence. A child brought to him to be baptized was in his mind, and in his words, "a young immortal to be educated for eternity;" a birth was the beginning of what was never to end; sin--his own and that of the race--was to him, as it must be to all men who can think, the great mystery, as it is the main curse of time. The idea of it--of its exceeding sinfulness--haunted and oppressed him. He used to say of John Foster, that this deep and intense, but sometimes narrow and grim thinker, had, in his study of the disease of the race, been, as it were, fascinated by its awful spell, so as almost to forget the remedy. This was not the case with himself. As you know, no man held more firmly to the objective reality of his religion--that it was founded upon fact. It was not the pole-star he lost sight of, or the compass he mistrusted; it was the seaworthiness of the vessel. His constitutional deficiency of hope, his sensibility to sin, made him not unfrequently stand in doubt of himself, of his sincerity and safety before God, and sometimes made existence--the being obliged to continue to be--a doubtful privilege.

[22] In his own words, "A personal Deity is the soul of Natural
Religion; a personal Saviour--the real living Christ--is the
soul of Revealed Religion."

When oppressed with this feeling,--"the burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible world," the hurry of mankind out of this brief world into the unchangeable and endless next,--I have heard him, with deep feeling, repeat Andrew Marvel's strong lines:--

"But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariots hurrying near;
And yonder all before me lie
Deserts of vast eternity."

His living so much on books, and his strong personal attachment to men, as distinct from his adhesion to their principles and views, made him, as it were, live and commune with the dead--made him intimate, not merely with their thoughts, and the public events of their lives, but with themselves--Augustine, Milton, Luther, Melancthon, George Herbert, Baxter, Howe, Owen, Leighton, Barrow, Bunyan, Philip and Matthew Henry, Doddridge, Defoe, Marvel, Locke, Berkeley, Halliburton, Cowper, Gray, Johnson, Gibbon, and David Hume,[23] Jortin, Boston, Bengel, Neander, etc., not to speak of the apostles, and above all, his chief friend the author of the Epistle to the Romans, whom he looked on as the greatest of men,--with all these he had personal relations as men, he cordialized with them. He had thought much more about them--would have had more to say to them had they met, than about or to any but a very few living men.[24] He delighted to possess books which any of them might have held in their hands, on which they had written their names. He had a number of these, some very curious; among others, that wild soldier, man of fashion and wit among the reformers, Ulric von Huetten's autograph on Erasmus' beautiful folio Greek Testament, and John Howe's (spelt How) on the first edition of Milton's Speech on Unlicensed Printing.[25] He began collecting books when he was twelve, and he was collecting up to his last hours. He cared least for merely fine books, though he enjoyed, no one more so, fine type, good binding, and all the niceties of the book-fancier. What he liked were such books as were directly useful in his work, and such as he liked to live in the midst of; such, also, as illustrated any great philosophical, historical, or ecclesiastical epoch. His collection of Greek Testaments was, considering his means, of great extent and value, and he had a quite singular series of books, pamphlets, and documents, referring not merely to his own body--the Secession, with all its subdivisions and reunions--but to Nonconformity and Dissent everywhere, and, indeed, to human liberty, civil and religious, in every form,--for this, after the great truths, duties, and expectations of his faith, was the one master-passion of his life--liberty in its greatest sense, the largest extent of individual and public spontaneity consistent with virtue and safety. He was in this as intense, persistent in his devotion, as Sydney, Locke, or old Hollis. For instance, his admiration of Lord Macaulay as a writer and a man of letters, an orator and a statesman, great as it was, was as nothing to his gratitude to him for having placed permanently on record, beyond all risk of obscuration or doubt, the doctrine of 1688--the right and power of the English people to be their own lawgivers, and to appoint their own magistrates, of whom the sovereign is the chief.

[23] David Hume's _Treatise on Human Nature_ he knew thoroughly,
and read it carefully during his last illness. He used to
say it not only was a miracle of intellectual and literary
power for a man of twenty-eight, but contained the essence
of all that was best on the philosophy of mind; "It's all
there, if you will think it out."

