CHAPTER III: RAB'S FRIEND
To say what ought to be said concerning Dr. John Brown, a man should haveknown him well and long, and should remember much of that old generationof Scotchmen to whom the author of "Rab and his Friends" belonged. Butthat generation has departed. One by one these wits and scholars of theNorth, these _epigoni_ who were not, indeed, of the heroes, but who hadseen and remembered Scott and Wilson, have passed away. Aytoun andCarlyle and Dr. Burton, and last, Dr. Brown, are gone. Sir TheodoreMartin alone is left. In her memoir of Dr. Burton--the historian ofScotland, and author of "The Book-hunter"--Mrs. Burton remarks that, inher husband's later days, only Dr. John Brown and Professor Blackieremained of all her husband's ancient friends and coevals, of all whoremembered Lockhart, and Hogg, and their times. But many are left whoknew Dr. Brown far better and more intimately than the author of thisnotice. I can hardly say when I first became acquainted with him,probably it was in my childhood. Ever since I was a boy, certainly, Iused to see him at intervals, especially in the Christmas vacations. Buthe seldom moved from Edinburgh, except in summer, which he frequentlypassed in the country house of certain friends of his, whose affectionmade much of the happiness of his latest years, and whose unfailingkindness attended him in his dying hours. Living always in Scotland, Dr.Brown was seen but rarely by his friends who resided in England. Thus,though Dr. Brown's sweetness of disposition and charm of manner, hishumour, and his unfailing sympathy and encouragement, made one feeltoward him as to a familiar friend, yet, of his actual life I saw butlittle, and have few reminiscences to contribute. One can only speak ofthat singular geniality of his, that temper of goodness and naturaltolerance and affection, which, as Scotsmen best know, is not universalamong the Scots. Our race does not need to pray, like the mechanic inthe story, that Providence will give us "a good conceit of ourselves."But we must acknowledge that the Scotch temper is critical if notcaptious, argumentative, inclined to look at the seamy side of men and oftheir performances, and to dwell on imperfections rather than on meritsand virtues. An example of these blemishes of the Scotch disposition,carried to an extreme degree in the nature of a man of genius, is offeredto the world in the writings and "Reminiscences" of Mr. Carlyle.
Now, Dr. John Brown was at the opposite pole of feeling. He had nomawkish toleration of things and people intolerable, but he preferred notto turn his mind that way. His thoughts were with the good, the wise,the modest, the learned, the brave of times past, and he was eager tocatch a reflection of their qualities in the characters of the living, ofall with whom he came into contact. He was, for example, almostoptimistic in his estimate of the work of young people in art orliterature. From everything that was beautiful or good, from a summerday by the Tweed, or from the eyes of a child, or from the humoroussaying of a friend, or from treasured memories of old Scotch worthies,from recollections of his own childhood, from experience of the stoicalheroism of the poor, he seemed to extract matter for pleasant thoughts ofmen and the world, and nourishment for his own great and gentle nature. Ihave never known any man to whom other men seemed so dear--men dead, andmen living. He gave his genius to knowing them, and to making thembetter known, and his unselfishness thus became not only a great personalvirtue, but a great literary charm. When you met him, he had some "goodstory" or some story of goodness to tell--for both came alike to him, andhis humour was as unfailing as his kindness. There was in his face asingular charm, blended, as it were, of the expressions of mirth and ofpatience. Being most sensitive to pain, as well as to pleasure, he wasan exception to that rule of Rochefoucauld's--"_nous avons tous assez deforce pour supporter les maux d'autrui_." {2}
He did not bear easily the misfortunes of others, and the evils of hisown lot were heavy enough. They saddened him; but neither illness, norhis poignant anxiety for others, could sour a nature so unselfish. Heappeared not to have lost that anodyne and consolation of religious hope,which had been the strength of his forefathers, and was his bestinheritance from a remarkable race of Scotsmen. Wherever he came, he waswelcome; people felt glad when they had encountered him in thestreets--the streets of Edinburgh, where almost every one knows every oneby sight--and he was at least as joyously received by the children andthe dogs as by the grown-up people of every family. A friend has kindlyshown me a letter in which it is told how Dr. Brown's love of dogs, hisinterest in a half-blind old Dandy which was attached to him, was evincedin the very last hours of his life. But enough has been said, in generalterms, about the character of "the beloved physician," as Dr. Brown wascalled in Edinburgh, and a brief account may be given, in some detail, ofhis life and ways.
