ead to rule them, and an eye to direct them. Out of this arose one of
his deficiencies. He _could_ go largely into the generalities of a
subject, and relished greatly others doing it, so that they did do it
really and well; but he was averse to abstract and wide reasonings.
Principles he rejoiced in: he worked with them as with his choicest
weapons; they were the polished stones for his sling, against the
Goliaths of presumption, error, and tyranny in thought or in polity,
civil or ecclesiastical; but he somehow divined a principle, or got at
it naked and alone, rather than deduced it and brought it to a point
from an immensity of particulars, and then rendered it back so as to
bind them into one _cosmos_. One of my young friends now dead, who
afterwards went to India, used to come and hear him in Broughton Place
with me, and this word _apprehend_ caught him, and as he had a great
love for my father, in writing home to me, he never forgot to ask how
"grand old Apprehend" was.

From this time dates my father's possession and use of the German
Exegetics. After my mother's death I slept with him; his bed was in his
study, a small room,[13] with a very small grate; and I remember well
his getting those fat, shapeless, spongy German books, as if one would
sink in them, and be bogged in their bibulous, unsized paper; and
watching him as he impatiently cut them up, and dived into them in his
rapid, eclectic way, tasting them, and dropping for my play such a lot
of soft, large, curled bits from the paper-cutter, leaving the edges all
shaggy. He never came to bed when I was awake, which was not to be
wondered at; but I can remember often awaking far on in the night or
morning, and seeing that keen, beautiful, intense face bending over
these Rosenmuellers, and Ernestis, and Storrs, and Kuinoels--the fire
out, and the gray dawn peering through the window; and when he heard me
move, he would speak to me in the foolish words of endearment my mother
was wont to use, and come to bed, and take me, warm as I was, into his
cold bosom.

[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.

_Vitringa in Jesaiam_ I especially remember, a noble folio. Even then,
with that eagerness to communicate what he had himself found, of which
you must often have been made the subject, he went and told it. He would
try to make me, small