meant it, strange as it might seem for a grown-up to be so anxious to forego his privileges; and what a meal it would have been, seasoned with laughter and merriment! For in his own words, speaking of another lovely soul, he was, if not always happy himself, a "happy-making " man. pretence sooner than a child. He was worth long waiting for. He seasoned it with the homely Scotch, familiar to most of his hearers, using it with perfect and fastidious taste, so that an "orra" word came to have a new value from the setting he gave it. Those familiar with his writings must have noticed this fine discrimination in the choice of simple and suitable words which gives to his style so large a part of its charm. A later dinner, years after, is recalled. Again a celebrity had been asked to the board, and it was hoped that the two who had so many sympathies and tastes in common would find But to turn to Dr. Peddie's reminiscences. He tells us his acquaintance each other congenial company. But with John Brown began when both Dr. Brown was silent, and no word were boys of twelve, on the occasion that the most eager interviewer could of his father's translation to the contranscribe spoke he. Even when the gregation of Rose Street, Edinburgh, shadow lay on his spirit there was and when my father assisted at the something infinitely pathetic in his ex-'Induction ' ceremony. We sat totreme gentleness, in the feeling of secure, unshaken trust, veiled only for a little while, that underlay the depression; and no one who has seen it can forget the sudden "irradiation" of the smile which broke through sooner or later, like sunshine after gloom. gether on the pulpit stairs—by special permission as the ministers' sous the church being crowded to excess; and I felt drawn to him more than to any youth I had met before, impressed by his looks of sweetness, intelligence, and earnestness, and the keen interest he showed in the proceedings; and from the fact likewise that, as there was a book under his arm, I thought he must be an awfully studious and clever fellow." But it was not in the social crowd that he showed his best side. He shrank from public appearances and from any call to make himself promineut. Dr. Peddie records the ludicrous inadequacy of his attempt to return Of his childhood in the manse of the thanks when his health was drunk at seceder minister at Biggar we have a a public dinner : "Gentlemen" (a vivid picture in the "Letter to John pause), "I thank you kindly" (pause) | Cairns, D.D." (Hora Subsecivæ, 2nd "for your kindness." He sat down series). A few lines extracted from amid laughter, in which, no doubt, heit, illustrative of the relations between was very ready to join. Like most people who are worth knowing at all, he reserved the best of him for his own fireside, and for the little band of intimate friends privileged to share his winter evenings. Even there he was often silent. As a rule, no man could be more quiet and sober in speech; he listened and assented far more than he talked, though now and then, among congenial souls, the fun and humor would bubble forth unrestrained; but even if he said nothing his sympathy made itself instinctively felt. And when he did open his stores they were found full to overflowing talk so shrewd, so wise, so kindly, so quaint parent and child, may, perhaps, send readers back to what is surely one of the most honest, tender, and pathetic portraits son ever drew. Reading it, one feels sure that it was no fancy sketch, but indeed "the truth told lovingly." 66 My first recollection of my father, my first impression not only of his character but of his eyes and face and presence, strange as it may seem, dates from my fifth year. Children are long of seeing, or at least of looking at, what is above them; they like the ground, and its flowers and stones, its red sodgers' and ladybirds, and all its 6 queer things; their world is about or the last Waverley novel; no more three feet high, and they are more often stooping than gazing up. I know I was past ten before I saw, or cared to see, the ceilings of the rooms in the manse at Biggar. ... visitings in a cart with her, he riding beside us on his thoroughbred pony, to Kilbucho, or Rachan Mill, or Kirklaw Hill. He went among his people as usual when they were ill; he preached "On the morning of May 28, 1816, better than ever they were sometimes my eldest sister Janet and I were frightened to think how wonderfully he sleeping in the kitchen bed with Tibbie preached-but the sunshine was over Meek, our only servant. We were all the glad and careless look, the joy three wakened by a cry of pain, sharp, of young life and mutual love. . insufferable, as if one were stung. What we lost, the congregation and Years after we two confided to each the world gained. He gave himself other, sitting by the burn side, that we wholly to his work. From this thought that 'great cry' which arose at time dates my father's possession and midnight in Egypt must have been like use of the German exegetics. After it. We all knew whose voice it was, my mother's death I slept with him; and, in our night-clothes, we ran into his bed was in his study, a small room the passage, and into the little parlor with a very small grate, aud I rememto the left hand, in which was a closet ber well his getting those fat, shapebed. We found my father standing less, spongy German books, as if one before us, erect, his hands clenched in would sink in them, and be bogged in his black hair, his eyes full of misery their bibulous, unsized paper; and and amazement, his face white as that watching him as he impatiently cut of the dead. He frightened us. He them up, and dived into them in his saw this, or else his intense will had rapid, eclectic way, tasting them, and mastered his agony, for, taking his dropping for my play such a lot of soft, hands from his head, he said, slowly large, curled bits from the paper-cutter, and gently, 'Let us give thanks,' and leaving the edges all shaggy. He never turned to a little sofa in the room; came