Dr. John Brown was born in Biggar, one of the gray, slaty-looking littletowns in the pastoral moorlands of southern Scotland. These towns haveno great beauty that they should be admired by strangers, but thenatives, as Scott said to Washington Irving, are attached to their "grayhills," and to the Tweed, so beautiful where man's greed does not polluteit, that the Border people are all in love with it, as Tyro, in Homer,loved the divine Enipeus. We hold it "far the fairest of the floods thatrun upon the earth." How dear the border scenery was to Dr. John Brown,and how well he knew and could express its legendary magic, its charmwoven of countless ancient spells, the music of old ballads, the sorceryof old stories, may be understood by readers of his essay on "Minchmoor."{3} The father of Dr. Brown was the third in a lineage of ministers ofthe sect called Seceders. To explain who the Seceders were, it would benecessary to explore the sinking morasses of Scotch ecclesiasticalhistory. The minister was proud of being not only a "Seceder" but a"Burgher." He inherited, to be brief, the traditions of a mostspiritually-minded and most spirited set of men, too much bent, it mayappear to us, on establishing delicate distinctions of opinions, butcertainly most true to themselves and to their own ideals of liberty andof faith. Dr. Brown's great-grandfather had been a shepherd boy, whotaught himself Greek that he might read the New Testament; who walkedtwenty-four miles--leaving his folded sheep in the night--to buy theprecious volume in St. Andrews, and who, finally, became a teacher ofmuch repute among his own people. Of Dr. Brown's father, he himselfwrote a most touching and beautiful account in his "Letter to JohnCairns, D.D." This essay contains, perhaps, the very finest passagesthat the author ever penned. His sayings about his own childhood remindone of the manner of Lamb, without that curious fantastic touch which isof the essence of Lamb's style. The following lines, for example, are arevelation of childish psychology, and probably may be applied, withalmost as much truth, to the childhood of our race:--
"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 lady-birds, and all its queer things; _their world is about 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."
I have often thought that the earliest fathers of our race, child-like inso many ways, were child-like in this, and worshipped, not the phenomenaof the heavens, but objects more on a level with their eyes--the "queerthings" of their low-lying world. In this essay on his father, Dr. Brownhas written lines about a child's first knowledge of death, which seem asnoteworthy as Steele's famous passage about his father's death and hisown half-conscious grief and anger. Dr. Brown describes a Scottishfuneral--the funeral of his own mother--as he saw it with the eyes of aboy of five years old, while his younger brother, a baby of a few months--
"leaped up and crowed with joy at the strange sight--the crowding horsemen, the coaches, and the nodding plumes of the hearse . . . Then, to my surprise and alarm, the coffin, resting on its bearers, was placed over the dark hole, and I watched with curious eye the unrolling of those neat black bunches of cords, which I have often enough seen since. My father took the one at the head, and also another much smaller, springing from the same point as his, which he had caused to be placed there, and unrolling
it, put it into my hand. I twisted it firmly round my fingers, and awaited the result; the burial men with their real ropes lowered the coffin, and when it rested at the bottom it was too far down for me to see it. The grave was made very deep, as he used afterwards to tell us, that it might hold us all. My father first and abruptly let his cord drop, followed by the rest. This was too much. I now saw what was meant, and held on and fixed my fist and feet, and I believe my father had some difficulty in forcing open my small fingers; he let the little black cord drop, and I remember, in my misery and anger, seeing its open end disappearing in the gloom." {4}
The man who wrote this, and many another passage as true and tender,might surely have been famous in fiction, if he had turned his powersthat way. He had imagination, humour, pathos; he was always studying andobserving life; his last volume, especially, is like a collection offragments that might have gone toward making a work, in some ways notinferior to the romances of Scott. When the third volume of Essays waspublished, in the spring of his last year, a reviewer, who apparently hadno personal knowledge of Dr. Brown, asked why he did not write a novel.He was by that time over seventy years of age, and, though none guessedit, within a few weeks of his death. What he might have done, had hegiven himself to literature only, it is impossible to guess. But hecaused so much happiness, and did so much good, in that gentle professionof healing which he chose, and which brought him near to many who neededconsolation more than physic, that we need not forget his deliberatechoice. Literature had only his _horae subsecivae_, as he said:_Subseciva quaedam tempora quae ego perire non patior_, as Cicero writes,"shreds and waste ends of time, which I suffer not to be lost."
