e with
more and more knowledge and "pureness;" and, as you say, there were
probably nowhere in Britain such lectures delivered at that time to such
an audience, consisting of country people, sound, devout, well-read in
their Bibles and in the native divinity, but quite unused to persistent,
deep, critical thought.

Much of this--most of it--was entirely his own, self-originated and
self-sustained, and done for its own sake,

"All too happy in the pleasure
Of his own exceeding treasure."

But he often said, with deep feeling, that one thing put him always on
his mettle, the knowledge that "yonder in that corner, under the
gallery, sat, Sabbath after Sabbath, a man who knew his Greek Testament
better than I did."

This was his brother-in-law, and one of his elders, Mr. Robert Johnston,
married to his sister Violet, a merchant and portioner in Biggar, a
remarkable man, of whom it is difficult to say to strangers what is
true, without being accused of exaggeration. A shopkeeper in that remote
little town, he not only intermeddled fearlessly with all knowledge, but
mastered more than many practised and University men do in their own
lines. Mathematics, astronomy, and especially what may be called
_selenology_, or the doctrine of the moon, and the higher geometry and
physics; Hebrew, Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin, to the veriest rigors of
prosody and metre; Spanish and Italian, German, French, and any odd
language that came in his way; all these he knew more or less
thoroughly, and acquired them in the most leisurely, easy, cool sort of
way, as if he grazed and browsed perpetually in the field of letters,
rather than made formal meals, or gathered for any ulterior purpose, his
fruits, his roots, and his nuts--he especially liked mental nuts--much
less bought them from any one.

With all this, his knowledge of human, and especially of Biggar human
nature, the ins and outs of its little secret ongoings, the entire
gossip of the place, was like a woman's; moreover, every personage great
or small, heroic or comic, in Homer--whose poems he made it a matter of
conscience to read once every four years--Plautus, Suetonius, Plutarch,
Tacitus, and Lucian, down through Boccaccio and Don Quixote, which he
knew by heart and from the living Spanish, to Joseph Andrews, the
Spectator, Goldsmith and Swift, Miss Austen, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss
Ferrier, Galt and Sir Walter,--he was as familiar with, as with David
Crockat the nailer, or