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Rab and His Friends and Other Papers
I add another bit from Mr. White, too characteristic of that mixture of kindness and cruelty, of tenderness and pluck, – Dandie Dinmont, – and of the exercise, called one-sidedly "sport." It ends happily, which is more than the bigstorefarmer wished: – "The mother of the farfamed Peppers and Mustards was a dark-coloured, rough-haired bitch of the name of Tar. Davidson wanted a cat from some of the cottages at a distance from Hindlee, that he might have the young dogs tried upon it. One of his shepherds chanced to call at Andrew Telfer's house (the grandfather, I believe, of my late friend), where he saw baudrons sitting on the end of adresser near the door; and the house being low and dark, he swept her into his plaid-neuk on going out, and carried her home. Next morning she was introduced to a covered drain, which ran across the road, the said drain being closed up at one end, whereby she was compelled to give battle to her foes. A young terrier was the first to oppose her, and paid for its rashness by retreating from the drain with the skin almost torn from its nose. Another of the same age met with the same punishment, and Davidson, considerably irritated, brought forward Tar, the old dame, who, by her age and experience, he considered, would be more than a match for the cat. There was sore fighting for a time, till again Puss was victorious, and Tar withdrew from the conflict in such a condition that her master exclaimed, 'Confoond the cat, she's tumblt an e'e oot o' the bitch!' which indeed was the case. 'Tak awathe stanes frae the tapo' the cundy,' said Davidson, 'and we'll ha'e her worried at ance.' The stones were removed, and out leapt the cat in the middle of her enemies. Fortunately for her, however, it happened that a stone wall was continued up the side of the road, which she instantly mounted, and, running along the top thereof, with the dogs in full cry after her she speedily reached a plantation, and eluded all pursuit. No trace of her could be discovered; and the next time the shepherd called at Andrew Telfer's house, my lady was seated on the dresser, as demure as if nothing in her whole life had ever disturbed her tranquillity."
7
In The Dog, by Stonehenge, an excellent book, there is a woodcut of Puck, and "Dr. Wm. Brown's celebrated dog John Pym" is mentioned Their pedigrees are given – here is Puck's, which shows his "strain" is of the pure azure blood – "Got by John Pym, out of Tib; bred by Purves of Leaderfoot; sire. Old Dandie, the famous dog of old John Stoddart of Selkirk – dam Whin." How Homeric all this sounds! I cannot help quoting what follows – "Sometime a Dandie pup of a good strain may appear not to be game at an early age; but he should not be parted with on this account, because many of them do not show their courage till nearly two years old, and then nothing can beat them; this apparent softness arising, as I suspect, from kindness of heart" – a suspicion, my dear "Stonehenge," which is true and shows your own "kindness of heart," as well as sense.
8
The same seeing eye and understanding mind, when they were eighteen years of age discovered and published the Solvent of Caoutchouc, for which patent was taken out afterwards by the famous Mackintosh. If the young discoverer had secured the patent, he might have made a fortune as large as his present reputation – I don't suppose he much regrets that he didn't.