The kind of life which Dr. Brown's father and his people lived at Biggar,the austere life of work, and of thought intensely bent on the real aimof existence, on God, on the destiny of the soul, is perhaps rare now,even in rural Scotland. We are less obedient than of old to the motto ofthat ring found on Magus Moor, where Archbishop Shairp was murdered,_Remember upon Dethe_. If any reader has not yet made the acquaintanceof Dr. Brown's works, one might counsel him to begin with the "Letter toJohn Cairns, D.D.," the fragment of biography and autobiography, thedescription of the fountainheads from which the genius of the authorflowed. In his early boyhood, John Brown was educated by his father, aman who, from his son's affectionate description, seems to have confineda fiery and romantic genius within the channels of Seceder and Burghertheology. When the father received a call to the "Rose Street SecessionChurch," in Edinburgh, the son became a pupil of that ancient Scottishseminary, the High School--the school where Scott was taught not muchLatin and no Greek worth mentioning. Scott was still alive and strong inthose days, and Dr. Brown describes how he and his school companionswould take off their hats to the Shirra as he passed in the streets.
"Though lame, he was nimble, and all rough and alive with power; had youmet him anywhere else, you would say he was a Liddesdale store farmer,come of gentle blood--'a stout, blunt carle,' as he says of himself, withthe swing and stride and the eye of a man of the hills--a large, sunny,out-of-door air all about him. On his broad and stooping shoulders wasset that head which, with Shakespeare's and Bonaparte's, is the bestknown in all the world." Scott was then living in 39 Castle Street. Ido not know whether the many pilgrims, whom one meets moving constantlyin the direction of Melrose and Abbotsford, have thought of makingpilgrimage to Castle Street, and to the grave, there, of Scott's "dearold friend,"--his dog Camp. Of Dr. Brown's schoolboy days, one knowslittle--days when "Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary Street fromthe High School, our heads together, and our arms intertwisted, as onlylovers and boys know how or why." Concerning the doctor's character, hehas left it on record that he liked a dog-fight. "'A dog-fight,' shoutedBob, and was off, and so was I, both of us all hot, praying that it mightnot be over before we were up . . . Dogs like fighting; old Isaac (Watts,not Walton) says they 'delight' in it, and for the best of all reasons;and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight. This is avery different thing from a love of making dogs fight." And this was themost famous of all dog-fights--since the old Irish Brehons settled thelaws of that sport, and gravely decided what was to be done if a childinterfered, or an idiot, or a woman, or a one-eyed man--for this was thedog-fight in which Rab first was introduced to his historian.
Six years passed after this battle, and Dr. Brown was a medical studentand a clerk at Minto Hospital. How he renewed his acquaintance there,and in what sad circumstances, with Rab and his friends, it issuperfluous to tell, for every one who reads at all has read that story,and most readers not without tears. As a medical student in Edinburgh,Dr. Brown made the friendship of Mr. Syme, the famous surgeon--afriendship only closed by death. I only saw them once together, a verylong time ago, and then from the point of view of a patient. Theseoccasions are not agreeable, and patients, like the old cock which didnot crow when plucked, are apt to be "very much absorbed"; but Dr.Brown's attitude toward the man whom he regarded with the reverence of adisciple, as well as with the affection of a friend, was very remarkable.
When his studies were over, Dr. Brown practised for a year as assistantto a surgeon in Chatham. It must have been when he was at Chatham that acurious event occurred. Many years later, Charles Dickens was inEdinburgh, reading his stories in public, and was dining with someEdinburgh people. Dickens began to speak about the panic which thecholera had caused in England: how ill some people had behaved. As acontrast, he mentioned that, at Chatham, one poor woman had died,deserted by every one except a young physician. Some one, however,ventured to open the door, and found the woman dead, and the young doctorasleep, overcome with the fatigue that mastered him on his patient'sdeath, but quite untouched by the general panic. "Why, that was Dr. JohnBrown," one of the guests observed; and it seems that, thus early in hiscareer, the doctor had been setting an example of the courage and charityof his profession. After a year spent in Chatham, he returned toEdinburgh, where he spent the rest of his life, busy partly with his artof healing, partly with literature. He lived in Rutland Street, near therailway station, by which Edinburgh is approached from the west, andclose to Princes Street, the chief street of the town, separated by agreen valley, once a loch, from the high Castle Rock. It was the room inwhich his friends were accustomed to see Dr. Brown, and a room full ofinterest it was. In his long life, the doctor had gathered round himmany curious relics of artists and men of letters; a drawing of a dog byTurner I remember particularly, and a copy of "Don Juan," in the firstedition, with Byron's manuscript notes. Dr. Brown had a great love andknowledge of art and of artists, from Turner to Leech; and he had verymany friends among men of letters, such as Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Thackeray.Dr. Brown himself was a clever designer of rapid little grotesques, roughsketches of dogs and men. One or two of them are engraved in the littlepaper-covered booklets in which some of his essays were separatelypublished--booklets which he was used to present to people who came tosee him and who were interested in all that he did. I remember somevivacious grotesques which he drew for one of my brothers when we wereschoolboys. These little things were carefully treasured by boys whoknew Dr. Brown, and found him friendly, and capable of sustaining aconversation on the points of a Dandy Dinmont terrier and other mysteriesimportant to youth. He was a bibliophile--a taste which he inheritedfrom his father, who "began collecting books when he was twelve, and wascollecting to his last hours."