to bed when I was awake, which there lay our mother-dead. She had is not to be wondered at; but I can been long ailing. I remember her sit- remember often awaking far on in the ting in a shawl an Indian one, with night or morning, and seeing that keen, little dark green spots on a white beautiful, intense face bending over ground and watching her growing those Rosenmüllers, and Ernestis, and pale, with what I afterwards knew Storrs, and Kŭinoels-the fire out, and must have been strong pain. She had, the grey dawn peeping through the being feverish, slipped out of bed, and window; and when he heard me move, 'grandmother,' her mother, seeing her he would speak to me in the foolish 'change come,' had called my father, words of endearment my mother was and they two saw her open her blue, wont to use, and come to bed, and take kind, and true eyes, 'comfortable' to me, warm as I was, into his cold us all as the day'-I remember them bosom." better than those of any one I saw yesterday and, with one faint look of recognition to him, close them till the 'time of the restitution of all things.' Here is what Dr. Cairns writes of the father, from whom the son inherited so much : The manse became silent. "As he was of the Pauline type of We lived and slept and played under mind, his Christianity ran in the same the shadow of that death, and we saw, mould. He was a believer in the or rather felt, that he was another sense of the old Puritans, and, amid father than before. No more happy the doubt and scepticism of the ninelaughter from the two in the parlor, as teenth century, held as firmly as any of he was reading Larry the Irish post- them by the doctrines of atonement boy's letter in Miss Edgeworth's tale, and grace. There was a fountain of T union of these ardent elements and of So touched was he tenderness in his nature, as well as a his profession. The physical beauty, if not of feature, at least of expression a mingled dignity and sweetness- was inherited too. Of the depth and tenderness of his home affections this is, perhaps, not the place to speak; but his love and grief for his beautiful wife, taken from him after a companionship of twentyfour years, are unforgettable by those who witnessed them. One instance of his loyalty to her memory we may retell. "I told him I could recall very vividly the only time I spoke to Mrs. Brown. He asked me to tell him about it, and I did. The next day I met him out at dinner, and, by rare good fortune, sat next him. He had only been seated a minute or two when he turned to me and said: What you told me about her yesterday has been like a Taught solely by his father while at Biggar, John Brown was sent on the removal to Edinburgh to the high school, and thence to the universitya very young student surely, since we find him already, at seventeen, beginning his medical studies as the apprentice of Mr. Syme, then a rising young surgeon. Of him, Dr. Brown spoke to the last in terms of the utmost affection and respect. "He was my master; my apprentice fee bought him his first carriage a gig-and I got the first ride in it. He was, I believe, the greatest surgeon Scotland ever produced, and I cannot conceive a greater, hardly of as great, a clinical teacher." The ride was across Corstorphine Hill by the Dean Road, where he often silver thread running through the walked, looking towards the far High- day.'" His love for his father reland hills; where, one December even-mained a part of him to the last. It ing, years upon years later, he walked at the going down of the sun with Thackeray. comes out again and again in his talk and his letters. Writing to Dr. MacLagan at the time when the University of Edinburgh conferred the degree of LL.D. upon him, Dr. Brown says: "Thanks for all you said and felt, and not least for the word about my father." Even on a day when he might justly have taken pleasure in his own honors, his pride in his good grey father came first. One wonders that one so sensitively poised should choose the profession of medicine, yet but for the clerkship at Minto House there would have been no "Rab and His Friends." In spite of his admiration of Syme as an operator, he seemed to recoil from the painful scenes of surgery" (chloroform was not as yet), and it was as a physician he started in Edinburgh in 1833. His constitutional sorrowfulness was largely increased by the incidents of lines. After his wife's death in 1864 his sister Isabella made her home in Rut 1 Dr. John Brown and his Sister Isabella. Out land Street, and for the last eighteen | dogs of his friends. Here, too, his years of her brother's life guided his acquaintance was large and varied, as household, received and welcomed his became one, indeed, who wrote of his friends, and in all ways rendered four-footed friends almost as if he held him such sprightly companionship as the Buddhist doctrine of previous Bridget gave to Elia. Unlike in many birth, and had once been a dog himself. ways she keen, impulsive, and im-"Once, when driving, he suddenly petuous; he, quiet in voice and move- stopped in the middle of a sentence,. ment-the brother and sister had yet and looked out eagerly at the back of much in common. In both were the the carriage. 'Is it some one you same deeps of tenderness, the same know?' I asked. 