[24] This tendency was curiously seen in his love of portraits,
especially of men whose works he had and liked. He often put
portraits into his books, and he seemed to enjoy this way of
realizing their authors; and in exhibitions of pictures he
was more taken up with what is usually and justly the most
tiresome departments, the portraits, than with all else. He
was not learned in engravings, and made no attempt at
collecting them, so that the following list of portraits in
his rooms shows his liking for the men much more than for
the art which delineated them. Of course they by no means
include all his friends, ancient and modern, but they all
_were_ his friends:--

Robert Hall--Dr. Carey--Melancthon--Calvin--Pollok--Erasmus
(very like "Uncle Ebenezer")--John Knox--Dr. Waugh--John
Milton (three all framed)--Dr. Dick--Dr. Hall--Luther
(two)--Dr. Heugh--Dr. Mitchell--Dr. Balmer--Dr.
Henderson--Dr. Wardlaw--Shakspeare (a small oil painting
which he had since ever I remember)--Dugald Stewart--Dr.
Innes--Dr. Smith, Biggar--the two Erskines and Mr.
Fisher--Dr. John Taylor of Toronto--Dr. Chalmers--Mr.
William Ellis--Rev. James Elles--J. B.
Patterson--Vinet--Archibald M'Lean--Dr. John
Erskine--Tholuck--John Pym--Gesenius--Professor
Finlayson--Richard Baxter--Dr. Lawson--Dr. Peddie (two, and
a copy of Joseph's noble bust); and they were thus all about
him for no other reason than that he liked to look at and
think of them through their countenances.

[25] In a copy of Baxter's Life and Times, which he picked up at
Maurice Ogle's shop in Glasgow, which had belonged to Anna,
Countess of Argyll, besides her autograph, there is a most
affecting and interesting note in that venerable lady's
handwriting. It occurs on the page where Baxter brings a
charge of want of veracity against her eldest and
name-daughter who was perverted to Popery. They are in a
hand tremulous with age and feeling:--"I can say w^t truth I
neuer in all my lyff did hear hir ly, and what she said, if
it was not trew, it was by others sugested to hir, as y^t
she wold embak on Wedensday. She belived she wold, bot thy
took hir, alles! from me who never did sie her mor. The
minester of Cuper, Mr. John Magill, did sie hir at Paris in
the convent. Said she was a knowing and vertuous person, and
hed retined the living principels of our relidgon, which
made him say it was good to grund young persons weel in ther
relidgion, as she was one it appired weel grunded."

The following is Lord Lindsay's letter, on seeing this
remarkable marginal note:--

EDINBURGH, DOUGLAS' HOTEL,
_26th December 1856._

MY DEAR SIR,--I owe you my sincerest thanks for your
kindness in favoring me with a sight of the volume of
Baxter's Life, which formerly belonged to my ancestrix,
Anna, Countess of Argyll. The MS. note inserted by her in it
respecting her daughter is extremely interesting. I had
always been under the impression that the daughter had died
very shortly after her removal to France, but the contrary
appears from Lady Argyll's memorandum. That memorandum
throws also a pleasing light on the later life of Lady Anna,
and forcibly illustrates the undying love and tenderness of
the aged mother, who must have been very old when she penned
it, the book having been printed as late as 1696.

I am extremely obliged to you for communicating to me this
new and very interesting information.--Believe me, my dear
Sir, your much obliged and faithful servant,

LINDSAY.

JOHN BROWN, Esq. M.D.

His conviction of the sole right of God to be Lord of the conscience, and his sense of his own absolute religious independence of every one but his Maker, were the two elements in building up his beliefs on all Church matters; they were twin beliefs. Hence the simplicity and thoroughness of his principles. Sitting in the centre, he commanded the circumference. But I am straying out of my parish into yours. I only add to what you have said, that the longer he lived, the more did he insist upon it being not less true and not less important, that the Church must not intermeddle with the State, than that the State must not intermeddle with the Church. He used to say, "Go down into the world, with all its complications and confusions, with this double-edged weapon, and you can cut all the composite knots of Church and State." The element of God and of eternity predominates in the religious more than in the civil affairs of men, and thus far transcends them; but the principle of mutual independence is equally applicable to each. All that statesmen, as such, have to do with religion, is to be themselves under its power; all that Christians, as such, have to do with the State, is to be good citizens.