The last time I ever saw Dr. Brown, a year before his death, he was kindenough to lend me one of the rarest of his treasures, "Poems," by Mr.Ruskin. Probably Mr. Ruskin had presented the book to his old friend; inno other way were it easy to procure writings which the author withdrewfrom publication, if, indeed, they ever were, properly speaking,published. Thus Dr. Brown was all things to all men, and to all boys. He"had a word for every one," as poor people say, and a word to the point,for he was as much at home with the shepherd on the hills, or with theangler between Hollylea and Clovenford
s, as with the dusty book-hunter,or the doggy young Border yeoman, or the child who asked him to "draw hera picture," or the friend of genius famous through all the world,Thackeray, when he "spoke, as he seldom did, of divine things."
Three volumes of essays are all that Dr. Brown has left in the way ofcompositions: a light, but imperishable literary baggage. His studiesare usually derived from personal experience, which he reproduced withsingular geniality and simplicity, or they are drawn from the traditionof the elders, the reminiscences of long-lived Scotch people, who,themselves, had listened attentively to those who went before them. SinceScott, these ancient ladies with wonderful memories have had no suchattentive listener or appreciative reporter as Dr. Brown. His papercalled "Mystifications," a narrative of the pranks of Miss StirlingGraham, is a brief, vivid record of the clever and quaint society ofScotland sixty years ago. Scotland, or at least Scottish society, is nowonly English society--a little narrower, a little prouder, sometimes evena little duller. But old people of position spoke the old Scotch tonguesixty years ago, and were full of wonderful genealogies, full ofreminiscences of the "'45," and the adventures of the Jacobites. Thevery last echoes of that ancient world are dying now from memory, likethe wide reverberations of that gun which Miss Nelly MacWilliam heard onthe day when Prince Charles landed, and which resounded strangely allthrough Scotland.
The children of this generation, one fears, will hardly hear of these oldraids and duels, risings and rebellions, by oral tradition handed down,unbroken, through aunts and grandmothers. Scott reaped a full, lateharvest of the memories of clannish and feudal Scotland; Dr. Brown cameas a later gleaner, and gathered these stirring tales of "A JacobiteFamily" which are published in the last volume of his essays. When hewas an observer, not a hearer only, Dr. Brown chiefly studied and bestwrote of the following topics: passages and characters of humour andpathos which he encountered in his life and profession; children, dogs,Border scenery, and fellow-workers in life and science. Under one orother of these categories all his best compositions might be arranged.The most famous and most exquisite of all his works in the first class isthe unrivalled "Rab and his Friends"--a study of the stoicism andtenderness of the Lowland character worthy of Scott. In a minor way thelittle paper on "Jeems," the door-keeper in a Dissenting house of theLord, is interesting to Scotch people, though it must seem a rathercurious revelation to all others. "Her last Half-crown" is another studyof the honesty that survived in a starving and outcast Scotch girl, whenall other virtues, as we commonly reckon virtue, had gone before hercharacter to some place where, let us hope, they may rejoin her; for ifwe are to suffer for the vices which have abandoned us, may we not getsome credit for the virtues that we have abandoned, but that once wereours, in some heaven paved with bad resolutions unfulfilled? "The BlackDwarf's Bones" is a sketch of the misshapen creature from whom Scottborrowed the character that gives a name to one of his minor Borderstories. The real Black Dwarf (David Ritchie he was called among men)was fond of poetry, but hated Burns. He was polite to the fair, butclassed mankind at large with his favourite aversions: ghosts, fairies,and robbers. There was this of human about the Black Dwarf, that "hehated folk that are aye gaun to dee, and never do't." The villagebeauties were wont to come to him for a Judgment of Paris on theircharms, and he presented each with a flower, which was of a fixed valuein his standard of things beautiful. One kind of rose, the prize of themost fair, he only gave thrice. Paris could not have done his dooms morecourteously, and, if he had but made judicious use of rose, lily, andlotus, as prizes, he might have pleased all the three Goddesses; Troystill might be standing, and the lofty house of King Priam.