9
[ – As I am now, to my sorrow and shame, too much of a mediate Grecian, I give a Balliol friend's note on these two words: – "What you have called 'presence of mind' and 'happy guessing' may, I think, be identified respectively with Aristotle's [Greek] and evaroxia – The latter of these, [Greek], Aristotle mentions incidentally when treating of [Greek], or good deliberation. Eth. Nic. bk. vi. ch. 9. Good deliberation, he says, is not eûotoxîa, for the former is a slow process, whereas the latter is not guided by reason, and is rapid. In the same passage he tells us that [Greek] is a sort of [Greek]. But he speaks of [Greek] more fully in Ana. Post. 1. 34: – [Greek] is a sort of happy guessing at the intermediate, when there is not time for consideration: as when a man, seeing that the bright side of the moon is always turned towards the sun, comprehends that her light is borrowed from the sun; or concludes, from seeing one conversing with a capitalist that he wants to borrow money; or infers that people are friends from the fact of their having common enemies.' And then he goes on to make these simple observations confused and perplexing by reducing them to his logical formula. "The derivation of the words will confirm this view. Evoroxia is a hitting the mark successfully, a reaching to the end, the rapid, and, as it were, intuitive perception of the truth. This is what Whewell means by saying, 'all induction is a happy conjecture.' But when Aristotle says that this faculty is not guided by reason [Greek], he does not mean to imply that it grows up altogether independent of reason, any more than Whewell means to say that all the discoveries in the inductive sciences have been made by men taking 'shots' at them, as boys at school do at hard passages in their Latin lessons. On the contrary, no faculty is so absolutely the child of reason as this faculty of happy guessing. It only attains to perfection after the reason has been long and painfully trained in the sphere in which the guesses are to be made. What Aristotle does mean is, that when it has attained perfection, we are not conscious of the share which reason has in its operation – it is so rapid that by 110 analysis can we detect the presence of reason in its action. Sir Isaac Newton seeing the apple fall, and thence 'guessing' at the law of gravitation, is a good instance of evaroxia. "[Greek], on the other hand, is a nearness of mind; not a reaching to the end, but an apprehension of the best means; not a perception of the truth, but a perception of how the truth is to be supported. It is sometimes translated 'sagacity,' but readiness or presence of mind is better, as sagacity rather involves the idea of consideration. In matters purely intellectual it is ready wit. It is a sort of shorter or more limited eùcrroxîa. It is more of a natural gift than [Greek], because the latter is a far higher and nobler faculty, and therefore more dependent for its perfection 011 cultivation, as all our highest faculties are. [Greek] akin to genius, [Greek] to practical common sense." – ]
10
A year ago, I found an elderly countrywoman, a widow, waiting for me. Rising up, she said, "D'ye mind me?" I looked at her, and could get nothing from her face; but the voice remained in my ear, as if coming from the "fields of sleep," and I said by a sort of instinct, "Tibbie Meek!" I had not seen her or heard her voice for more than forty years. She had come to get some medical advice. Voices are often like the smells of flowers and leaves, the tastes of wild fruits – they touch and awaken the memory in a strange way. "Tibbie" is now living at Thankerton.
11
I have been told that once in the course of the sermon his voice trembled, and many feared he was about to break down.
12
There is a story illustrative of this altered manner and matter of preaching. He had been preaching when very young, at Galashiels, and one wife said to her "neebor," "Jean, what think ye o' the lad?" "It's maist o't tinsel wark," said Jean, neither relishing nor appreciating his fine sentiments and figures. After my mother's death, he preached in the same place, and Jean, running to her friend, took the first word, "It's a' gowd noo."
13
On a low chest of drawers in this room there lay for many years my mother's parasol, by his orders – I daresay, for long, the only one in Biggar.
14
His reading aloud of everything from John Gilpin to John Howe was a fine and high art, or rather gift. Henderson
15
With the practices of this last worthy, when carried on moderately, and for the sport's sake, he had a special sympathy.
16
I believe this was the true though secret source of much of my father's knowledge of the minute personal history of every one in his region, which – to his people, knowing his reserved manner and his devotion to his studies, and his so rarely meeting them or speaking to them, except from the pulpit, or at a diet of visitation – was a perpetual wonder, and of which he made great use in his dealings with his afflicted or erring members."
17
He was curiously destitute of all literary ambition or show; like the cactus in the desert, always plump, always taking in the dew of heaven, and caring little to give it out. He wrote many papers in the Repository and Monitor, an acute and clever tract on the Voluntary controversy, entitled Calm Answers to Angry Questions, and was the author of a capital bit of literary banter – a Congratulatory Letter to the Minister of Liber-ton, who had come down upon my father in a pamphlet, for his sermon on "There remaineth much land to be possessed." It is a mixture of Swift and Arbuthnot. I remember one of the flowers he culls from him he is congratulating, in which my father is characterized as one of those "shallow, sallow souls that would swallow the bait "without perceiving the cloven foot!" But a man like this never is best in a book; he is always greater than his work.