'No,' he said;. heart of love that gave them so fresh 'it's a dog I don't know.'" 2 That dog an interest in their fellows; and both must have been a tourist with a Saturhad the finely cultivated taste that day-to-Monday ticket! "I have just made them choose and love only what met a deeply conscientious dog," he was best in literature. Nor did remarked to a friend 66 ; he was carrydifference of taste in jokes" divide ing his own muzzle ! " Of Dr. Pedthem, for they shared a sly and die's staid Dandie he used to say, "He "pawky" humor, a vivid sense of the must have been a Covenanter in a ludicrous. former state; "but indeed no doggie trait of character, even if exhibited in a mongrel "tyke," ever escaped him. a This last period of his life was, perhaps, the most tranquil and fruitful. Already honored by thousands as the Dr. Peddie closes his little volume creator of "Rab" and 66 Marjorie with a selection from Dr. Brown's corFleming," he gathered about him old respondence; but the biographer's friends and new, finding in their affec- obligation, sacredly observed, to omit tionate regard consolation for many everything concerning the living, or too. hidden sorrows. His interest in liter- private for the public eye, somewhat ature and in the expression of his detracts from the interest of the letters. thoughts by his pen was always quick For it was the personal touches in to revive after seasons of depression, those intimate little notes over the and his fertility and spontaneity seemed quaint signature "Jeye Bee," the fine to increase towards the end; while his sympathy, that gave his correspondcorrespondence with all sorts and con-ence its charm. His fellow-feeling ditions of men and women brought a came out, perhaps, most strongly in the fresh breeze into his life. His love of notes always brief- in which he sorrowed with his friends in their sorrow. The few words said so much, and said it so finely. 66 nature never failed him. "The beauty and wondrousness of all visible things, the earth and every common sight," was strong in him while he had eyes to The letters to Sir George Harvey, a see it. For Edinburgh "the glorious lifelong friend, are chiefly concerned creature" he had a lover's passion; with questions of art, though pleasant frequence never "staled" her glints of home life in the Highlands charms for him. He rode or walked shine through. Those to Coventry daily in Princes Street, his progress Dick are in another key, and with this almost a royal one, so many hats were cultured correspondent books and the lifted, so many faces, young and old, men who write them are the chief brightened at sight of his. theme. Here is a discerning criticism of Landor: And next to the "humans," his kindly regards were bestowed on the 1 For perhaps the most perfectly truthful and sympathetic sketch yet made of both, see Miss McLaren's "John Brown and his Sister. Outlines." "Landor is rather an uncommon man than a great one, and a good deal of his fame is owing to that felicitous, • Outlines. baphazard, and wilful wildness of what manner of man he was, and his thought, and to his learning and large-ideas on religion can be, imperfectly, mindedness, making it dangerous to do no doubt, but so far truly, gathered anything but praise him, lest one be- from his writings." tray his own ignorance. But, after all, there is real stuff in him, and his style is divine, having strength and beauty, and delicacy and unexpectedness, and yet naturaluess. His arrogance seems a state, not an act, of his mind, and it | mars more than he is aware the effect of his best thoughts." Thanking Sir Theodore Martin for a copy of his "Life of Horace : John Brown died, after a very short illness, on May 11, 1882; the sorrowfulness and mystery that had so often darkened his days all rolled away. At eventide it was light. He lives for many readers everywhere, in his books. He, too (as he wrote of Thackeray), "is beyond fear of forgetfulness or change," because of "My dear Theodore Martin, Felix "Rab," of "Minchmoor," of "Pet tu! Thanks for this delightful fireside | Marjorie;" but the generations that 'Horace.' I have been sipping it in knew him think of the man firstmy easy-chair, and with delectation all good, sagacious, wise, lovely in his evening, and thinking how pleasantly life. the 'lonely, kindly man' would turn over the leaves if Blackwood would only send it ('from the author') to the Elysian Fields ! ... Good-night! my dear old friend. Don't I see you in that light-blue dress with hooks and eyes, and an upright martial collar. at æet. eight, the envy of all Arnott's !"1 -- From The Daily Graphic. TRIPOLI IN SYRIA. WHILE hundreds of Englishmen yearly visit the port of Jaffa on their way to Jerusalem, and scores embark The graver side is sometimes, but not from the harbor of Beyrout after their often, touched in his large correspond- visit to Damascus, a very small number ence. He shrank with characteristic see the picturesque town of Tripoli, Scotch reticence from any parade of which is hardly more than forty miles religious feeling. But his life spokenorth of Beyrout. And yet Tripoli is "divine reverence was a part of him- one of the most charming places on the self. "He was a sincere, humble, and Syrian coast. I once spent a month of devout Christian," writes his brother, convalescence there in the spring of Professor Crum-Brown. "His religion the year, and when the news of the was not a thing that could be put off terrible disaster to the Victoria reached and on, or be mislaid or lost; it was in me the mise en scène at once flashed him, and he could no more leave it before me the glorious tall cone of behind than he could leave his own the Lebanon, which immediately bebody behind. It was in him a well of hind Tripoli rises to a height of over living water not for himself so much as ten thousand feet, still covered with for all around him. And his purity, the winter snows, rosy in the sunset truth, goodness, and Christ-like charac- light (the catastrophe occurred beter were never more clearly seen than tween six and eight, and at this season in those periods of darkness when they the sun sets at Tripoli about ten minwere hidden from his own sight. He utes past seven) - the rounding hills, very seldom spoke expressly of reli- the great Saracenic castle behind the gion; he held that the greater and town, the mass of houses of the comthe better the inner part of a man pact little city, pointed here and there is, and should be, private-much of it with a graceful minaret or a tile roof of more than private.' But he could not red the forest of orange gardens, a speak of anything without manifesting rich, lustrous bed of green stretching away to the Mina, or port the gay, yellow sands and then the world of 1 Writing-school, Edinburgh. |