Among Dr. Brown's papers on children, that called "Pet Marjorie" holdsthe highest place. Perhaps certain passages are "wrote toosentimentally," as Marjorie Fleming herself remarked about the practiceof many authors. But it was difficult to be perfectly composed whenspeaking of this wonderful fairy-like little girl, whose affection was aswarm as her humour and genius were precocious. "Infant phenomena" areseldom agreeable, but Marjorie was so humorous, so quick-tempered, sokind, that we cease to regard her as an intellectual "phenomenon." Hermemory remains sweet and blossoming in its dust, like that of littlePenelope Boothby, the child in the mob cap whom Sir Joshua painted, andwho died very soon after she was thus made Immortal.
It is superfluous to quote from the essay on Marjorie Fleming; every oneknows about her and her studies: "Isabella is teaching me to make simmecolings, nots of interrigations, peorids, commoes, &c." Here is aShakespearian criticism, of which few will deny the correctness:"'Macbeth' is a pretty composition, but awful one." Again, "I never readsermons of any kind, but I read novelettes and my Bible." "'Tom Jones'and Gray's 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard' are both excellent, and muchspoke of by both sex, particularly by the men." Her Calvinistic beliefin "_unquestionable_ fire and brimston" is unhesitating, but the youngtheologian appears to have substituted "unquestionable" for"unquenchable." There is something humorous in the alteration, as ifMarjorie refused to be put off with an "excellent family substitute" forfire and brimstone, and demanded the "unquestionable" article, no otherbeing genuine, please observe trade mark.
Among Dr. Brown's contributions to the humorous study of dogs, "Rab," ofcourse, holds the same place as Marjorie among his sketches of children.But if his "Queen Mary's Child Garden," the description of the littlegarden in which Mary Stuart did _not_ play when a child, is second to"Marjorie," so "Our Dogs" is a good second to "Rab." Perhaps Dr. Brownnever wrote anything more mirthful than his description of the suddenbirth of the virtue of courage in Toby, a comic but cowardly mongrel, acur of low degree.
"Toby was in the way of hiding his culinary bones in the small gardens before his own and the neighbouring doors. Mr. Scrymgeour, two doors off, a bulky, choleric, red-faced man--_torvo vultu_--was, by law of contrast, a great cultivator of flowers, and he had often scowled Toby into all but non-existence by a stamp of his foot and a glare of his eye. One day, his gate being open, in walks Toby with a huge bone, and making a hole where Scrymgeour had two minutes before been planting some precious slip, the name of which on paper and on a stick Toby made very light of, substituted his bone, and was engaged covering it, or thinking he was covering it up with his shovelling nose, when S. spied him through the inner glass door, and was out upon him, like the Assyrian, with a terrific _gowl_. I watched them. Instantly Toby made at him with a roar too, and an eye more torve than Scrymgeour's, who, retreating without reserve, fell prostrate, there is reason to believe, in his own lobby. Toby contented himself with proclaiming his victory at the door, and, returning, finished his bone- planting at his leisure; the enemy, who had scuttled behind the glass door, glared at him. From this moment Toby was an altered dog. Pluck at first sight was lord of all . . . That very evening he paid a visit to Leo, next door's dog, a big tyrannical bully and coward . . . To him Toby paid a visit that very evening, down into his den, and walked about, as much as to say, 'Come on, Macduff'; but Macduff did not come on."
This story is one of the most amazing examples of instant change ofcharacter on record, and disproves the sceptical remark that "no one wasever converted, except prize-fighters, and colonels in the army." I amsorry to say that Dr. Brown was too fond of dogs to be very much attachedto cats. I never heard him say anything against cats, or, indeed,against anybody; but there are passages in his writings which tend toshow that, when young and thoughtless, he was not far from regarding catsas "the higher vermin." He tells a story of a Ghazi puss, so to speak, avictorious cat, which, entrenched in a drain, defeated three dogs withsevere loss, and finally escaped unharmed from her enemies. Dr. Brown'sfamily gloried in the possession of a Dandy Dinmont named John Pym, whosecousin (Auld Pepper) belonged to one of my brothers. Dr. Brown was muchinterested in Pepper, a dog whose family pride was only matched by thatof the mother of Candide, and, at one time, threatened to result in theextinction of this branch of
the House of Pepper. Dr. Brown hadremarked, and my own observations confirm it, that when a Dandy is notgame, his apparent lack of courage arises "from kindness of heart."