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 warrior 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 Brotherstone19
After a tight discussion between these two attached friends, Dr. Wardlaw said, "Well, I can't answer you, but fish I must and shall."
20
He gave us all the education we got at Biggar.
21
One day my mother, and her only sister, Agnes – married to James Aitken of Callands, 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.
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."
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 department, 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 Hill – Dr. Carey – Melanchthon – 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 – Shakspere (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 Elies – 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 namedaughter who was perverted to Popery. They are in a hand tremulous with age and feeling: – "I can say with truth I never in all my lyff did hear trewly, and what she said, if it was not trew, it was by others sugested to hir, as yt she wold embak on Wedensday. She belived she wold, bot thy took hir, allés! 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 favouring 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.
26
This earnestness of nature pervaded all his exercises. A man of great capacity and culture, with a head like Benjamin Franklin's, an avowed unbeliever in Christianity, came every Sunday afternoon, for many years, to hear him. I remember his look well, as if interested, but not impressed. He was often asked by his friends why he went when he didn't believe one word of what he heard. "Neither I do, but I like to hear and to see a man earnest once a week, about anything." It is related of David Hume, that having heard my great-grandfather preach, he said, "That's the man for me, he means what he says; he speaks as if Jesus Christ was at his elbow."
27
The following note from the pen to which we owe "St. Paul's Thorn in the Flesh" is admirable, both for its reference to my father, and its own beauty and truth.
28
On one occasion, Mr. Hall of Kelso, an excellent but very odd man, in whom the ego was very strong, and who, if he had been a Spaniard, would, to adopt Coleridge's story, have taken off or touched his hat whenever he spoke of himself, met Dr. Belfrage in the lobby of the Synod, and drawing himself up as he passed, he muttered, "high and michty!' "There's a pair of us, Mr. Hall." 29 Such an occasional paroxysm of eloquence is thus described by Dr. Cairns: – "At certain irregular intervals, when the loftier themes of the gospel ministry were to be handled, his manner underwent a transformation which was startling, and even electrical. He became rapt and excited as with new inspiration; his utterance grew thick and rapid; his voice trembled and faltered with emotion; his eye gleamed with a wild unearthly lustre, in which his countenance shared; and his whole frame heaved to and fro, as if each glowing thought and vivid figure that followed in quick succession were only a fragment of some greater revelation which he panted to overtake. The writer of this notice has witnessed nothing similar in any preacher, and numbers the effects of a passage which he once heard upon the scenes and exercises of the heavenly world among his most thrilling recollections of sacred oratory." —Memoir prefixed to posthumous volume of Discourses.
29
James i. 15, 16. It is plain that "do not err" should have been in verse 15th.
30
"The youth Story was in all respects healthy, and even robust; he died of overwork, or rather, as I understand, of a two years' almost total want of exercise, which it was impossible to induce him to take." – Arnold's Report to the Committee of Council on Education, 1860.
31
We have not noticed his iterativeness, his reiterativeness, because it flowed naturally from his primary qualities. In speaking it was effective, and to us pleasing, because there was some new modulation, some addition in the manner, just as the sea never sets up one wave exactly like the last or the next. But in his books it did somewhere encumber his thoughts, and the reader's progress and profit. It did not arise, as in many lesser men, from his having said his say – from his having no more in him; much less did it arise from conceit, either of his idea or of his way of stating it; but from the intensity with which the sensation of the idea-if we may use the expression – made its first mark on his mind. Truth to him never seemed to lose its first freshness, its edge, its flavour; and Divine truth, we know, had come to him so suddenly, so fully, at mid-day, when he was in the very prime of his knowledge and his power and quickness – had so possessed his entire nature, as if, like him who was journeying to Damascus, a Great Light had shone round about him – that whenever he reproduced that condition, he began afresh, and with his whole utterance, to proclaim it. He could not but speak the things he had seen and felt, and heard and believed; and he did it much in the same way, and in the same words, for the thoughts and affections and posture of his soul were the same. Like all men of vivid perception and keen sensibility, his mind and his body continued under impressions, both material and spiritual, after the objects were gone. A curious instance of this occurs to us. Some years ago, he roamed up and down through the woods near Auchindinny, with two boys as companions. It was the first bur& of summer, and the trees were mere than usually enriched with leaves. He wandered about delighted, silent, looking at the leaves, "thick and numberless." As the three went on, they came suddenly upon a high brick wall, newly built, for peach trees, not yet planted. Dr. Chalmers halted, and looking steadfastly at the wall, exclaimed most earnestly, "What foliage! what foliage!" The boys looked at one another, and said nothing, but on getting home, expressed their astonishment at this very puzzling phenomenon. What a difference! leaves and parallelograms; a forest and a brick wall!