The fourth epoch of his personal life I would date from his second marriage. As I said before, no man was ever happier in his wives. They had much alike in nature,--only one could see the Divine wisdom of his first wife being his first, and his second his second; each did best in her own place and time. His marriage with Miss Crum was a source of great happiness and good not only to himself, but to us his first children. She had been intimately known to us for many years, and was endeared to us long before we saw her, by her having been, as a child and girl, a great favorite of our own mother. The families of my grandfather Nimmo, and of the Crums, Ewings, and Maclaes, were very intimate. I have heard my father tell, that being out at Thornliebank with my mother, he asked her to take a walk with him to the Rouken, a romantic waterfall and glen up the burn. My mother thought they might take "Miss Margaret" with them, and so save appearances, and with Miss Crum, then a child of ten, holding my father's hand, away the three went!

So you may see that no one could be nearer to being our mother; and she was curiously ingenious, and completely successful in gaining our affection and regard. I have, as a boy, a peculiarly pleasant remembrance of her, having been at Thornliebank when about fourteen, and getting that impression of her gentle, kind, wise, calm, and happy nature--her entire lovableness--which it was our privilege to see ministering so much to my father's comfort. That fortnight in 1824 or 1825 is still to me like the memory of some happy dream; the old library, the big chair in which I huddled myself up for hours with the New Arabian Nights, and all the old-fashioned and unforgotten books I found there, the ample old garden, the wonders of machinery and skill going on in "the works," the large water-wheel going its stately rounds in the midst of its own darkness, the petrifactions I excavated in the bed of the burn, _ammonites_, etc., and brought home to my museum (!); the hospitable lady of the house, my hereditary friend, dignified, anxious and kind; and above all, her only daughter who made me a sort of pet, and was always contriving some unexpected pleasure,--all this feels to me even now like something out of a book.

My father's union with Miss Crum was not only one of the best blessings of his life,--it made him more of a blessing to others, than it is likely he would otherwise have been. By her cheerful, gracious ways, her love for society as distinguished from company, her gift of making every one happy and at ease when with her, and her tender compassion for all suffering, she in a measure won my father from himself and his books, to his own great good, and to the delight and benefit of us all. It was like sunshine and a glad sound in the house. She succeeded in what is called "drawing out" the inveterate solitary. Moreover, she encouraged and enabled him to give up a moiety of his ministerial labors, and thus to devote himself to the great work of his later years, the preparing for and giving to the press the results of his life's study of God's Word. We owe entirely to her that immense _armamentarium libertatis_, the third edition of his treatise on Civil Obedience.

One other source of great happiness to my father by this marriage was the intercourse he had with the family at Thornliebank, deepened and endeared as this was by her unexpected and irreparable loss. But on this I must not enlarge, nor on that death itself, the last thing in the world he ever feared--leaving him once more, after a brief happiness, and when he had still more reason to hope that he would have "grown old with her, leaning on her faithful bosom." The urn was again empty--and the only word was _vale!_ he was once more _viduus_ bereft.

"God gives us love; something to love
He lends us; but, when love is grown
To ripeness, that on which it throve
Falls off, and love is left alone.
This is the curse of time"--

But still--

"'Tis better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all."

It was no easy matter to get him from home and away from his books. But once off, he always enjoyed himself,--especially in his visits to Thornliebank, Busby, Crofthead, Biggar, and Melrose. He was very fond of preaching on these occasions, and his services were always peculiarly impressive. He spoke more slowly and with less vehemence than in his own pulpit, and, as I often told him, with all the more effect. When driving about Biggar, or in the neighborhood of Langrig, he was full of the past, showing how keenly, with all his outward reserve, he had observed and felt. He had a quite peculiar interest in his three flocks, keeping his eye on all their members, through long years of absence.

His love for his people and for his "body" was a special love; and his knowledge of the Secession, through all its many divisions and unions,--his knowledge, not only of its public history, with its immense controversial and occasional literature, but of the lives and peculiarities of its ministers,--was of the most minute and curious kind. He loved all mankind, and specially such as were of "the household of faith;" and he longed for the time when, as there was one Shepherd, there would be but one sheepfold; but he gloried in being not only a Seceder, but Burgher; and he often said, that take them all in all, he knew no body of professing Christians in any country or in any time, worthier of all honor than that which was founded by the Four Brethren, not only as God-fearing, God-serving men, but as members of civil society; men who on every occasion were found on the side of liberty and order, truth and justice. He used to say he believed there was hardly a Tory in the Synod, and that no one but He whose service is perfect freedom, knew the public good done, and the public evil averted, by the lives and the principles, and when need was, by the votes of such men, all of whom were in the working classes, or in the lower half of the middle. The great Whig leaders knew this, and could always depend on the Seceders.