Among Dr. Brown's landscapes, as one may call his descriptions ofscenery, and of the ancient historical associations with Scotch scenery,"Minchmoor" is the most important. He had always been a great lover ofthe Tweed. The walk which he commemorates in "Minchmoor" was taken, if Iam not mistaken, in company with Principal Shairp, Professor of Poetry inthe University of Oxford, and author of one of the most beautiful ofTweedside songs, a modern "Bush aboon Traquair:"--
"And what saw ye there, At the bush aboon Traquair; Or what did ye hear that was worth your heed? I heard the cushie croon Thro' the gowden afternoon, And the Quair burn singing doon to the vale o' Tweed."
There is in the country of Scott no pleasanter walk than that which Dr.Brown took in the summer afternoon. Within a few miles, many placesfamous in history and ballad may be visited: the road by which Montrose'smen fled from Philiphaugh fight; Traquair House, with the bears on itsgates, as on the portals of the Baron of Bradwardine; Williamhope, whereScott and Mungo Park, the African explorer, parted and went their severalways. From the crest of the road you see all the Border hills, theMaiden Paps, the Eildons cloven in three, the Dunion, the Windburg, andso to the distant Cheviots, and Smailholm Tower, where Scott lay when achild, and clapped his hands at the flashes of the lightning, _haud sineDis animosus infans_, like Horace.
From the crest of the hill you follow Dr. Brown into the valley ofYarrow, and the deep black pools, now called the "dowie dens," and so,"through the pomp of cultivated nature," as Wordsworth says, to therailway at Selkirk, passing the plain where Janet won back Tamlane fromthe queen of the fairies. All this country was familiar to Dr. Brown,and on one of the last occasions when I met him, he was living atHollylea, on the Tweed, just above Ashestiel, Scott's home while he washappy and prosperous, before he had the unhappy thought of buildingAbbotsford. At the time I speak of, Dr. Brown had long ceased to write,and his health suffered from attacks of melancholy, in which the worldseemed very dark to him. I have been allowed to read some letters whichhe wrote in one of these intervals of depression. With his habitualunselfishness, he kept his melancholy to himself, and, though he did notcare for society at such times, he said nothing of his own condition thatcould distress his correspondent. In the last year of his life,everything around him seemed to brighten: he was unusually well, he evenreturned to his literary work, and saw his last volume of collectedessays through the press. They were most favourably received, and thelast letters which I had from him spoke of the pleasure which thissuccess gave him. Three editions of his book ("John Leech, and OtherEssays") were published in some six weeks. All seemed to go well, andone might even have hoped that, with renewed strength, he would take uphis pen again. But his strength was less than we had hoped. A coldsettled on his lungs, and, in spite of the most affectionate nursing, hegrew rapidly weaker. He had little suffering at the end, and his mindremained unclouded. No man of letters could be more widely regretted,for he was the friend of all who read his books, as, even to people whoonly met him once or twice in life, he seemed to become dear andfamiliar.
In one of his very latest writings, "On Thackeray's Death," Dr. Browntold people (what some of them needed, and still need to be told) howgood, kind, and thoughtful for others was our great writer--our greatestmaster of fiction, I venture to think, since Scott. Some of the linesDr. Brown wrote of Thackerary might be applied to himself: "He lookedalways fresh, with that abounding silvery hair, and his young, almostinfantile face"--a face very pale, and yet radiant, in his last years,and mildly lit up with eyes full of kindness, and softened by sorrow. Inhis last year, Mr. Swinburne wrote to Dr. Brown this sonnet, in whichthere seems something of the poet's prophetic gift, and a voice sounds asof a welcome home:--
"Beyond the north wind lay the land of old, Where men dwelt blithe and blameless, clothed and fed With joy's bright raiment, and with love's sweet bread,-- The whitest flock of earth's maternal fold, None there might wear about his brows enrolled A light of lovelier fame than rings your head, Whose lovesome love of children and the dead All men give thanks for; I, far off, behold A dear dead hand that links us, and a light The blithest and benignest of the night,-- The night of death's sweet sleep, wherein may be A star to show your spirit in present sight Some happier isle in the Elysian sea Where Rab may lick the hand of Marjorie."