32
"And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him." – Rev. vi, 8,
33
Monday, 28th November 1859.
34
In the thin octavo, The Office of the State, and in its twin volume on Church Polity there will be found in clear, strong, and singularly candid language, the first lines of the sciences of Church and State politics. It does not say much for the sense and perspicuity of the public mind, if two such books are allowed to fall aside, and such a farrago of energetic nonsense and error as Mr. Buckle's first, and we trust last, volume on Civilisation, is read, and admired, and bought, with its bad logic, its bad facts, and its bad conclusions. In bulk and in value his volume stands in the same relation to Mr. Dick's, as a handful, I may say a gowpett of chaff does to a grain of wheat, or a bushel of sawdust to an ounce of meal.
35
In our excellent National Gallery (Edinburgh), a copy of Titian's Ariadne in Naxos is hung immediately above Wilkie's sacred sketch of John Knox administering the Sacrament in Calder House!
36
This great writer was first acknowledged as such by our big quarterlies, in the North British Review, fourteen years ago, as follows: – "This is a very extraordinary and a very delightful book, full of truth and goodness, of power and beauty. If genius may be considered (and it is as serviceable a definition as is current) that power by which one man produces for the use or the pleasure of his fellowmen, something at once new and true, then have we here its unmistakable and inestimable handiwork. Let our readers take our word for it, and read these volumes thoroughly, giving themselves up to the guidance of this most original thinker, and most attractive writer, and they will find not only that they are richer in true knowledge, and quickened in pure and heavenly affections, but they will open their eyes upon a new world – walk under an ampler heaven, and breathe a diviner air. There are few things more delightful or more rare, than to feel such a kindling up of the whole faculties as is produced by such a work as this."
37
I am wrong in this. Bacon first uses this thought in his
38
Can the gifted author of these lines and of their music not be prevailed on to give them and others to the world, as well as to her friends?
39
Lob-lye-by-the-fire.
40
On one occasion, Brownie had undertaken to gather the sheep into the bught by an early hour, and so zealously did he perform his task, that not only was there not one sheep left on the hill, but he had also collected a number of hares, which were found fairly penned along with them. Upon being congratulated on his extraordinary success, Brownie exclaimed, "Confound thae wee gray anes! they cost me mair trouble than a' the lave o' them."
41
This is a mistake, as his friend Dr. A. P. Stanley thus corrects: – "'The long unlovely street' was Wimpole Street, No. 67, where the Hallams lived; and Arthur used to say to his friends, 'You know you will always find us at sixes and sevens.'"
42
We had read these lives, and had remarked them, before we knew whose they were, as being of rare merit. No one could suppose they were written by one so young. We give his estimate of the character of Burke. "The mind of this great man may perhaps be taken as a representation of the general characteristics of the English intellect. Its groundwork, was solid, practical, and conversant with the details of business; but upon this, arose a superstructure of imagination and moral sentiment. He saw little, because it was painful to him to see anything, beyond the limits of the national character. In all things, while he deeply reverenced principles, he chose to deal with the concrete rather than with abstractions. He studied men rather than man." The words in italics imply an insight into the deepest springs of human action, the conjunct causes of what we call character, such as few men of large experience can attain.
