dusty and stony
ways'; of intellectual task-work; of a true love consoling the last
months of weakness and pain. The tale is not repeated here because it is
novel, nor even because in its hero we have to regret an 'inheritor of
unfulfilled renown.' It is not the genius so much as the character of
this St. Andrews student which has won the sympathy of his biographer,
and may win, he hopes, the sympathy of others. In Mr. Murray I feel that
I have lost that rare thing, a friend; a friend whom the chances of life
threw in my way, and withdrew again ere we had time and opportunity for
perfect recognition. Those who read his Letters and Remains may also
feel this emotion of sympathy and regret.

He was young in years, and younger in heart, a lover of youth; and youth,
if it could learn and could be warned, might win a lesson from his life.
Many of us have trod in his path, and, by some kindness of fate, have
found from it a sunnier exit into longer days and more fortunate
conditions. Others have followed this well-beaten road to the same early
and quiet end as his.

The life and the letters of Murray remind one strongly of Thomas
Davidson's, as published in that admirable and touching biography, _A
Scottish Probationer_. It was my own chance to be almost in touch with
both these gentle, tuneful, and kindly humorists. Davidson was a
Borderer, born on the skirts of 'stormy Ruberslaw,' in the country of
James Thomson, of Leyden, of the old Ballad minstrels. The son of a
Scottish peasant line of the old sort, honourable, refined, devout, he
was educated in Edinburgh for the ministry of the United Presbyterian
Church. Some beautiful verses of his appeared in the _St. Andrews
University Magazine_ about 1863, at the time when I first 'saw myself in
print' in the same periodical. Davidson's poem delighted me: another of
his, 'Ariadne in Naxos,' appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_ about the
same time. Mr. Thackeray, who was then editor, no doubt remembered Pen's
prize poem on the same subject. I did not succeed in learning anything
about the author, did not know that he lived within a drive of my own
home. When next I heard of him, it was in his biography. As a
'Probationer,' or unplaced minister, he, somehow, was not successful. A
humorist, a poet, a delightful companion, he never became 'a placed
minister.' It was the old story of an imprudence, a journey made in damp
clothes, of consumption, of the end of his earth